I couldn’t believe my eyes when the photo popped up on my email. A brand new sign, against a lush green stretch of bush that lined the road to Wangi Wangi, New South Wales, Australia between the towns of Morisset and Toronto, where my brother-in-law and his wife live. Yes, there is another Toronto in the world.
I couldn’t believe my eyes because my last memory of that site, ingrained in my mind forever, was the day I watched a gum tree explode into flames in the midst of a stand of blackened trees. The once grassy forest floor was smothered in a grey and white bed of ash with smoke curling up around what was left of the charred road sign. It was what I imagined a nuclear winter would resemble. It was, in fact, what became known as Australia’s Black Summer.
We spent Christmas and New Year’s there one year ago. I wrote about it in this space. It was my first Christmas away from home in the Land Down Under with my husband’s family. The excitement and joy of such a long-awaited reunion was muted by the raging bushfires that were ravaging Australia.
New South Wales was worst hit and flames had come perilously close to this little town an hour north of Sydney, with smoke filling our nostrils and stinging our eyes; temperatures topped 40 degrees Celsius. There had been no rain for months; farmers’ fields and vineyards were reduced to dust bowls. So you can understand the shock, albeit a joyful one, of seeing that photo, that image of a wonderful renewal less than 12 short months later.
I had known about the resilience of the gum forests in Australia and how occasional burns actually played a role in strengthening the ecosystem as well as controlling the routine blazes woven into the fabric of the Sunburnt Country. But this time it was different. It was unprecedented. The toll was immense: according to the Centre for Disaster Philanthropy, 46 million acres of forest and farmland, thousands of homes, almost three dozen lives and over a billion animals lost. Who can forget those scenes of utter destruction, those giant smoke clouds the size of countries seen from space and the unknown heroes coming to the rescue of singed koalas.
Unprecedented has been a word we’ve heard and seen a lot this past year, in heart-stopping and gut-wrenching terms but this unprecedented example of resilience; this one photo in our email made us gasp with pleasant surprise and smile. It gave hope that this tired ailing world can look forward to a rebirth after the ravages of a global threat that’s testing the resilience of humanity itself.
At the time there were far-off rumbling but we had no idea another oh so different disaster in the name of a new coronavirus was looming that would steal the headlines from the Aussie bushfires.
Nine months after those first out -of- control- bushfires erupted, thanks to the dogged efforts of the heroic firies” (firefighters) and their incredible community support, the heaviest rains in 30 years doused the remaining embers.
Buoyed by image of the gum tree comeback, we can look with hope to our own heroic “firies”, our first responders and scientists, with the support of us all to douse the flames of the Covid19 inferno.
Then one day too, hopefully soon, we all will gasp with surprise and smile at images chronicling a resilient comeback that we will all deem truly unprecedented in the best possible terms.
Connie Smith is a free-lance journalist and part-time media instructor at Mohawk College.
View the article on The Hamilton Spectator website here