Last year’s annual Bilpin Flower Show was held on Saturday 12 October 2019 a cold and wet day which brought everyone closer to the flowers exhibited and to each other, to the kitchen dispensing hot food, and to the stalls selling local produce, in this community’s thanksgiving. The beautiful wildflowers grown in local gardens were glorious but piqued my desire to see them in the wild. Heading further up Bells Line of Road I pulled into the carpark at Pierces Pass, one of my favourite places for bushwalking in World Heritage Blue Mountains National Park.
Then in December 2019 and January 2020 life changed forever. Bushfire skirmishes along the east coast of Australia burst into a conflagration, inciting mass demonstrations against Climate Change. At the mass protests in smoke-filled Sydney people were given masks, presaging the appearance of the COVID-19 pandemic.
ABOVE: Sydney Town Hall, 12 Nov 2019, ‘NSW is Burning, Sydney is Choking, Climate Emergency Rally’, wearing a mask presaged the COVID-19 pandemic.
When I retraced my steps on Saturday 8 February 2020, a windy and rainy day, the Pierces Pass scenery was unrecognisable. The first signs of regrowth were reassuring but the absence of any sight or sound of wildlife was frightening. The guilty feeling of somehow being complicit in taking it for granted and allowing it to be destroyed was inescapable.
The joy usually experienced upon reaching the Walls Lookout at Pierces Pass was displaced by the sight of the discoloured leaves of countless trees in the native forests below. The gloom offset by grandeur of the escarpment opposite, heavy rain adding dramatic visual effects, saturating the sandstone colours of the rock face and interspersing them with white waterfalls pouring into the valley. Nature’s recuperative powers became apparent with the rain blanketing the ravaged landscape and highlighting the distinctive and diverse regrowth.
Returning to Pierces Pass again on Sunday 16 February 2020 was disconcerting in a different way. How do you reconcile the obliteration of three billion native animals with a quintessentially Australian blue sky that is devoid of the sound of its birds? Imagining the screams of wildlife and scorched and disfigured trees wailing is traumatic.
ABOVE: New green leaves give hope and distract from the decimation of wildlife populations and destruction of survivors food and shelter habitat.
How do the descendants of Gundungurra and Darug ancestors with such deep and continuous connections with Colomatta Country over tens of thousands of years and such a long history of fire management cope with the damage caused to their traditional lands by these bushfires? Their knowledge and understanding of Country must be acknowledged and respected.
LINKS
Dharug Ngurra Aboriginal Corporation