A Map of What Has Burnt

It was only a couple of weeks ago that I was camped under the myrtles there, nestled into a shady nook with a gas cooker and a cheap tent. The river ran with that honey-colour that you find out west – it gives you a fake tan when you wade into it. I pocketed a few beautiful rocks from its banks and its bed. Skipping down the latticework of tree roots that led to the water’s edge, I caught a glimpse of a male pink robin, whistling away on a moss-covered branch, dressed gorgeously.

Now it seems that it’s all gone, all that wet forest along the Donaldson River. So too the huge tracts of rainforest north of the Pieman River, with slow-growing huon pines strewn throughout it, habitat for sea-eagles, masked owls and Tasmanian devils. I was also on the Pieman, kayaking downstream in a squall to a waterfall that had turned into a piddle off a ledge. Liverworts and fungi caught the eye. Currawongs and black cockatoos chuckled and heckled in the canopy. I picked up a biscuity bit of broken branch that was coated in moss and lichen; it floated on the river, having been carried down a minor creek. So much green there has now been reduced to a blackened crisp.

A few days after we left the west coast, a swathe of lightning strikes had cut in a sickle-shape across the island. It’s been dry in Tassie. It doesn’t take much to start a fire and once it gets moving, it’s hard to stop. The first hints of a blaze go unnoticed for a few days in unpopulated landscapes. The wind has swirled around, frustrating the firies’ efforts. It hasn’t rained. When you look at the map, the affected sections form weird blobs, sprawled out like slime moulds around the Road to Nowhere, Mount Meredith, Mount Pelion West, Canning Peak.

And you do, you look at the map. You look at it incessantly, you keep up-to-date even though there is no blaze within cooee of where you live or work. The information brings no comfort, but you are drawn to it anyway.

I have started to tell people that the summer of 2016 was probably the most significant season of my life. I returned to the island after a stint overseas to find that the land had dried out like desert. Everywhere you went, the earth was cooked. I was a bushwalking guide on the Overland Track, walking through the mountains, almost week-in, week-out. There’s usually plenty of moisture up there, even through summer, but it hadn’t rained in months. One night, I saw an electrical storm travel past to the south of our hut. Inevitably, when I reached the summit of a mountain with a couple days later, some I saw grey smoke rising from different sections of an adjacent national park. Within an hour, a chopper came to investigate. Our national park was closed.

That summer I was hit with a type of anxiety and stress that I’d not experienced before. I didn’t quite have the reflective skill or words for it, and didn’t quite comprehend how palpable was my sense that something was going wrong. “The rainforests are fucked,” I spat at someone who didn’t understand why I was so upset. Some poet I was! But the words told a lot: I was anguished and I didn’t have a handle on my emotions.

When it comes to fire ecology, Tassie is a tricky place. Fire has been a common and frequent element of life here for many millennia. Plenty of plant species are adapted to arid conditions; some reproduce through fire, dropping seeds into the nutrient-rich ash beds that are left behind. But there are also flora communities that evolved when this land mass was further south, cooler, wetter, and less exposed to bushfires. These have survived mostly in the mountains, where there’s a lot of rainfall and the temperatures rarely rise too high. They are remnants of an ancient time and as such they are, to me, something close to sacred.

The places that held these beautiful plants – their roots deep in the planet’s history – might not survive the century.

The fires in 2016 were not the first bushfires to ever happen in Tasmania, far from it, but they were the first ones that I understood as part of the systemic upheaval of our environments. Fire ecologists explained how these attacks of dry lightning were a new phenomenon down here, but that we might expect to see a lot more of them. For a while, I’d thought of my home island as a lucky refuge from the future catastrophes people spoke about. This was very much, of course, wishful thinking.

I was also in close contact with fires in 2019. Once again, I was bushwalking when the fires broke out – I heard the storm from a lakeside campsite and saw ominous plumes rising as I got to a ridgeline the next morning. Within hours, a helicopter came to evacuate us. As we rose into the air, it became obvious that there were dozens of fires in the area. The air was choked with dark haze.

One evening a few weeks later, I was at a pub in town with a bunch of fellow bushwalking guides. The sky broke into a spattering of rain. We cheered. In the time that it took for us to run outside, the rain had stopped. It was one of the most dispiriting moments of my life, like the weather spirits had taken to mocking us.

We’ve been lucky over the last few Tasmanian summers but I now habitually associate summer with the risk of fires. The season is not quite so fun and carefree as it used to be. A few times I’ve seen a purple plume billow up from somewhere nearby and rushed to an internet connection, to check the bloody Tas Alerts map. Of course, I live in a eucalyptus forest – on a dead-end road, no less – so it would be foolish not to be prepared. But this sort of thing wasn’t as much on the forefront of our minds a decade ago. Now it seems inevitable that the places we love will be threatened over and over again, as well as human lives and homes, and of course the habitat of other animals as well.

As well as the west coast forests, the Overland Track is on fire again. Yesterday I received a text from an ex-colleague of mine, telling me that one of the huts in which we’d worked had burnt down.

It was inevitable, really. I’ve known for years that something like this was bound to happen – not by some special form of prescience, I just listened to people who were watching the patterns, who knew more than me. It’s unfortunate this disaster has dovetailed with a decreasing political will to tackle the problems that beset our planet’s ecological processes. Our electorates get weirder as the climate goes more haywire.

The destruction of a hut isn’t so much of a disaster. I’m anxious to know what of the rainforest around has survived – there are specific pencil pines and pandanis that I have mind – but the hut itself can be rebuilt easily enough. It was, however, the source of many special memories. I worked up there for ten years. There are lots of stories to tell about good times shared with a bunch of different people (and with a pygmy possum, who had become addicted to crème brulée). My own personal guiding career had already, it seemed, come near enough to its conclusion. But a chapter of something much larger than anything within my own life may well have reached an end as well.

I am not so much spitting caustic speech any more. I walk around in a daze that I can these days recognise as an expression of grief.

As far as I can tell, in the future we will lose much more of the land that we have loved. Apparently all there is to do is to love it, nevertheless.