Tag Archives: fire

Drought, Fire & Flooding Rains . . .

by . Posted on
17 Feb

I guess I couldn’t really understand what it was to be a farmer in this country without experiencing Drought. I console myself with that idea. The climate denialists will quote Dorothea McKellar’s beautiful ode to Australia as rationale for their beliefs, and it is true that Mother Nature operates in cycles, but we are in extremis now.

https://www.dorotheamackellar.com.au/archive/mycountry.htm

When we first came here, the farmers around us who had lived and farmed this land all their long lives told us that the Ellenborough River had never stopped flowing. It stopped in September 2019. We felt confident in our oasis with its creeks, springs and river. But we watched our stagnant pools dropping by inches a day in the vicious heat of spring and summer. We feared for ourselves, our stock, our platypus population – the river and rainfall are what sustains us all.

We scrambled frantically on the phones to find feed and then for funds to pay for it. We had to put our hand up for charity when we just couldn’t take any more. We watched beloved cows drop to their knees and despite our best efforts never get up again. We spent days digging a downer out of a bog, feeding and watering her and hand feeding her calf. We got intimate with maggots in an array of injuries. We learned just how useful hip lifters are. We hauled on heavy cows to turn and lift them. We tried and we tried and we tried . . . and we failed. We lost too many to count. We lost friends, four leggeds that we raised by hand and loved beyond measure: Isis, Damson, Millie, Milka, Henrietta, Big Red, JB and more. And then there were all the cows and steers we had to sell for a pittance because we feared they too would lie down and die.

And then there was Goldie. Our golden girl. Our beautiful bitch. Ben’s dog. There is something so incredibly beautiful about a boy and his dog. Listening to his peals of laughter as she scrambled all over him as she has done since a pup. He loved her so much. We all did. And her puppies were a miracle (unplanned though her pregnancy was, I am so grateful for it now). I stayed up all night and at one point woke Ben to come and see a baby being born. It was a sacred time. And despite her exhaustion and overwhelm (8 babies!!) Goldie was an amazing Mum. She hid under the house for a while that first day (& who can blame her?) and then she would disappear for a little while very day for a rest. Slowly traversing further afield as the weeks passed – down to the river for a swim and explore. Never too far, always back in an hour for the next feed. Until the day she disappeared with Mudji and didn’t come home. As night fell we were frantic and started feeding the babies (luckily I had bought some powdered puppy milk as a supplement for Goldie at the pet shop’s advice). Mudji turned up at the neighbour’s the next day as usual but no Goldie. It was Ben’s birthday weekend and we were out looking high & low, calling for her. No sign. No trace. No sound. Nothing. No body to bury. No real closure. No time to grieve.

We raised her pups, Ben instantly claiming the little lemon beauty as Goldie’s replacement and I held the little black boy close to my heart and refused to let him go despite Ged’s disapproval. And then we had to let them go too. God, that was hard. Every goodbye felt like another part of Goldie leaving us. And they were all so beautiful, just like her. But the fact that they are so loved by the families they have gone to, and that her light lives on in this world, is a source of great joy.

I don’t like who we became last year. Brutal, brittle, broken people. We talked very seriously about walking off the farm. We just couldn’t take it any more. We were in shock, I see now that it was like a war zone mentality – we became immured to death somehow, closed off from it, sealed from its shockingness in order to protect our own hearts.

And then came the fires. Moving slowly, but inexorably our way from Mt Seaview and Yarras. That added another level of stress. I went away to a long planned yoga retreat, hoping for healing. Instead I got a text from Ged with a dramatic photo of the fire now in the neighbour’s place and barrelling down on us. So I learned to live in the moment – going deep into meditation and breathing and then coming out to get on the phone and issue rapid fire instructions what to pack, what to leave, where essentials were, how to protect our assets. I stayed and focussed while fear built in me and then drove home via Bunnings on the Monday, filling a trolley with hoses and sprinklers. Ben was evacuated and we had two days to prepare ourselves and our property for the onslaught.

George, our 85 year old neighbour came by. He was scared. He doesn’t scare easy. He was worried about crown fires and fireballs and the lack of water, how dry it was, how little hope we could escape annihilation. But we did. Although the fires continued around us for months. ‘Watch & Act’ sounds so benign. But it is a state of hypervigilance, of nerves in tatters, of fear that I never want to experience again. And the helicopters overhead hour after hour, day after day, the thick smoke we breathed for months, and the sweet stench of death from my rotting friends gave me a feeling of Vietnam or some other vile warzone.

We went away but Ged had to come back to fight fire, to fix broken water pipes, to take delivery of more unaffordable hay. We couldn’t relax. We were constantly on edge, cranky, snappy.

The first rain came on Christmas Day – the ultimate Christmas gift. In January a slow moving wall of clear rainwater saw the river flowing again. Now we have cleansing floods, trees tossed and bobbing on fast moving muddy flood water as the riverscape is purified once more.

And now the healing can begin. I have begun what I call ‘crying yoga’ the nights on my mat sobbing for my lost friends. And walking the landscape, remembering their faces, their soft pelts, their wet noses.
We are scarred by 2019. We will never forget. I don’t know what the future holds, but I do know this – the global human population has exploded over the past 150 years as has our consumption, manufacturing, coal burning and carbon creation as we evolve from horse and cart to steam power, electricity, petrol & diesel driven cars, planes and more. We cannot possibly believe that our deforestation and coal burning has not irrevocably altered the planet and its atmosphere. We have to stop. We have to change. We have to backpedal. We all have to do our bit.

A tinder dry tale of a late winter fire

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Comboyne View
09 Aug

Last Monday I was in town (which isn’t usual) and happened to hear on The Country Hour that the RFS was bringing in the fire permit season a month earlier than they have for the past few years. It used to be 1st October. For the past couple of years it has been 1st September. Now they were saying 1st August.

That meant we had 3 days to do a month’s burning! Farmers generally burn off in August – after the frosts have killed the grass and the air temps have increased. So bringing forward the deadline was a foolhardy decision by the RFS. It would have been better to have told us all in June or July that if there was no rain, they would be bringing in the permit season earlier.

I had been for a big walk, high into the bush the previous day, looking for the star picket post remover which seems to have vanished into thin air! I hadn’t been up there for maybe 6 months and I was amazed by the depth of the leaf litter and the branches and other debris littering the bushscape.  After 7 lush wet years and then the high, drying, winds we have experienced lately, I was walking on 6 inches of crackly, slippery, dryness and navigating fallen tree limbs very few feet.

We hadn’t burnt up there for about 4 years and clearly, if we wanted to be safe in the event of a catastrophic fire summer, we needed to light it up.

We don’t like to burn, unlike many farmers who use it as an intrinsic part of their overstocked cattle feeding regime. But occasionally we use it as a tool to clean up an area or lighten the fuel load to protect us against a hot summer fire.

With the forecast el nino spring and summer, and as we back onto State Forest, we feel compelled to protect ourselves. Our lovely neighbour has been asking us to light up behind part of our property and into hers for years. So we lit into the bush behind us, Ged stayed home and we had our English wwoofers, Ben & Naomi on hand in case of escapee blazes (we have all had one ‘get away on us’! and burn a paddock we didn’t intend to!)

All went well for a couple of days but on Friday when little Ben and I began our descent off Comboyne mountain after preschool we saw a haze of thick smoke in the valley and were worried! As we drove along the final stretch of Tilbaroo and looked over to our land, we saw a spreading grass fire where we definitely had no intention of burning!

Through the gate, through the river, up the bank, hooting and shouting to Ged ‘the farm is on fire!’  He leapt in his car with the fire beaters and we stopped long enough at The Tree House to hoot and yell the same dire message to the wwoofers and then we all raced over to ‘the other side’ as if we were competing for the world rally racing championships!

Little Ben and I checked the bees while the boys raced into fire fighting mode. The bees had fled and Ben and I were devastated. Not again! (I was responsible for the last getaway blaze & have been banned from playing with matches for life!) We met up with the boys and sent Naomi & little Ben home (I need to do a poo, Mummy!)

It didn’t take long to get it all under control. The bees came home and are busy, busy. But the bush is still burning. The neighbours say it hasn’t been burnt for 20 years or more. Better a cool winter burn than a raging summer furnace travelling at 30kms an hour – with the tops of oily eucalypts alight, fireballs and radiant heat.  Unfortunately State Forests and National Parks are little managed, so we are giving them a long overdue clean out and in this valley we can all feel a lot safer and more prepared for whatever Mother Nature may throw at us in terms of drought . . .

The valley still has a smoky haze, the helicopters are keeping an eye on the fires on distant hills and we can relax, hoping that this will keep us safe this summer . . . the river is SO low, the creek is almost dry, the dams too.  When we arrived here the drought was ending.  We have had 7 years of flood and fertility.  This is going to be a new experience for us on this land we love.  But we will weather it.  And we will grow and learn.  We have to.  That is the lesson of Mother Nature who tempts, taunts, tries, feeds and clothes us.  Like every woman she has many moods and is sometimes swift to change them.  Like every woman she makes us happy when she is balanced – sun and rain.

Right now we are praying for rain . . .

A Cleansing Fire

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Ged watching his fire
30 Sep

Pyromaniac that I am, I love the burning off season. Lines of fire, snaking across country and into the bush, lighting up the late winter nights with their warming glow. I love to light them, putting a lit match to the bladey grass and hearing it snap, crackle and roar. As a general rule, we don’t burn Avalon, because we believe in repeatedly slashing the grass and mulching the land to retain moisture and build up the soil levels to create healthier soil and pasture. 5 years ago when we came here, the land was all bladey grass, bracken fern and fireweed, now we have beautiful native grasses, kikuyu, clover and oatey grass, and the bladey grass is almost gone. Burning bladey grass might give you green pick for the cattle, but all you get is more bladey grass, so it never made much sense to us. However, as a way of seeing what is there in areas that have not been slashed, it is invaluable, and as a way of quickly clearing the land without slashing, it can be useful. But not our preferred way of doing things.

Anyway, the Friday before Ostara, the spring equinox and the real Easter in the southern hemisphere, it was a dull day, with moisture in the air, no beating sun and the hint of rain to come, so Ben and I thought we would just quickly light some fires to burn down into the weeds along a section of the river bank and into the neighbour’s paddock, which she has always invited us to burn. We lit a few fires along the fence line which blazed up briefly and then fizzled so we figured they would be out momentarily and went home for lunch. About 4 hours later we drove over to feed the horses and I saw the wall of smoke . . . ‘I think we have a problem’ I said to Ben. He wasn’t concerned. He’s heard Mummy say that before when she’s inadvertently burnt a paddock!

We drove over the ridge and saw a line of flames licking voraciously at everything in its path. 500 metres from the site of our start up fires and travelling in the opposite direction to our intention! We weren’t going to even try to beat this one back, it was going to have to keep gorging until it was replete. All we could do, was damage limitation. We drove down to the horses and set them free. Then we splashed water all around the water tank above base camp and removed all the water pipes, stand pipe and hoses. Then back burnt around the tank just to make sure. Next we drove through Henry Hollow and up into the Dam Paddock and there we stopped in shock and horror. We were faced with a blackened wasteland and facing us were the bee hives standing sentry like and stark white against the ash. ‘The bees! Daddy is going to go mental’ One hive was already swarming. One was still smouldering. All our lovely workers, all the new frames and comb all ready to be filled with lovely, life giving honey. All my fault . . .

We rang Ged and told him the bad news. But it was to get worse. By the time he came home two hives were burnt to cinders and we will have to start again with nucleus hives. He found a hive of European bees in a fallen tree and bear like tried to extract the comb and honey and then persuade some to take up residence in some of our boxes but they didn’t want to relocate despite their hot home, so that didn’t work out the way we planned it either. The fire continued on its merry way all night and for two days thereafter, clearing, cleaning, exposing.

At least we are rid of the high load of dead grass before the predicted drought gains intensity – although the ground is already so dry, the river lower than it was at the end of the last drought, we are desperately begging for rain. And the fire has cleaned up and rid us of old stumps and piles we inherited from the previous owners. And the exciting news is that what we really wanted to burn, the oasis with the spring in the middle, is now accessible and we can see the tree graveyard in there. This is obviously where they used to go to extract millable timber, cut fence posts and strainers etc. I spent two days in there, black from head to foot, lugging logs and branches and chainsawing wood to make it manouvrable, feeding the existing fires to clear areas of all the fallen timber. There’s another 6 months work in there but it will be beautiful when it is done. A lush green forest, a shady oasis in the middle of the pasture where the stock can retreat to on hot days and Ben and I can wander in awe.

We have to take the long view in farming. And I am learning that stressing achieves nothing. There was no point in trying to fight that fire, she obviously wanted to be burnt. And now she is.

Working in the blackened aftermath over the weekend, I meditated on the cleansing fire, the phoenix arising, and the rebirth and renewal offered both by the fire and the first days of spring. How it was possible to rebuild and restart in the ashes – relationships, friendships, dreams, plans, futures. Here is the cycle of life in all its stark reality – death, decay, rebirth. Every aspect of our lives affected by these never ending circles and rhythms if we could only realise it, and stop demanding the excitement and blossoming of eternal spring. We have to learn to live with the circles and cycles, see them, accept them and even embrace them as essential for our evolving, revolving life on earth.