We’re driving up from the Rapid river, a beer-coloured tumult capped with froth and busy with rain; huge myrtles the size of eucalypts were camped on one bank and the blackwood was just coming into yellow wattle-flower, an unexpected sunshine in the dim wet green; on the ground we had spaced our steps around conical mounds rising up like wide muddy candles, the fragile homes of burrowing crayfish.
 |
| The jagged outlines of Sarah Anne Rocks with all the vegetation burnt back. |
“After the fires were going, there was a group of us that were watching closely where they were going and where they might go, and we were pretty nervous about what might be taken out … will it get down to the Rapid river?’
On the other side of the bridge there had been a black and brown mess of burnt trees and leaves; it had looked as though a giant had picked up the entire forest and shaken it in ash and then dropped it down again. For the fires did get down to the Rapid river, spooling through the guts of Tasmania’s Tarkine region. They got to a lot of places: more than 60,000 hectares in the Mawbanna fire alone.
Read the piece by Ben Walter on The Guardian - “Speaking for trees: hope, despair and regrowth in Tasmania’s charred forests.”
No comments:
Post a Comment