ALIVE WITH POSSIBILITY
MAGAZINE ARTICLE online magazine ‘ALIVE WITH POSSIBILITY’ written by Sandra Groom
Published online in March 2020
https://www.google.com/chrome/
(A story of events that happened from December 2019 to February 2020)
We are surrounded by fire. Our beautiful land is burning and we are in a state of emergency. Our Brave Rural Fire Fighters, affectionately known as ‘Firies’ - mostly volunteers - have battled out of control fires for weeks in torturous conditions. Firefighters from all over the world came to assist us, yet so many lives were lost, including three Americans who died in action. Every day from our house on the river, we watch aeroplanes drop from the sky to scoop up water to water bomb the nearby fires. Hundreds of homes and properties have been incinerated, leaving people’s lives and hearts in ruins. What the final tally will be on the health of our people and our land remains to be seen.
Our animals are dying in catastrophic numbers. It’s possible our koalas will never live in the natural bushland again. A ‘conservative’estimate of one billion animals have perished. We have lost 23,000,000 hectacres of land and there is absolutely nothing for our surviving wildlife to eat.
Like others, my husband and I have been shaken to the core. We’ve had our lives and our homes threatened and out of control, feeling as though our world was falling apart, and that nothing is safe. Many have had to evacuate their homes, many decided to stay and defend theirs, with varying heartbreaking results. Everyone has been addicted to the ‘Fires Near You’ app and the ABC radio for life saving information, we’ve been unable to sleep, with adrenalin running high and on constant red alert.
We chose to evacuate our dogs to Sydney, and our fire plan was for Gerald and I to leave our home before it became an emergency, but we prepared buckets of water and hoses, we cleaned out the guttering, and then we packed our car with a few precious belongings and a change of clothing.
Our small community has waited and watched in horror as the tragedy unfolded over several weeks. The threat had hardly passed, and the stench of smoke was everywhere and in everything and smoke obscured the sun, with burning leaves still falling from the sky, with our homes, village, river and beaches covered in blanket of black ash - when a request for help was posted on our local community page by two young women, Nicole Brooke Wilson and Jessie Dunster. That post resulted in a group of committed people gathering at our local pub, and today that group is known as Wildlife Stations Shoalhaven.
A palpable sense of urgency was present, people were on edge and a conversation focussed on ‘This is our wildlife and we have to do something to help/save them’ began. Everyone had an opinion, everybody wanted to do something, everybody talked to everybody else. A loud, somewhat chaotic yet productive two hours later, about fifty people left with valuable information. Some had diagrams to make simple, inexpensive (about Aus$15) water stations for wildlife out of PVC piping, some committed to drive out to the fire ravaged areas to erect the water stations once they were built, others promised to return to the water stations every two days to refill them, and still others armed themselves with recipes to make food for wildlife. This will be needed for several months.
Not being a builder, nor having the courage to drive into burned areas where we were told we would undoubtedly witness hundreds of dead animals, I took on ‘food’. I went straight to the local Co-op for a sack of meal, and then to our community supermarket (IGA) to buy the ingredients, and three hours later, seven women, young and old, united in my kitchen to make ‘Roo Balls’. There was some ribald humour and lots of laughter, and we made 350 (about the size of an apple) that afternoon. By 5 pm they were delivered to the couriers, and by 6.30 pm the couriers were delivering them to starving, thirsty wildlife in Calalla Bay, 14 kms away, which firefighters had deemed ‘safe enough’ for our volunteers to enter.
The next day, a call went out advising that the recipe we were using might actually cause harm to some wildlife, as they were starving and eating food they would not normally eat, and some could die from damage done to their delicate digestive systems. It was possible our good deeds could turn into a tragedy. Kangaroos and wallabies and fruit bats and birds and lizards and snakes and ants and spiders all eat different things. FB posts flew – “STOP making Roo Balls!”
But – NOW! - what to feed our wildlife when there was absolutely nothing out there for them to eat? More FB posts, and new information: we would make garlands of fruit and vegetables, threaded on wire, which our couriers would hang in whatever trees were left standing. People drove a huge truck in a 320 kms round trip to the markets in Sydney and returned with hundreds of kilos of pumpkins, sweet potatoes, melons, apples, cucumbers, oranges and bananas, paying for it with their own money or from donations from friends and family and community. Others bought wire and wire cutters. The next day more women arrived at our house with chopping boards and sharp knives, with one bringing supplies from a make shift ‘depot’.
Our first foray into making wire garlands commenced. Wrangling wire as thick as a wire coat hanger requires strong hands, and Gerald took over cutting 800 mm lengths. The rest of us donned aprons and gloves, and wielding our sharp knives , chopped vegetables and fruit into pieces about half the size of your palm. We soon discovered it’s hard work on your hands and shoulders.
We lined up the individual buckets of different fruit and vegetables into an assembly line and then with our lengths of wire, began pushing the wire through each chunk. It was mayhem to start with as we struggled to master this new skill, and we suffered a few injuries, with people stabbing ourselves and each other, drawing blood, and we were sticking Band Aids on to stop the bleeding! Two people narrowly missed losing an eye as wire ‘bounces’ (as you thread one end the other bobs around!). We failed a lot and wasted chunks which broke (not really, it was all taken to a neighbour in my street who rescued four horses and eighty chickens from the fires, and homed them on her small farm.) When someone magically found the ‘knack’ – of holding a chunk down on to a wooden board, and pushing the wire through, our injuries lessened.
It was time consuming as we had no skills, but we made seventy garlands that afternoon - we learned a lot and got faster and more efficient. Piled up in boxes, they looked very festive, and were immediately delivered to a group of volunteers who took them to our closest ‘safe’ area about 14 kms away, and hung them in the trees. The laughter, the conversations, and the camaraderie created as we worked together with one single aim – to feed and water our wildlife – was a joyous experience, amongst much sadness. People who had only just met were hugging as we said goodbye, sharing phone numbers, friendships were formed and texts flew amongst us over the next weeks. “Are you OK?” “When are we chopping next?” “What shall I bring?” Two days later, we did it again, and more people arrived, and more couriers drove our bounty out to our wildlife. It became obvious that my kitchen was clearly too small, and we relocated to our new ‘depot’, a large shed provided free of charge to us by our local Co-op.
A large warehouse was also donated to house our truckloads of food as well as several large trestle tables, and people arrived with plastic buckets, pliers, wire, there were men and women driving Bobcats, unpacking truck loads of fruit and vegetables, and a mobile walk in fridge was donated to keep garlands fresh ready to be couriered out. The tables were set up under the trees, in searing heat and sapping humidity, and wearing hats and sunscreen, we started chopping and threading. As each day passed, more people turned up, and sometimes there were too many, but we didn’t want to turn anybody away, yet we didn’t have enough equipment. Some people were in our area on holiday and came to do a good deed, but no knives and no boards, and those of us who had been doing it for some days had to train the newcomers. People drove from Sydney 160 kms away to spend a few hours helping, and as it was school holidays, parents turned up with their children – from little ones to teenagers - wanting to give them a ‘feel good experience’. That added to our safety concerns with wires and sharp knives, for what we really needed a training department, and health and safety regulations! We gave the children the task of making the smaller wreaths, and gave them buckets of chopped soft fruits, like bananas, plums, and pears, for the fruit bats (which were literally dropping from the sky in their hundreds with hunger). Their attempts were sometimes unusable, but the life changing lesson those kids learned will, I hope, will change who they are in the world, forever. It filled my heart and I wept watching them, intently wanting to make a difference to our wildlife. They were – we all were - a part of something bigger than ‘community’, each doing ‘our bit’ to save our wildlife.
Hearing stories from the couriers about the heartbreaking sights of dead animals they saw whilst delivering food was harrowing. But the beautiful stories they told about the first ants they saw! A baby wallaby rescued from its dead mother’s pouch. Two bees amongst the carnage. A wombat emerging from his burrow which he had shared with other species.
Our village, normally packed with locals and tourists from Sydney, especially on weekends – became a ghost town. Some shops didn’t open, were they dealing with their fire damage or wasn’t it worth the effort? In some places, food and petrol ran short, as supplies were cut off by fires, with one supermarket opening its doors for only a few shoppers at a time, to prevent panic buying. Thousands slept on the beach and others tried to flee by boat. Several main highways and roads were closed and thousands of our summer tourists queued for kilometres in their cars, trying to return to their homes, north and south of the fire zone. Countless millions of dollars have been lost in revenue for businesses and tourism.
But slowly, life has begun to return to ‘normal’. A new kind of normal. Shops re-opened and people ventured back into everyday life. Life After The Fires. I saw so many people on our streets hugging silently, or sitting having a coffee, holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes, intently listening to the story being told, I saw lots of tears. People have opened their homes to strangers, people have cooked meals and delivered them in their thousands. Others have temporarily adopted people’s horses, chickens, cows, dogs, cats, and pigs. Our emergency centres have been overwhelmed with donations of furniture, clothing, toiletries, and people have volunteered their precious time in a myriad of ways.
Kangaroo Island in South Australia sent out an SOS for 200 volunteers assist with the tragedy of our koalas and wildlife there, and several thousand people applied. People donated cash with unprecedented generosity, and Celeste Barber, a comedian who was caught in the thick of the fires whilst on holiday to her parents in law, posted a video and a request for help on Facebook, and within days she had raised over $6,000,000. Today that total is: AusM $62,000,000, from people around Australia and the world. Our recovery will take years – a decade, maybe more? - but we have made a start. And unbelievably, Mother Nature’s green shoots have begun to appear in our devastated bushland.
I’ve seen and heard of so many large and small acts of courage and bravery, of generosity and compassion, of love and selflessness. I’m seventy years old and I’ve never been sadder nor cried so much or so often. I came here from Africa 46 years ago – and I’ve never been more proud to be an Australian.
SANDRA GROOM
Please note, I am the story teller here, and I was not the ‘driver’ of this project. I am one of thousands of others around Australia who responded to an urgent call to action.
If this story has moved you to help our wildlife - as crass as it sounds - money is the best possible thing you can do
Or come on holiday! Come to our beautiful country, come to our part of paradise here in the South Coast (south of Sydney) and spend some money to help get our tourism and industry and businesses back on their feet. My husband and I drove further south last weekend and bought a few things, had lunch, filled up our car with petrol, and visited friends to spread some love – they fought the fire THREE TIMES and saved their home!