Today it’s time to get serious and look back at what Braidwood’s been through in the last few months. Think about it: fires, storms, pestilence and the prospect of economic depression – pretty much three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, give or take. Let’s not speculate about the fourth – I think we can all agree three out of four is quite sufficient (to paraphrase Mr Meat Loaf).

So we arrived in Australia from Singapore in November last year. Sydney was experiencing smoky conditions from bushfires that were starting to cause some concern. At the time, our main worry was the effects of the long drought which had parched the country into a vast, brown dustbowl.

With Christmas approaching and no financial services work likely in Sydney, we lugged our bags to Canberra, where there was family and the prospect of government employment. The fires now topped every news bulletin and people were starting to use the word ‘unprecedented’ to describe them. Go to any high point in town and you could see the plumes of smoke popping up on the horizon and growing through the day. 

One day we took a drive to Braidwood to check on Corner Cottage. There was smoke rising from the hills not far off which seemed quite threatening and people were talking about losses of homesteads and livestock. Coming home, the sun lit the smoke with a weird orange glow.

I wrote an article – a very long article, I should warn you – about these fires. It’s got a lot of numbers in it: hectares burnt, human fatalities, livestock and wild animal deaths, carbon emitted, etc. But the thing that’s impossible to measure is the effect on people’s outlook. We’d experienced similar conditions in Singapore when the smoke from slash-and-burn farmers in Indonesia blanketed the island for a few days – this was different.

Here, smoke overlaid the countryside and reduced visibility to an eerie yellow-brown twilight. Canberra recorded the worst air quality on the planet. Days of being hemmed in on all sides with no sight of the sky or horizon brought a sense of impending doom; with no realistic prospect of an end in sight, real fear started to take hold.  There was no telling what the eventual toll might be, but memories of the high casualties in previous fires were ever-present and the media’s rolling coverage told of more and more, bigger and bigger fires.

There was such a sense of powerlessness: bearing in mind that the rural fire services were staffed entirely by volunteers, who’d never been required to keep going for so long, everyone wanted to be doing something to help. But there’s no point showing up with no skills or gear, so making food packages and contributing cash was the next best thing to do.

We drove to Braidwood on New Year’s Day to check on the cottage. The road was deserted and the world was a daguerreotype of brown land, brown air, brown sky.

Braidwood came under threat more than once, and with resources stretched to the limit, farmers and friends got together and formed the Mongarlowe Mosquito Army – a smart and brave idea which made a huge difference. This short film tells it better than I can:

Relief came in February with some good, soaking rain that retarded the fires and filled the dams. But rapidly in its wake came a catastrophic storm with massive hailstones. It’s like Nature was telling us not to get too comfortable – it has plenty more tricks up its sleeve. 

In the midst of social distancing and COVID-19, this already seems like ancient history. It’s as if our memories have been wiped as the fires are replaced in the headlines by pandemic talk. But all this has made life harder for those who lost their homes and livelihoods. The countryside is green again and rebuilding is under way, but we’re hearing that much of the hoped-for assistance for the worst-hit hasn’t materialised as all the financial levers the government can pull have been devoted to financing COVID-19 measures.

Looking back, it’s been a packed six months. The word to summarise Braidwood’s experience of fires and pestilence is resilience — families’ and communities’ survival depends on strength and adaptability. The Mosquito Army showed once again that necessity is the mother of invention — and that we are not only better together, but much stronger than we knew, say, this time last year.