Sometimes Nothing Can Happen but Fire

​By Max Hayward

                1. Christmas at The Cape

The path to the beach seemed endless as a ten-year-old. Dried up banksia seed pods and barky sticks poked out of the dirt path that transformed into sand as you approached the dunes. A thick and heavy tangle of tea tree limbs and eucalypts filtered the sunlight, so it didn’t burn until you got out onto the beach, which was dazzlingly bright and invariably windy.

Victoria’s coastline is uncomfortable. There are rocky headlands that abut vast sandy beaches only reachable by boat or kayak. Dense banks of scrub fringe most of the Eastern shores, while there are also stretches of marsh, and cliffs built of crepe-like sand around the bays, with limestone escarpments plunging into the surf in the south-west. Gales batter and cold fronts whip across the worn-down coast through the year. And in the moments of calm, when Victorians clamber to the shore for a swim or surf, we plunge into icy water that never reaches New South Wales temperatures. Defying logic, we wallow with the sharks and clumps of shark-like kelp, thrilled to be in the wildness of it all.

Max Hayward won third equal prize in the 2020 Bass Coast Prize for Non-Fiction with Sometimes Nothing Can Happen but Fire. Part family memoir, written in the wake of the summer bush fires, it explores our relationship with these fire-prone lands contrasting Aboriginal notions of custodianship of land (including controlled burning) with European concept of ownership.  

My family are beachcombers and fast walkers. We are indoctrinated early on with our mothers, who at first draw us to the ocean with promises of fish and chips, boogie boarding and sandcastle-building. Then, as we grow into question-asking primary schoolers, we find shells and slender pieces of driftwood, that can be repurposed as magical wands. Then, the beach transforms into something higher-than, something full of drama. It’s our place of baptism and worship.

When my maternal grandparents moved from their beloved farm in the hills to an acreage on a lakeside ridge known for its thriving mosquito population, suddenly the sanctuary of Mum’s childhood home vanished, and the broader family was suspicious of the new place like it was a new step-parent. What was this new element in everyone’s life? The replacement house seemed to be purely constructed of cream carpet hallways and light brown wooden cabinetry. Even as a ten-year-old, I felt uneasy about the transition. The multi-generational location for Christmas and birthday celebrations now belonged to someone else – another, younger family that hadn’t yet picked mushrooms or gotten stuck in mud or been surrounded by bushfire as my grandparents once had.

In reaction to the new, strange house, the family planned a different Christmas venue – a cabin by the beach in a place called Cape Conran. It sounds American, suburban and manicured, but in fact it’s deep into the coastal scrub that extends for 300 kilometres from the mini-golf capital of Victoria, Lakes Entrance, to the southern coast of New South Wales. It’s a briny, ancient landscape with long shallow estuaries and 100-person hamlets dotted along grey roads lined with recently squashed wombats and wallabies.

The cabin that the family rented looked like a ski chalet – timber and glass with a utilitarian kitchen furnished with long heavy tables, and surrounded by wide wooden verandas – but it smelt like a mulch of dry gum leaves and moist soil. Because it was surrounded by banksias and bushels of native grass and barky undergrowth, there were spooky rustlings underneath the cabin and in its dark corners – a secret world of woolly centipedes, crab-like spiders and thick, dusty moths. If you stood still, the world would wriggle around you. The kids were fearful of and fascinated by this world, while the adults were preoccupied with each other.

That Christmas, things felt optimistic to me. I wasn’t privy to the gossip exchanged between aunties or any of the quietly disintegrating adult relationships. I also wasn’t young enough to fully engage with my tiny younger cousins or brother (I was far too grown up), so I was in the twilight zone between two worlds – the overlapping space of a Venn diagram. This position felt lonely sometimes, but also offered a unique perspective on the way adults acted after a deep conversation or spark of conflict.

Memories from our first family Christmas at Cape Conran are a bright and joyful blur – I must’ve been slightly too young to remember anything specific. But moments from our second Christmas, hidden amongst the tea tree, have stayed with me, like a series of under-developed Polaroids – I can’t quite make out the detail, but the shapes are familiar:
An aunty on the beach, telling me about her pregnancy.
A cousin smashing a windowpane out of frustration with his mother.
Another cousin falling asleep in the sun, resulting in her being a shade of glowing ember.
A seal gliding across a perfectly curled wave.
And there was something else that stuck with me, that I felt acutely conscious of for the first time in my twelve years of existence:
The smell of a bushfire.
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Between shell discoveries and sand fortresses and long lunches featuring experimental salads and innumerable sausages, I remember a thick, soupy dread that descended on me – a sense that everything was about to change.​

                                                     2. Lightning Strikes

My maternal grandparents died six months apart in 2018, so last year was the second Christmas without them. The house on the mosquito-infested hill had been sold, and now the extended family was strewn across the east coast of Australia, celebrating separately. Suddenly we weren’t as bound by the tradition and anticipation of a Christmas with grandparents and little kids. There had been attempts to get everyone together again, but airfares, work commitments, and personal rivalries blocked anything from eventuating.

In November of 2019, lightning strikes in the dense East Gippsland bush north of Bairnsdale triggered a series of small fires that spread with every wind change. They continued to burn in December, when it became clear I had to rethink holiday plans at Dad’s farm near Ensay, a farming hamlet fringed by blue eucalyptus hills called The Angoras. I decided to spend a week by the coast instead, with Mum, her partner and their friends in the beach village of Lake Tyers Beach.

On a hot, dry day, Gippsland feels ominous even without the presence of fire or smoke. The sun beats down on hard cracked sand that’s unforgiving to any soft white skin. Angry-looking trucks roar down the highway as campervans lumber between service stations. Snakes bask on riverbanks and currawongs cry to each other from parched branches. And mirages dance across roads and hot green picnic tables, like auras warning humans to not get too close. Everything, it seems, is untouchable.

At Lake Tyers Beach, the ocean water remains frigid through the year, apart from a brief moment in February when it warms to a swimmable level. Mum’s partner, an immense person in size and confidence, plunges into the surf at any opportunity. I worry he looks too much like a seal for a stretch of coast that’s frequently patrolled by sharks, and other creatures that go “bloop” in the night.

The pair of them were preparing to set off on a trip around Australia just after New Year’s – a highway odyssey across the desert, then up the west coast – but the predictions for January were not looking favourable for travel. Smoke was choking most of Victoria and new fires were springing up around Adelaide and on the New South Wales south coast. But they had packed up their current life in Melbourne, and their old life in Lake Tyers, and were now in an empty beach house waiting for their futures to start. My boyfriend Craig and I arrived in town with hangovers and sunburn from a pool party on Christmas Eve. We all hugged and exchanged wry smiles of haplessness.

When I was growing up, the trouble with Santa wasn’t the psychological impact of learning your parents lied to you, or that a whole industry was complicit in this elaborate hoax, it was that as soon as you knew the truth, life lost another layer of its magic sheen. There might be moments later that come close to recapturing the magic – a first kiss shared with a crush; finishing your final high school exam; seeing a friend getting married – but when the Santa puzzle is finally solved, Christmases just become another meal and opportunity for adults to drink too much sparkling wine. Families are great, and so is Jesus for those that way inclined, but the materialistic ecstasy of a pillowcase packed with plastic trinkets and lollies is difficult to match.

So, we drank too much sparkling wine, ate various meats and listened to compilation CDs. It smelt like eucalyptus burning, but the fire was still swirling around in state forest fifty kilometres away.

Boxing Day means different things to different people, but compared to Christmas, it’s less about obligations and competitive gift-giving and more about doing things that actually make you happy. For some it means cricket, or going to the movies, and for others it’s purely a beach day. My brother, boyfriend, mum and I all jumped into the car and headed to Cape Conran where my aunty and cousin were camped with friends. The sky was only faintly hazy, and road was quiet. We took our time driving, buying snacks and looking through op shops along the way before reaching the campgrounds which were already being abandoned. Word was spreading that the coastal park would shut before New Year’s. ​

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                                                   3. Bushfire Season​

Seasonal bushfires are a natural, cyclic part of the Australian environment. For more than 50,000 years, as eucalyptus forests became more prevalent around the country[i], lightning would ignite blazes which would burn everywhere from south-eastern highlands to savannahs and scrub in what is now referred to as the Northern Territory. In the months and years after a bushfire, the land would regenerate with fresh eucalyptus seedlings. Most gum trees have a remarkable ability to grow quickly in relatively infertile soil, and this meant bird, insect and mammal populations could recover quicker, especially if fires only burnt through the dried-up undergrowth and didn’t harm the canopy of older trees.

More intense fires that destroy large, old-growth trees happen when there’s an excessive build-up of leaf litter, ferns and other debris on the forest floor. Aboriginal communities would control the amount of this undergrowth by lighting fires that would effectively clean up any hazardous build-ups before the peak of summer heat. ‘Control burning’ as it’s commonly referred to (or ‘cultural burning’ as it’s traditionally known)[ii], helped protect older trees from succumbing to intense fires. The regrowth after fires also attracted animals like kangaroos that were perfect game for hunting. But with the development of human-propelled climate change, the longer, drier and hotter summer season unfortunately shrinks the timeframe when this control burning can happen.

Eucalyptus trees, which were in Australia prior to Aboriginal arrival, became an even more successful and enduring plant that flourished particularly along the east coast.

Eucalyptus trees were rare in Australia 45,000 years ago. But the arrival of Homo sapiens inaugurated a golden age for the species. Since eucalyptuses are particularly resistant to fire, they spread far and wide while other trees and shrubs disappeared.[iii] (Harrari, Y 2014, p. 17)
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The change of Australia’s ecosystem with the proliferation of eucalyptus forests, along with the hunting and extinction of megafauna like the diprotodon (also known as the giant wombat) after the arrival of the country’s First Peoples, is when the country was first altered by humans on a notable scale but over a long period. When Europeans arrived with disease and invasive plant and animal species, the ecological changes were so fast, widespread and aggressive that we’re still trying to rectify these problems – with blackberries continuing to choke rivers, and wild cats eating bird populations, wiping some out to near extinction levels. And while national parks that fringe towns and cities are subject to regular human conservation efforts, the remote mountain regions that extend up the east coast of Australia are far less physically accessible for positive intervention.

The Great Dividing Range, one of the longest mountain chains in the world, is effectively a series of interconnected eucalyptus forests that stretches from central Victoria to tropical north Queensland. Although there are high country meadows and rocky outcrops that punctuate the range, bushland dominates its ecology. It is also where the majority of Australia’s major bushfire events occur.

The 2019/2020 bushfire began in an offshoot of the Dividing Range on November 21, months before the skies turned a hellish red above Mallacoota. An ongoing drought and a hotter-than-usual preceding year (exacerbated by climate change), coupled with decades of dried-up undergrowth, coalesced to bring perfect fire conditions.   

In Melbourne I nervously watched the blackening map on the CFA website, which tracked the extent of the fire. In early December, a few blobs deep in the bush, seemed far enough away to remain optimistic that rain would come, or plans could be executed to stop the fire in its path.

‘Fire breaks. They’ll be able to create more fire breaks and back-burning,’ I said to my boyfriend, who was also anxious about his parents near other fires in New South Wales.
Of course, we all become experts on a subject when we become familiar with its language. Growing up in eastern Victoria you become familiar with the general lingo of ‘back-burning’ and ‘fire-front’ and ‘undergrowth’, but if you don’t have a working knowledge or experience in land management or firefighting, you toss these words around like a spectator at the football, rather than a player. The realities of fire are that they can be as volatile, random and surprising as any game of football. Sometimes the only way to play is reactionary.

In January, heavy smoke had descended across much of Victoria. The fires had grown exponentially and were stretched from the high country to the ocean, licking ski resorts and surf towns all at once. Mallacoota, the tiny coastal town hundreds of kilometres into the heavily forested corner of the state, was completely surrounded by a smouldering front. Tourists that had been trapped there for weeks, huddled on the beach over an apocalyptic New Year’s were being airlifted and shipped out by the defence force. The slow and steady life of a remote village, one known for being off-beat and a favourite destination of hikers and birdwatchers, was now a war zone with army helicopters hovering above. I imagined toddlers screaming as their mothers tried to shelter them from smoke spewing across the estuary.

You can see nothing. It is like the darkest, darkest night. You can hear the fire, it's roaring away. We’re getting a lot of ash falling. Unless you’ve got [a mask] you’ll be in trouble. A lot of people are using wet tea towels. And that works, but you cannot get enough air in. 
Don Ashby, a rescue coordinator in Mallacoota.[iv]
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Dad stayed to protect the farm from the fire that was dancing just behind The Angoras, while mum and her partner remained in Lake Tyers Beach, directly south near the Ninety Mile Beach. I called and messaged Dad four times a day as I anxiously refreshed the ABC and CFA live tracking of the fire front, and he was always calm, but sometimes admitting that the situation was indeed ‘fuckin’ shit’. Mum, meanwhile, jumped from level-headedness on clearer days to sheer panic when the wind picked up and black leaves tumbled into the backyard.

A combination of light rain showers, cooler temperatures and shifting winds saved Dad’s farm and the panicked community of Lake Tyers Beach. A relief washed over my family – we’d all dodged another bullet. Dad didn’t admit to how close the farm had been to destruction until after the fires nearby started to fizzle out. They had reached only a few hundred metres away, and singed the bush behind our property.

With the regaining of breath and normalising of blood pressure came a clear-eyed view of what had happened. One million hectares of bush had burnt so far in Gippsland alone[v], small townships like Sarsfield and Buchan had lost dozens of houses, and the fire was still not under control.

By late January, with the arrival of cooler weather, the recovery process begun and the fire’s spread had slowed. But the heavy rain didn’t arrive soon enough for Cape Conran. Much of the park – its grassy dunes and heavy banksia limbs, its beds of dry leaves and swaying gum trees, its overly-friendly lace monitors and the parade of squawking birds – burnt to the ground on February 1.
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​                                                   4. Coming of Age

As a young teenager, I rode my bike down dirt tracks that webbed through the head-height grass and scrub stretched out behind the band of coastal tea tree and banksia. I listened to folky pop songs, like Middle of the Hill by Josh Pyke, and imagined myself in a coming-of-age montage as I glided through the dust and sunshine. I mouthed lyrics in the moody way teenagers do while nobody’s looking. Even when the battery of my MP3 player died, I kept my earphones in, and pictured myself in a movie. Nobody else is experiencing this solitude or this emotional response, I thought. The feeling of Middle of the Hill spoke to me, not so much the lyrics, which were a lot darker than I initially registered:

One time when a coupla men drove down the hill in a white van
Said there was a phone box filled with money 'round the corner
And I woulda gone along but she took me by the hand
To the house in the middle of the hill
In the middle of the hill, in the middle of the hill​

Josh Pyke’s discography, along with Wish You Well by Bernard Fanning, and similar songs about emotional experiences that I couldn’t fully grasp, were the sentimental soundtracks for beach holidays that I kept private, reserved for my rides through the heathland. I would also listen to the occasional power ballad while looking out soulfully to the ocean, but mostly I pictured myself in a bittersweet coming-of-age movie. Each holiday to Cape Conran felt like a form of therapy, away from the mounting tension of high school. 

Sometimes I worried my family would become suspicious that I was smoking or doing drugs, because I would disappear for a long-time doing laps and repeating the same songs. In retrospect, I must’ve looked permanently puzzled.

A large part of the teenage experience is to look inward, obsessively, and attempt to align your developing personality with a part of the outside world. Attempting to contextualise yourself becomes an all-consuming pursuit, and a difficult one if you’re riding a bike around for hours alone, listening to up-tempo songs about paedophiles. I would sometimes make nervous conversation with other teenagers and maybe stand near them, but I ultimately decided that the connection I actually valued was with Cape Conran itself: the spiky vegetation, and jagged ancient rocks and clumps of floating kelp. This was my context.

I looked at the surfy boys, or the kids who did jumps on their bikes and drank illicit beers on the beach at night and wondered whether they collected shells on long walks with their mothers. Did family Christmases lose their magic when the Santa conspiracy was uncovered? What was their favourite song from Tea and Sympathy?
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In my tent at night I laid in the dark, wrapped in a pretzel of sleeping bag, jumper and towels. Everything was slightly damp and smelt like campfire smoke. I listened to my Dad’s hollow snoring a few metres away, but further in the distance there were congregations of young people – people Mum gently suggested I “hang out” with – laughing and murmuring in deep voices. Their names would’ve been something sporty like Ryan or Tyler, and I imagined them daring each other to jump into the ocean nude or eat bowlfuls of tomato sauce. They were the ones that were in minor trouble at school – primarily for breaking windows – but would be quietly adored by some teachers for their cheekiness. It was the golden era of ‘boys will be boys’, a phrase that in Gippsland really meant ‘straight white boys will do what they want’.​

  
​                                                  5. Another Education
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The Aboriginal connection to land was an elusive concept to me while I was growing up. At primary school up in the tiny milling town of Swifts Creek, we were given snippets of stories about the Dreaming and tasted witchetty grubs, and on Play School they had clips of living in the Outback and craft segments about Aboriginal art. During high school, down in the comparatively suburban Warragul, I had even less exposure to Aboriginal history and ideas, apart from sporadic texts in English like the Rabbit Proof Fence and Jindabyne. There were hazy snapshots of First Nations cultures, but without Aboriginal teachers, the lessons felt anchorless, like we were missing the narrative that threads disparate ideas together.

On strolls along the boardwalks which wrapped around the Cape and that connected campgrounds to the beach, I would look at the plaques detailing the flora and fauna of the park, alongside notations about the pre-colonial history of the area. There was certainly a recognition of Aboriginal people as the traditional custodians of the land, but beyond general blurbs about the practical existence of finding food and using natural resources, I can’t remember a broader narrative – a story that linked facts and anecdotes.

The story wouldn’t come from signage approved by Parks Victoria, or from tokenistic high school projects, or eating bush tucker. Starting to understand fragments of Aboriginal culture and its deep connection to land would only just begin through the understanding of how this landmass, originally claimed to be ‘Terra Nullius’ (meaning ‘nobody’s land’ in Latin) – from windswept beaches to temperate rainforests and vast deserts – was stolen from its caretakers.

The word ‘apocalyptic’ was used in press coverage of the bushfires, especially to describe the scenes of huddled masses on the beach in Mallacoota, and it has been flung around to describe the Coronavirus pandemic and populist rhetoric employed by President Trump and his cohort. But on an emotional and social level, Indigenous people from Australia to the Americas are already living in a post-apocalyptic world.

According to the Dreamtime mythos, the Gunaikurnai people emerged from the meeting of Borun, the pelican, and Tuk, the musk duck, in the waterways now known as the Gippsland Lakes. Together, Tuk and Borun became the creators of the local Aboriginal world.[vi]

Human inhabitance of East Gippsland extends at least 18,000 years. The Gunaikurnai people have fished the rivers and hunted the forests and grasslands; rites of passage, social hierarchies and rituals have evolved, and the land has rejuvenated season after season for centuries. Despite the massacres committed by settlers, including Angus McMillan[vii] – a Scottish pastoralist and explorer –  the Aboriginal culture and people have survived.

The Lake Tyers Aboriginal Mission, a community that’s both a relic of colonialism and now managed by Aboriginal people, is across the lake from the white-dominated beach township. The times I had kayaked out on the lake that separates these two settlements, I’ve wondered about the people living at the Mission. But on Boxing Day 2019, as the sky glowed and smoke clogged the air, I didn’t think once about anything beyond my personal anchoring to places. My holiday place, my childhood home, the trees I loved.

Creation stories help us make sense of the world, whether it’s a broadly-known cultural narrative like Tuk and Borun, or it’s an analysis of ourselves – a forensic dissection of our psyches – and it can be triggered by physical or psychological phenomena; think about the idea of temptation and human fallibility in Genesis, versus the explanation of the natural environment in Aboriginal mythologies.

My family’s creation story is shaped more like a bullet point list of historical events, though we’re all unreliable narrators who gently shift the story around each generation. My recollections of Cape Conran Christmases, for example, could be entirely baseless and the simple hallucinations of a theatrical pre-teen. White history in Gippsland has carried on being retold in a similar fashion for the past 200 years. How the English, Scottish and Welsh tamed the land and its people – logged the forests, dammed the rivers, and confined the Aboriginal population to communities like Lake Tyers – is commemorated with monuments and plaques like the cairns that mention Angus McMillan as a frontiersman.[viii] What’s lacking in the creation story of the south-eastern colony is specificity. History has been reduced to broad strokes. Families have vaguely commented that things have changed and that why don’t they just move on? But as we now know, undergrowth builds up until nothing can happen but fire.​

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                                                   ​6. Ownership

As the descendant of British farmers, I have found the concept of land ownership a natural, almost preordained element of life. Growing up on a property in remote East Gippsland and roaming around hectares of paddocks and bends of the Tambo river felt and still feels unremarkable. Spending summers on a campground by the beach in a coastal park without any shops or holiday homes nearby was nothing special.

Over the years of living in Melbourne’s suburbs I became friends with classmates and work colleagues from slightly-different-but-still-white backgrounds. Through conversations I had with this assortment of people it became increasingly clear that I had a very different view of the natural world and of land ownership than people who spent childhoods in towns or the city. I rambled on about clouds and trees and rainfall to anyone who would listen, and they’d look at me bemused, and then change the conversation to family or childhood friends. After many moments of social puzzlement, I have become an amateur anthropologist, investigating my own connection to the land.

Craig is an Aboriginal man whose ancestors were from the northern New South Wales Gamilaraay (also known as Kamilaroi) and southern Queensland Wakka Wakka peoples. When we started dating, I told him about Cape Conran and where I came from in Gippsland. Trying to seem educated, I referenced the terms Koorie and Gunaikurnai as the Aboriginal people of the area where I grew up, but I didn’t understand how those terms related to different things. There were some awkward moments in our conversations when we both silently recognised how full of shit I was. Now I know, Koorie is a term that encompasses a large group of communities in southern New South Wales and eastern Victoria, while Gunaikurnai pertains to most Aboriginal people in East Gippsland.[ix]

After three months of dating, Craig came to a magazine launch event with me. The magazine was an online publication with an ethos of ‘celebrating culture and place’, and it started with a spotlight on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. As is common with cultural events nowadays, the night began with an Acknowledgement of Country – a recognition of the First Nations peoples, past, present and emerging. I’d heard this many times before at festivals and events, but this was the first time I’d really listened to this language about land custodianship of the Wurunderji-willam people in the area now known as Melbourne. It took my new connection with Craig to heighten my awareness and make the words stick.

The Wurundjeri’s connection to land is underpinned by cultural and spiritual values vastly different to those of the Europeans. The Wurundjeri did not ‘own’ the land in the European sense of the word, but belonged to, or were ‘owned by’ the land. They did not live in permanent settlements but, rather, camped for periods within defined clan boundaries where food was plentiful, and moved on when the land needed to rejuvenate. The land provided all the Wurundjeri needed – food, water, medicine, shelter – and they treated it with the respect due to such a provider.[x]
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​There might have been a succinct summary like this on the plaques along the Cape Conran boardwalk, relating to the Gunaikurnai people but I’d never paid attention to it. Like most white people, I couldn’t just receive information or listen to Acknowledgements of Country, I had to have a personal connection to start to understand some element of Aboriginal culture beyond the factoids.

I took Craig to Cape Conran, and we went beachcombing with Mum. Craig politely admired the cove and rolling surf, and took photos of the headland, with its rocky shelves and sand covered in kelp. He walked behind us as Mum and I collected cowrie and abalone shells. We recounted holidays, like the first, glowing family Christmas in the cabin, and the second less jubilant one.

I gave Craig a bleached white paper-thin Cellana tramoserica[xi] and he said ‘oh, no thanks’. I thought he just didn’t like shells, but he explained that he didn’t take items from the land if it’s not his country. Of course, I thought ‘country’ referred to the whole of Australia and not the ancient ‘countries’ throughout the pre-colonial continent.  

When we moved in together, I brought a shoebox full of shells and rocks and arranged them carefully on my bedside table and in ceramic bowls on the desk and bookshelf. They were my beloved souvenirs, not only from Cape Conran but other lands I had no deep ancestral claim to, like Cape Tribulation, Wineglass Bay and even Vanuatu. These are artifacts I still don’t have the heart to return to nature just yet, though I know it could be one of those small cracks that widens between couples if it’s not discussed.

Curated displays of treasures from the beach are a decorative signature of my Mum and aunties. The farm they grew up on, at the base of the myth-inspiring Mount Lookout, was just far enough from the coast for washed-up treasures to pique imaginations. Their humble beach trips became intrepid adventures. I imagine them wearing colonial-era clothes with fans and parasols, but this was the 70s, so they probably wore earth-coloured bathers and a lot of denim. On warm weekends, Lakes Entrance was the preferred destination – just a forty-minute drive away – but for school holidays the family drove up the coast, to Tathra in southern New South Wales. Like Cape Conran, the water at both beaches was chilly year-round, with a mix of erratic surf and rips that snaked out to the Tasman Sea and Bass Strait.
Decades after those school holidays on the south coast, the family rekindled a beach tradition with those Christmases in the cabin. But by then, the farm at Mount Lookout had been sold. The physical places that had bound the family in those sepia 70s and anxious 80s turned out to have a stronger grip on everyone than anyone cared to confess. At least, this was my perception as a 12-year-old with selective memory.

As my extended family grew up and relocated to scattered pockets across the eastern seaboard, I became increasingly curious about where we’d all come from in the first place. I knew our ancestors were English, with a splattering of Welsh blood and drop of German, and when I quizzed grandma and grandad about their childhoods, they gave me tidbits about estranged siblings and former past-times (Grandad had a particularly eclectic mix of singing, tennis and Freemasonry). When their answers grew foggy, I turned to Mum and she would fill in parts of the emotional world my grandparents had missed; like in all families, there were long-held resentments in the gaps between glittering life events. I knew that families before The War weren’t as changeable as they are now, but they were still as psychologically complex. The security of land ownership wasn’t something romantic and lofty, it was a sensible way to support a family. You couldn’t, after all, rent a farm.

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                                             7. The Parks Aren’t Locked Up

My younger brother now works as an anthropologist in the Kimberly region of Western Australia, helping people in remote Aboriginal communities navigate the bureaucracy of Native Title – the legal process of connecting First Nations people to claim land rights for regions throughout the country. He says the work is challenging, and is a window into the schism between white Australian business interests and deep ancestral ties to the land. Considering the mining and farming operations in the Kimberly region, the notions of ‘custodianship’ rather than wholesale ‘ownership’ mustn’t gel with Rio Tinto and BHP.

While there isn’t iron ore mining in Gippsland, the Native Title claims process has also been fraught. In 2010 the Traditional Owner Settlement Act legally recognised the Gunaikurnai as a people with the ability to make Native Title claims, but with this exception:

Native title is taken to be extinguished on grants of freehold land (private land) and by crown land subject to public works (roads, public development etc). Therefore the agreement and the native title determination only affect undeveloped Crown land within the Gippsland region.[xii]
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In East Gippsland this means remote expanses of rugged bush – predominantly national parks and state reserves – but few open spaces, as farmland is ‘freehold’.

Since the ‘Traditional Owner’ act passed, the partnership between national parks and the Gunaikurnai people has subsequently ignited debate about the management of parks and reserves through Gippsland – which includes Lake Tyers, but not Cape Conran – and whether the build-up of hazardous undergrowth is natural, due to local neglect or Melbourne-based bureaucracy, or whether it’s a ‘greenie conspiracy’. One thing is certain, and that is the issue of bushfire management in national parks is deeply political.

Some conservative politicians have previously stated that national parks had been sealed off from effective management (including control burning), as deputy New South Wales premier John Barilaro said of that state’s similar issues:

‘We can't be dictated to by a green-left ideology that advocates locking up bushland and leaving it.’[xiii]

He was criticised for the remarks by political opponents and academics alike, including Ross Bradstock, director of the Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires at the University of Wollongong.

‘[it’s a] very tired and very old conspiracy that is always regurgitated and it’s always found to be wanting in the wash-up after the fires.’[xiv]

The truth, it seems, is that fire and forest management agencies do clear undergrowth to avoid catastrophic bushfires, but the timeframe to do this is getting smaller, due to the effects of longer dry spells and heat waves. Chris Hardman, the Chief Fire Officer at Forest Fire Management in Victoria said:

‘We planned to burn 246,396 hectares of public land in 2019, but were unable to do so because it would have been unsafe’[xv]

And the reason for this smaller timeframe is that the world is getting warmer and consequently, Australia’s weather is becoming more volatile. By looking only at undergrowth, we’re avoiding the larger issue, climate change, which is a direct result of industrialisation and its bedfellow, colonialism. To view national parks as “locked up” by a left-wing conspiracy as Barilaro said, is too convenient, and evidently missing the point. Control burning obviously needs to happen, as Aboriginal people have been doing for thousands of years, because we live in a region of hyper-flammable yet regenerative forests.

​But to ignore volumes of climate science, is to not acknowledge that even though Native Title does something to recognise the First Nations people and their connection to land, we are still causing a feedback loop of environmental destruction. In Gippsland and beyond, this a startling example of a European misunderstanding of the Australian environment.

                                                   
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                                                8. A Loss That Isn’t Owned

The sense of collective loss in 2020 has been gut wrenching. We have lurched from disaster to disaster, sometimes as a unified community, but usually divided by the fault lines of race and proximity to money – against the Hollywood story we'd love to believe. And when the dust settles from the economic disaster of the bushfires then pandemic in Gippsland, the environmental rejuvenation of Alpine bush and coastal heathlands will only just be starting. And as trees grow, creeks bubble with clear water and animals return, the mental scars will haunt us for generations. As a white man, I will never understand the inherited trauma of First Nations people and the seismic shock of First Contact. The ensuing massacres and forced assimilation remain unfathomable to me. I can read more books about Indigenous cultures and Australia's colonial history, and I can learn to talk in a less self-serving way. I can also educate myself more about my farming family's history, which is undoubtedly darker than anybody wants to admit. But, the connection to land and that sense of custodianship is fundamentally different for me. I love the mountain vistas and open paddocks of Dad’s farm, and I loved Cape Conran from the (objectively) dangerous beach to the dirt track I whimsically rode my bike down as a teenager, but they’re also places I would rather own than simply take care of. It sounds psychopathic, but the world, even just on a subconscious and metaphorical level, is ownable to a white man, and that's why the bushfires last summer stung. My sense of entitlement felt endangered.   

I wonder what a Gunaikurnai teenager in 1769 thought about Cape Conran, the year before Captain Cook made landfall at Botany Bay. Would he have wandered the grasslands humming to himself, thinking about his sordid crush on another teenage boy? Was his family debating over the best location for proximity to the beach but also fresh water? Did his aunties have underlying tension due to the childhood rivalries? Maybe! I wouldn’t be surprised if insecure teenagers with complicated families have existed in every society since the dawn of Homo Sapiens.

What’s certain is that this Gunaikurnai teenager would have shifted around seasonally, hunting and foraging. He would have never seen a rabbit or fox, or eaten a blackberry, and the waterways would have been more abundant with fish and the grasslands teeming with kangaroos. The dry years were more balanced with wet years, and the bushfires were less intense.

1769 was not only a year before Cook’s arrival, it was at the start of the Industrial Revolution – a period when humans unlocked their dangerous potential and the dominos started to fall.
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                                                   9. Future Tense

As I write this, I look out to The Angoras mountain range from my Dad’s dining room. I am here for an uncertain amount of time because Melbourne (where I live normally) is in lockdown. The second wave of coronavirus outbreaks is (hopefully) at its crest. Everyone must now wear face masks outside and only leave the house when necessary. I worry about Craig, who’s in our flat close to the city centre, but there hasn’t been an exponential rise in cases, like in the US or Brazil, and to avoid a nervous breakdown, I have found that a sense of perspective can be a powerful tool, especially when we look to the future. Rather than focussing on all the panic-inducing details, we should be looking at our collective future in terms of a grand narrative in which the natural environment and humanity are intertwined. The first step is education – a deeper understanding of how First Nations people are connected to the land whites tend to dominate rather than treat it like the ecosystem we’re all part of. That education is not going to be achieved through any amount of board walks and information plaques at Cape Conran. We should look to the story of last summer as a warning for what’s ahead if we continue merrily ignoring climate change.
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I don’t have any idea what this Christmas will bring. Coronavirus will almost certainly continue to ravage the world, and lightning will ignite some of the remaining forests along the east coast. I’m not sure if I’ll get to see family, who are still strewn across Australia and cut off by hard borders. But I know that the sense of ownership I have, that links back to my grandparents’ yearning for security, and my British ancestors’ seeking of farmland across oceans, must come to an end. And if 2020 has taught me anything so far, it’s that the less tangled up you are with possessions, the easier it is to adapt and move on. I can own my memories of Cape Conran and the farm where I grew up, but the land is not mine and it’s time to recognise that.
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NOTES
​[i] Harrari, Y. 2011 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Harper, London
[ii] Korff, J. 2020 Cool burns: Key to Aboriginal fire management, Creative Spirits, viewed 26 July 2020
[iii] Harrari, Y. 2011 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Harper, London
[iv] McGuire, A and Butt, C Cut off: How the crisis at Mallacoota unfolded, The Age, viewed on 25 July 2020
[v] ABC News 2020, Fires in Victoria destroy estimated 300 homes, former police chief to lead Bushfire Recovery Victoria, viewed on 26 July 2020
[vi]  Ramahyuck 2020, Gunai/Kurnai People, Ramahyuck, viewed on 24 July 2020 
[vii] O’Mahoney, C 2019, The Scottish explorer who became the butcher of Gippsland, The Guardian Australia, viewed on 27 July 2020
[viii] Costa, J ABC News 2020, Wellington Council Votes Down McMillan Cairn Removal, ABC News, viewed on 27 July 2020 
[ix] Bataluk Cultural Trail 2020, Gunai and Kurnai, Koorie and Koori, Bataluk Cultural Trail, viewed on 25 July 2020 
[x] Aboriginal History of Yarra 2020, Introduction, Aboriginal History of Yarra (City of Yarra), viewed on 28 July 2020 
[xi] Gastropod. There are many species of limpets, all inhabit the intertidal zone on rocky shores. Shown is the common Cellana tramoserica – Aboriginal Victoria 2020, A Guide to Shells Commonly Found in Victorian Aboriginal Shell Middens, Aboriginal Victoria, viewed on 1 August 2020 
[xii] Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation 2020, Gunaikurnai Native Title Agreement, Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation, viewed on 30 July 2020 
[xiii] Trask, S 2019, Barilaro pours more fuel on bushfire spat, Canberra Times, viewed on 30 July 2020
[xiv] Cox, L. 2020, Factcheck: are national parks 'locked up' and more vulnerable to bushfires?, The Guardian Australia, viewed on 30 July 2020 
[xv] Cox, L. 2020, Factcheck: are national parks 'locked up' and more vulnerable to bushfires?, The Guardian Australia, viewed on 30 July 2020