Telling the stories of Black Summer
With my own garden still a blackened ruin, I wrote about how Australia was scarred by the Black Summer of 2019/2020.
Outlet: WIRED (UK)
Length: 4400
Turnaround time: Four weeks
Number of interviews: 14
Published: 21 April 2020
“In a really terrifying voice she said ‘we're on fire, get out, get out!’”.
This was a longform feature for the UK-based edition of WIRED, telling the personal stories of the devastating 2019/2020 Black Summer bushfires in Australia.
I was still traumatised from our own close encounter with those fires when I took on the commission. With hindsight, scraping a pen over those still-raw nerves might not have been the most sensible thing for my mental health, but I think it’s some of the best writing I’ve done.
Why this story?
Australia’s horrific 2019/2020 bushfires made world headlines, and for good reason. They were record-breaking in so many ways – their size, their ferocity, the huge number of people caught in their path, the ecosystem destruction, the dramatic evacuations and personal stories – but were also a harbinger of what’s to come in the climate-changed world that the burning of fossil fuels is shaping.
WIRED UK’s science editor Matt Reynolds got in touch through Twitter asking me if I wanted to write an ‘in-depth and people-first’ story about the Australian bushfires, which at the time were still burning but in a slightly less catastrophic manner.
He was initially interested in using Kangaroo Island as a case study to kick off the piece, because almost the entire island had been razed by fire. But I suggested that the NSW south coast might be a better option, because of the sheer scale of the calamity there, both in terms of the size of the fires, and the number of communities and people affected.
The NSW coast was also a lot easier and safer for me to get to and get around at the time, whereas Kangaroo Island was still smouldering and uncertain. Matt agreed, and commissioned a 3000-word piece with a one-month deadline.
Where to start?
This story had to be embedded in scene and sights and sounds. But the prospect of going to a bushfire-devastated region, while my own garden was still charcoal, was terrifying.
I had been getting counselling for eco/climate anxiety for ever since the 2019 election – remember that one? – which morphed into therapy for post-trauma in the wake of the bushfires.
I remember discussing the story with the therapist; what effect it might have on me, how I could deal with those effects, how I could prepare.
I recall joking that I might just spend the whole four-hour car trip to the south coast crying and listening to music as a way to really ‘let it all out’. That turned out to be pretty close to the truth.
A few days before I was due to head to the coast, eastern Australia experienced a record-breaking, three-day rainstorm that dropped around 35 centimetres of rain on the south coast in a single day. It finally extinguished the last of the fires burning in the area, while also flooding roads and entire suburbs.
The roadscape to the coast was therefore a very different scene to what it would have been the week prior. There were flashes of green emerging from the black: epicormic buds on eucalypts, new fronds unfurling from the charred tops of tree ferns, an inch of two of green stems growing out from grass trees.
But the fire devastation was still so clear. It was heartbreaking, because these were the landscapes of my childhood holidays. Driving down the winding, scenic Clyde Mountain road and looking out over dead trees stretching all the way to the horizon was painfully sad and shocking, and really set the scene for the whole story.
In the 36 hours I had in the south coast, I drove around just trying to absorb what I was seeing, and mapping it onto my memories. I walked along beaches lined with charcoal tide marks, took pictures of road signs melted and unreadable, drove past ruin after ruin of what had once been homes and businesses. I sat outside a coordination centre for those affected by the fires and noted the weary, numb faces of those coming and going.
I was acutely conscious of not intruding, not poking into people’s grief or photographing the structural corpses of communities. There had been some comments on social media about journalists picking over the metaphorical bones of the dead, and how that was compounding communities’ sense of powerlessness and trauma. So I tried to avoid driving down small suburban streets, and I didn’t photograph houses or businesses. I didn’t try to interview random people on the street.
I had managed to schedule an interview with the director of Mogo Zoo, whose staff had staged a dramatic, unaided, exhausting fight against the flames to save the zoo. Chad Staples was already something of a celebrity, as the story of the battle for the zoo had gone global. To his credit, he still made the time to sit down and talk to me about the experience, even though he was clearly still recovering from it. That story made the lead for the piece.
Interviews
The 2019/2020 bushfires were so huge that everyone knew someone who was directly affected. This is where social media can be a useful tool for journalists to exploit use their personal networks to find sources. My wonderful friends and family provided so many contacts of people who found themselves on the frontline of the bushfires that in the end I had more interviews than I could use.
I spoke to people who’d found themselves stranded on beaches wondering if they were going to die. I spoke to people who watched their suburbs burn. I spoke to people who literally drove through flame to reach safety. I spoke to people who lost everything. I spoke to people who had already endured so much, and were now experiencing the loss of their sacred places and lands and animals.
Those interviews were *hard*. I’m on a learning journey about how to interview people affected by trauma, and also about trauma in journalism. I was acutely conscious that I was speaking to people who had been through a truly awful experience, and that the worst possible thing I could do would be to compound that trauma through cack-handed and insensitive questioning.
Research
There wasn’t a huge amount of research needed for this story, other than getting my facts, figures and dates right. But to draw the dots between these fires and climate change, I had to do a bit of trawling through scientific papers. That evidence wasn’t hard to find (except, apparently, for some in the right-wing media who doggedly clung to the convenient climate-denialist mythology that it was all to do with well-travelled and determined pyromaniacs).
Structure and writing
Editor Matt Reynolds had suggested a loose structure of thirds for the story, and maybe I had that in the back of my mind as I wrote. To be honest the writing process for this one is lost in a bit of a fog.
At the time, it was the last of a long run of bushfire stories I had written in the aftermath of the catastrophe, including one that I wrote for The Atlantic as the water-bombing DC10 aeroplanes were still roaring over our house to douse the flames on the other side of town.
I think I was channelling a raw scream of rage and frustration and fear and shock and guilt and relief into story after story, in the hope that it might help me find answers or meaning, or in some way fix the problem by stirring the right people into climate action.
As often happens when I’m really emotionally invested in what I’m writing, I was probably stopping and gesturing at the air as I wrote – like an Italian in an animated but silent conversation with an invisible companion. It seems to help me find the beats in a sentence.
And guess what: as I wrote the word ‘beats’ this very minute, I had to stop and gesture like a conductor.
I filed the first version about 500 words over the limit. Not only did the editor not balk, but he asked for more details, including – much to my great pleasure – a request to add in some political context about then Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his government’s failure to act on climate change.
The end result was a 4400 word piece, which ran a couple of months after I filed it.
What did I learn ?
After this story came out, I resolved to have a break from writing about bushfires. For these stories I wrote for WIRED, The Atlantic, USA Today, The Scientist, MIT Technology Review and others, I had tapped a vein of intense emotions that made it one of the most profound writing experiences of my life. But that came at a cost. By the end of this story, I was tapped out, and needed to stop and focus on mental recovery.
We actually went to the UK for three weeks in March 2020, just as the pandemic was taking off, to visit my ailing father-in-law. It was the break I needed, getting away from the ever-present reminder of how close we had come to losing everything.
Then we returned to the pandemic, and I jumped out of the bushfire and into the petri dish.
But that’s a whole other story.
(P.S It appears I have already failed my resolution to publish one of these posts every two weeks. I blame some monster deadlines, school holidays and other responsibilities. It won’t probably will happen again).