69) Reindeer

Rangifer tarandus

Whenever I’m in London – and I’m there, in general, once every few years – one of the first places I visit is the British Museum.  I’m a creature of habit, I suppose, content to do the same things again and again – but notwithstanding that, the seemingly infinite insights into humanity afforded by the museum’s collection will, I imagine, never cease to amaze, astonish, and delight me.

Usually I’m content just to wander through the museum’s maze of rooms (though there’s one item in particular, an ancient board game scratched nearly three thousand years ago into the pedestal of an enormous Assyrian statue, that I always make sure to visit), but when I was in the museum just a few weeks ago it was with a much more specific, and directed, aim: I had a ticket to see the museum’s Ice Age Art exhibition.

The exhibition, which opened earlier this year and will close on the third of June, presents a number – a relatively small number by the standards of modern exhibitions – of carvings and sculptures created in what is now Europe over a period of time ranging from forty thousand to ten thousand years ago.  The exhibition is presented chronologically, and within each room is further divided thematically so that similar objects appear together.  Here and there the objects are counterpointed by small works – sculptures, drawings – by modern artists such as Mondrian and Matisse, but the focus is always – as it should be – on the ancient art.

Several of the items appear, to our eyes, to be purely decorative; whatever meaning they had we can now only guess at – barely even that.  A great many of the items, however, are clearly figurative or representational, and besides the human figures – overwhelmingly female – what they represent are animals.  Mostly mammals, but mammals of all kinds, again and again: sometimes crudely rendered; sometimes – the more recent carvings – created in exquisite and outstanding detail.  Whatever the level of craftsmanship, though, all the carvings display a breathtaking vividness, the vividness of animals acutely and daily observed.

The enormous head of Musk ox (Ovibos moschatus) seems to have been almost willed out of a chunk of rock; or more tantalisingly, when the viewer’s eye lingers over the sculpture, a feeling emerges of the artist responsible having spotted the original rock and discerned within it the shape of the Musk ox’s head, the potential for transformation hiding within the rock.  A Cave lion (Panthera leo spelaean) reaches forward with all four legs; though the sculpture is barely more than a rough silhouette hewn out of wood, an accompanying photograph of a modern lion demonstrates the astonishing succinctness and clarity with which the artist summed up the animal in all its mid-hunt ferocity.  One extraordinary object is a spinning pendant, found in the Mas d’Azil Cave: one side depicts an infant Aurochs (Bos primigenius), the other side the adult; a hole is in the top of the disc and as the disc was spun by a thread tied through this hole the carvings on either side of the disc would have presented the flickering image of the animal growing from youth to maturity and back again.

For me, though, the most astonishing piece of all is a depiction of a Reindeer that was found in the La Madeleine Cave.  The animal’s likeness is etched into the ivory of its own horn.  It’s tiny, and with its enormous eye it appears at first to be almost a caricature.  Yet there’s something precise about the creature’s outline: the way it stretches its neck out as if cautiously smelling the air; the particular point of its ear or the tuft of fur on its chest.  If you can find space in the crowd of people around the display cabinet you might be tempted to lean in for a closer look, and as you do the astonishing detail of the work suddenly reveals itself as if a microscope had been switched on: every contour of the animal’s body, skeleton and muscle alike; every change in the texture of its fur – every detail of the animal is carved into the ancient ivory with a series of tiny and precise scratches that any jeweller would be proud of.  Looking at the animal it’s even possible to fancy that the beast is slightly undernourished, as if caught in the middle of a particularly difficult season.  That such detail was achieved on such a tiny scale, tens of thousands of years ago, using tools no more sophisticated than rock and bone and naked eyesight, makes the viewer gasp and almost cry at the genius of it. 

It’s that genius, that realisation of the keen intelligence and insight of the people who, when we were in school, we dismissed as merely “cavemen”, that justifies this exhibition its title: Ice Age Art.  Art is not always alive or vivid or exciting; it does not always convey something ineffable yet undeniable about the nature of its subject – but at its best, I think it’s fair to say, it always does.  The items on display in Ice Age Art rank among the greatest pieces of art I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing.  Modest though they are, it’s surely not unreasonable to place them among humanity’s most significant achievements.

To be honest, though, I found it difficult to engage with the non-figurative items – those that I’m tempted, rightly or wrongly, to call ‘abstract’.  Even the human figures did not always excite me, marvellous though they are.  The items that really held my attention, that really made me gasp and grin in delight, were the carvings of animals.  It seems that throughout the entire long period represented by the exhibition, it was into the depiction of animals that the artists put all their effort and insight.  In these items it’s possible to see the artists – those ancient humans – attempting to engage, in some way, with another living creature: to give that creature some kind of dignity or worth in itself, if nothing else then through the very fact of having devoted so much time to its creation (researchers have concluded that some of these items would have taken hundreds of hours to create).  Again, we can’t know the purpose of these items, and perhaps there was some ritual or mystical significance to their creation or their existence – and yet as I looked at them I found myself feeling that I understood the minds of those ancient people

 When I started this blog, and ever since, I’ve been driving at something: I’m unsure what, or how to explain it, but I know it’s there and I can feel myself getting closer to it, or at least circling it.  Though it may make me sound hubristic to say so, in Ice Age Art I saw that same sense of drive, the same sense of purpose: the palpable feeling of a questing human mind, unsure what exactly it’s driving at but feeling itself on cusp of some discovery about itself or about the world.  Perhaps I’m wrong, but if whole point of Ice Age Art is to bring us closer to the common humanity of our forebears, then it works, it works spectacularly; and that’s how it worked on me.  It’s a privilege to have been able to see it; it’s the greatest privilege of all to belong to the same species as the people who created such exquisite and moving works of art so long ago.

Image sourced from http://www.guardian.co.uk

68) Spider

Araneae

 

When people ask me what I write, invariably these days the answer that I give is that I write a blog called Noticing Animals.  When, however, they ask the natural follow-up question – “What’s it about?” – I find myself struggling to answer quite so easily.  It’s about a lot of things: animals, of course; but also memory and reminiscence; amateur sociology; metaphors and parallels; personal appreciations.  I guess, though, that if there’s one theme which has consistently underpinned the whole enterprise, right from the very start, it’s that animals are everywhere; that they are always in our company and we in theirs; and that even in the most urban of environments we see more of them every day than we realise or stop to consider.  In my own way, what I write about – and what I’ve always been besotted by – is nature.

Which is why nearly the first thing I did when I arrived in London for a brief holiday three weeks ago was get the Tube east to Shoreditch, where I walked down Brick Lane to the site of an old brewery.  It was a pilgrimage of sorts.  I was there to go to a record shop, a branch of London’s famous Rough Trade records – because within that record shop are a few short shelves devoted to books championed by the website Caught by the River.

Caught by the River, which updates nearly daily and sends out an email newsletter at the end of each week, is devoted to all manner of things: the pleasures of drinking good beer; the thrill and joy of discovering or remembering great music; the more arcane or esoteric avenues of British history.  Most of all, though, it’s dedicated to writing of – and from – the natural world; and nature – that peculiar British kind of nature, existing in a profound and time-worn relationship with humanity – is Caught by the River’s constant undercurrent.  Caught by the River is a daily reminder of the very fact of nature, its undeniable presence: in turning on our computer, or checking our phone, or engaging with whatever our screen of choice is, and catching up on the website’s latest dispatches – sent in by contributors in the Orkneys, in Wales, in London, anywhere in the British Isles – we (those of us who have discovered and cherish the site) are brought into awareness, and thus in a way into contact, with the natural world.  We’re invited to reach out to it, and if reading about it on a screen can never replicate being there in person, it at least settles a little bit of that natural world into our minds.  It balms our souls.

So it was with great excitement that I stood before the Caught by the River bookshelves in Rough Trade East and picked out what I wanted to buy – books I’d been eagerly looking forward to, and those I’d never heard of before – and took my purchases to the cafe at the front of the shop and settled in, hunching my shoulders against the cold air coming through the open door, to read some of the best nature writing around.  By and large these books – or any books like them – aren’t readily available in Australian bookshops.  I don’t know why the British have taken to nature writing but Australians largely haven’t – perhaps because our nature is more often hostile, and uncomfortable, and more harshly indifferent to our presence.  Perhaps we – those of us of European heritage, who still drive Australian culture – simply haven’t been on this continent long enough to feel the same kind of deep affinity with our land that the people of Wales, and Scotland, and particularly England, seem to.

An engagement with nature doesn’t necessarily need to involved hiking out into the forest, though, or driving miles from human habitation.  Nature is everywhere, and animals and plants are constantly doing what they can to assert themselves: that is, if not the meaning, then at least the constant aim of life; all life.  I wasn’t thinking about any of this as I sat down, though; I was thinking only of how excited I was to finally be where I was, and how much I had to discover and take back home with me.  But as I sat I looked around the shop, taking everything in – and, unexpectedly, I noticed a tiny movement from beneath the table in front of me.  Seemingly unseen by anybody else, a small spider – barely larger than a pin – slid down from the table’s underside on a single strand of silk; and then it climbed up again, disappearing once more from sight.  The animal was visible for only a second.  It was mid-April, and everyone I talked to in England told me how cold this year’s spring had been; and I could feel that cold myself.  The sky was grey, nearly white, overcast.  Icy rain was threatening.  There was no sign anywhere of any insect life – what insect could have yet hatched into such weather?  Yet the spider was there, all the same, investigating its world, and waiting.

I could hear the traffic.  The streets outside were dirty with pollution.  We don’t usually think of cities as being friendly to wildlife, or to nature at all; but in its purest state a city is nothing so much as an aggregation of chaos: a jumble of lives and experiences of all kinds all pooled together and somehow conspiring to cope with each-others’ presence.  Those lives are frequently non-human.  One of them lives under a table at Rough Trade East.  I hope it keeps its head down; I hope it makes it through to the summer, and the coming feast.  I hope it’s still there next time I visit, to see what’s new on the bookshelves and what I’ve missed.  And I know that from now on, every time I check my email and see that another Caught by the River newsletter has arrived, I’ll remember the first time I opened those books in that shop – and I’ll remember that tiny spider, that tiny intrusion of the natural world into the indifferent streets of London.  Every time.

  

Image sourced from http://en.wikipedia.org

67) House Sparrow

Passer domesticus

Their feathers were ruffled against the autumn wind.  There were twenty of them or more.  I walked right past them on my way from my office to a lunchtime coffee; they clung to the ground like Mice (Mus spp.), as if weighed down by the skittering clouds.  On the bare, pale gravel on the edge of a typically abandoned carpark in Melbourne’s Docklands I almost didn’t see them until I was on top of them; and they barely moved from my path.  They must have seen me, though; I still recall a lesson from my university days, studying biology: Sparrows will call each-other to form a flock until there are enough of them to ensure that one is always on the lookout for threats.

Sparrows don’t belong here.  They’re a long way from home.  When I was very young they were my favourite bird, until I learned to hate introduced species of all kinds, at which time my affections tilted towards the even more petite, spectacularly beautiful, and impeccably Australian Superb Fairy-wren (Malurus cyaneus).  Yet House Sparrows have been in Australia since 1863; in every country town they explore the grilles of parked cars, pecking for stray seeds and the ruined bodies of insects.  At what point does an animal being to belong?  At what point do we let it belong?

I still cherish the memory of riding down Rae Street, in North Fitzroy, one autumn morning years ago, and passing a young couple deep in a kiss; as they embraced a small flock of Sparrows burst from the gutter like confetti.  The Sparrows completed the scene; they turned it from a moment of ardour to a scene of unbridled joy that perhaps nobody noticed but me.  A private euphoria.

We see the patterns that we want to see, of course.  When I was riding down that street in the mid-morning air with the anticipation of a croissant and a coffee in my head I was predisposed to find a small and unexpected moment of delight.  When, today, I left my office to get a coffee over the road – to escape from the confines of the office for just twenty minutes – I was following a set routine rather than anticipating any pleasure.  When I saw the Sparrows clinging to the earth as if it might fall away I was in a frame of mind to see such a sight and interpret it in such a way.

Just a few hours earlier, through Twitter, I’d heard the awful news: Jason Molina, singer, songwriter, driving force behind Songs:Ohia and more recently Magnolia Electric Co, had died.  He has died.  He is dead, at the nondescript but appallingly young age of thirty-nine, reportedly as a consequence of alcoholism.  It’s late at night now and I’ve been listening to his music all evening and if I sometimes distract myself from it, let it slip into the background, that’s only because every time I stop to actually listen to him sing his songs in a voice which is – was – an impossibly perfect fit for his yearning, despairing lyrics, I become so heartbroken that I have to shut my eyes tight against the pain of it.  Help does not just walk up to you.

Shortly after I heard the news I asked a colleague, a few years younger than me and transferred from the company’s office in Austin, Texas, if he’d ever listened to Jason Molina.  We’ve talked about music in the past and we share an appreciation of much of the same music and many of the same bands, but on Molina he drew a blank.  “Was he Australian?” he asked.  I told him that Jason Molina is dead; even though it doesn’t mean anything to him I had to say it to someone; but we both had work to get back to so I told my colleague wanly that it didn’t matter, and instantly I hated myself a little for it.  This one, this man, these songs – they matter, more than the work of any of thousands of other musicians.  I didn’t realise until today just how much they matter.

I only discovered Jason Molina and his music a few years ago; five at the most.  Perhaps I have the zealotry of the recently converted.  Sometimes I’ve tried to come up with an answer as to why I never got into his music when I was younger, even though I’d long been vaguely aware of the name Songs:Ohia: he began releasing music – so much music – at exactly the same time, in the mid-to-late nineties, that I was beginning to discover music.  He fit in exactly with the kind of music I loved then and love still.  Yet there’s no use in wondering, I guess: I found him when I found him.  I’m lucky to have found him at all.

I was going to go out tonight: there were beers I was excited about trying and I was going to make a small night of it.  But it seemed wrong to drink on the day that I found out Jason Molina had drunk himself to death.  It’s irrational, and of no consequence to anybody, but I wrestled with the decision and when I finally decided to come straight home from work I felt the same way I’ve felt in the past when I’ve decided to go to the funeral of somebody who was only a passing acquaintance.  It felt exactly like that, as if Jason Molina had ever been anything more to me than a voice whispering from a pair of speakers.  I came home and decided to stay sober, and quietly sorrowful, and write this.  I’ve been procrastinating writing anything on this blog for weeks: I have ideas but I’ve always found myself dragged to the TV, or to Twitter, or to Facebook, when I should have been writing instead.  Now that I’ve written this, hasty and rough and confused as it is, I feel as though I’ve written it in blood; it feels shameful, somehow, that anything at all could come of such a desolately sad day.

When I went back to work from my coffee break there was one Sparrow that had strayed from the flock.  It was dishevelled by the wind; it looked like a waif.  I thought at first that the others had abandoned it; but in fact this one Sparrow was the one that had wandered.  As I walked towards it along the footpath it opened its wings and flew low and straight along the ground back to the bosom of its kith and kin.  They continued pecking at the ground for food, as if they’d done it a thousand times before and would do it a thousand times again and every day would always be the same.

Image sourced from http://en.wikipedia.org

66) Grey-headed Flying Fox

Pteropus poliocephalus

The screen slides down so silently that you don’t even notice it: if you look away for a few moments and turn back there will be a cinema screen there where before there was just an empty frame.  It’s getting dark, and moths and other insects are flashing like tiny meteors through the beam of light from the projector, sitting in a second-floor window.  The sky is nearly dark overhead.  We know the film is about to start because the bats have begun flying overhead.

They’re Grey-headed Flying Foxes, large fruit-bats with a wingspan of a metre.  Though the night sky is full of bats – insectivorous microbats, flitting above treetops in the long summer dusk – the fruit-bats are the only ones anyone notices and the only ones anyone talks about.  In 2003 a colony was moved from the Royal Botanic Gardens to Yarra Bend Park, and every night they fly out in their thousands, moving methodically and heading south-west.  Their nightly migration takes them directly over the Abbotsford Convent, where in summer one of Melbourne’s numerous outdoor cinemas holds residence.

In its second year of operation the patrons of the Shadow Electric know that bats, like films, only come out in the dark.  As the screen descends there’s a murmur of anticipation and excitement, and not infrequently gasps of surprise and delight too at the sight of the bats flying so close overhead.  The stream of animals seems never to stop, and just when you think you’ve seen the last straggler another two or three dozen will suddenly appear in tight formation.  What’s astonishing is how silent they are: these large garrulous animals, who squabble and squawk during the day as they invade each-others roost space in defoliated trees, who when flying solo crash through branches searching for food and screeching excitedly; when they’re flying out, the flock as one, they make not a sound, and not even the slow beating of their wings ruffles the night air.

As the film begins the cinema audience becomes just as silent.  There’d been talking and laughing and the ordering of drinks only minutes before, but now that the screen’s dropped and the images upon it have amplified the growing darkness of the air around us everyone has stopped talking.  The courtyard of the convent is quieter than a cathedral, and I think – not for the first time – that a cinema, a good cinema full of attentive patrons, is perhaps the last great place of reverence in our society.  Sometimes at a cinema, half-hidden in the darkness, I like to turn around and look at the faces of my fellow audience-members: there’s something stirring, something heartening, about the sight of dozens of people all fixing their unwavering attention on the same thing at the same time.  We make our own spaces at home but at the cinema we’re all forced into each-other’s company, and we all experience – as much as is possible – the same thing as each-other, and we’re not even trying.

Tonight, though, I won’t be turning to look at the faces of strangers.  I’ve arrived late, and have to take my place at the back of the many rows of seats that are placed out before each film and packed up again afterwards.  Though there are several million people in Melbourne all told, in reality it’s a small city, in fact not so much a city as a collection of villages, and you tend to see the same faces again and again.  As I take my seat and wait for the film to start I notice that behind me a woman is placing more seats, preparing for a late influx of film-goers.  I know this woman, she used to work at another cinema where I was a frequent customer, and I’d take every opportunity to talk to her and for a long time I was infatuated with her to such a degree that I even managed to convince myself, somehow, that it was love.  It wasn’t, of course, it very rarely is, and when I asked her out she turned me down – but we’re adults, and we’ve been through this before and we’ll be through it again, and now when I see her – rarely – we’re polite to each-other and nothing really has changed, except that I’ve become more self-aware.  Affection lingers, and I’d like to say hello to her – but I’ve changed my appearance since then, and it’s dark, and I’m not sure she’d recognise me, and anyway to what end?  What would be the purpose of saying hello?  I hope that she’ll notice me but when she doesn’t I decide to leave her be.  I’ve bothered her enough in the past.  Our lives which briefly intersected have now moved on, and I stay silent, and instead I watch the bats.

They’ll return in the morning.  There must be somewhere, west of the city, where they go to eat.  They do it every night, flying right over my house, right over the strange patchwork of houses and shops and gum trees and parks that makes up this part of Melbourne.  They must have seen the city change so much.  They’ve been living in Yarra Bend Park for just a year longer than I’ve been in Melbourne; we’ve been cohabiting the same part of the city for nearly a decade.  I thought it’d be a year.  When the bats were moved from the Botanic Gardens nobody was sure if they’d stay where they were put.  I was walking along the river one evening a while ago, to the convent and back, in the company of someone I know, and as the bats appeared I mentioned how in awe I was of them, every night.  My companion didn’t share my awe, but when I teased her about being over them she corrected me: she wasn’t over them, she was just used to them.  And so am I, I suppose, but even so I can’t stop staring.  I can’t stop watching them as they pan across the sky.  They’ll fly over factories and freeways, rivers and cranes and construction sites and train-yards, before they get where they’re going, and the next night they’ll do it all again, and if you didn’t look up you wouldn’t even notice them.  We live in the midst of such extraordinary things.

Image sourced and adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org

65) Southern Brush-tailed Rock Wallaby

Petrogale penicillata

If you drive south from Canberra, through the neighbourhood of Weston Creek along Cotter Road, past the enormous antenna dishes of the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, past the village of Tharwa, you’ll get to a place called Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve.  Neither forest nor zoo, Tidbinbilla is a series of open-range enclosures and walking paths in a narrow valley between steep and heavily wooded hills.  In Tidbinbilla you’ll find all kinds of animals native to south-eastern Australia – those that are abundant in the wild, and those that are at or beyond the point of local extinction.  If the animals are not free to leave, they nonetheless appear to be utterly content, and walking through the fifty or so square kilometres of the reserve it’s possible to observe – or often, fail to observe – several species in what is, but for the fences, a natural habitat.

Tidbinbilla is more than just a tourist destination, though: its main and most important role is as a breeder of endangered animals.  Over many years the reserve has built up a store of expertise that has resulted in, for instance, 900 eggs of the endangered and spectacularly beautiful Northern Corroboree Frog (Pseudophryne pengilleyi) being laid in the breeding season of 2008-09 alone.

For anyone in Canberra with an interest in the bush – and in the “bush capital”, that’s most people – going to Tidbinbilla is an essential and familiar experience.  Whether it’s on a school excursion, or taking overseas visitors, or just for pleasure, Tidbinbilla is as much a part of Canberra – removed though it is – as the more familiar and clichéd sights of Parliament House, or the War Memorial, or the Mt Stromlo Observatory.

The reserve is particularly and justly proud of its success in breeding the at-risk Southern Brush-tailed Rock Wallaby. Through a system of cross-fostering – adopting baby Rock Wallabies out to more common species of Wallaby housed elsewhere in the reserve – Tidbinbilla has overseen the birth of dozens of the animals.  By necessity the Rock Wallabies are kept in a smaller, more forbiddingly fenced enclosure than the other animals: experts at hopping over vertical obstacles, they’re adept at escaping from captivity.  Although Brush-tailed Rock Wallabies are locally plentiful elsewhere, according to Tidbinbilla's website there are estimated to be fewer than 40 of the southern subspecies left in the wild.

The most recent information available from Tidbinbilla’s website announces that the reserve has supplied to the state of Victoria fourteen captive-bred Rock Wallabies which are now ready to be released into the wild.  The species is precariously balanced: once hunted nearly to extinction for their fur, they are now dependant on humans – or we have made ourselves, ironically, their guardians.  Without Tidbinbilla, the species would surely disappear forever, as have so many Australian animals before it.

I don’t know how many times I’ve sat in the back of my parents car as we’ve made the drive out to Tidbinbilla and back again.  When I was a child it must have been at least every couple of years.  But I know with certainty exactly how many times I’ve made the trip in the last decade: through Weston Creek, past the Mt Stromlo Observatory, out through Tharwa and across the Cotter River.  I’ve done it only once since the summer of 2003.

In 2003 Canberra was several years into a drought that would continue for several years more.  Under the clear, bleak sky the city seemed trapped in an eternal summer, and when in January the annual storms came they came without rain.  The eucalypt forests that surrounds Canberra, that everywhere infiltrate and sometimes seems to even engulf Canberra, became so dry that leaves turned to brittle dust underfoot.  When in early January 2003 a dry storm rolled over Namadgi, the National Park that makes up nearly half of the Australian Capital Territory, lightning struck a tree, and without rain to douse the flames a bushfire was started.

The fire was not a secret.  Everyone knew it was there.  But it was remote, and difficult to access, and summer in Australia is a time of fire so this particular one was not treated with undue alarm.  It burned out of control for two weeks, and then, on Saturday the eighteenth of January 2003, when the temperature reached forty degree Centigrade, a ferocious wind blew from behind the fires towards Canberra, and the flames began to move.

In Yarralumla, a long way from the fire-front, I was preparing for an uneventful weekend.  There were rumours of fire, so I had the radio on, but reports were muddled and confusing and so despite the smoke blowing over the city I remained unconcerned.  The family dog, a puppy, had urinated on a rug, so I took the rug outside and hung it on the clothesline and turned the hose on it.  I had no inkling that water might be a precious commodity that day, nor that outside might be a dangerous place to be.

I can’t remember when the first leaves fell, but by the time they began I’m sure it had become clear to everyone that this was not going to be a normal day; that the fires, wherever they were, were not just the grass fires that had burned close to the Australian Mint and the Governor General’s residence the previous summer.  My grandmother had been visiting us from Adelaide that year, and together we’d all – her, me, my brother, and my parents – gone down to Lake Burley Griffin, five minutes walk from my parents’ house, to watch helicopters scoop water up for the purposes of dousing the nearby flames.  That was Christmas, 2001, and we’d been tense but ultimately unconcerned.  On the eighteenth of January 2003, though, my parents were away, on holiday, and my brother was away, at the house of family friends at the other end of Yarralumla, and I was by myself, and worried, because the leaves were starting to fall.

I can remember the leaves vividly, which is strange, because though I know the sky was black with smoke I can barely remember that.  I can remember the sick yellow smoke that clung to the city like a winter fog for the next two weeks; I can remember picking through the remains of a friend’s house in the aftermath of the fires; and I can remember, always, the black leaves.  They fell out of the sky, the long lanceolate leaves of eucalypts: they fell constantly, carried by the wind from fires that were kilometres away, and every one of them was burnt black.  Somewhere in the city, a wildfire was rushing into streets and houses, through forests and woodlands, creating and then riding on cyclonic winds, and as it moved through the wooded areas it wrenched the leaves off the trees and scooped them into the air and hurled them across the city.  They were still hot when they landed.   The cinders of the same great, disjointed forest that we Canberrans embraced city-wide, and built our houses near, and welcomed into the heart of our city.

At some point my parents’ house lost power: in Yarralumla we were safe from the flames, but the electricity sub-station that serviced the suburb was closer to the front and was destroyed.  The same thing happened all over the city.  We were without power for days, I can’t remember how many days, and we had to throw out most of the contents of our fridge: meat, dairy, anything that we couldn’t fit into the medium-sized blue esky that we ate out of for most of the next week.  It was nearly impossible to replace anything: supermarket shelves were stripped bare, with food being bought in vast quantities to feed the many thousands of people taking refuge in various hastily-organised emergency shelters scattered throughout the city.  For several days after the fires there was not a loaf of bread to be found in Canberra; not a litre of milk; no cans or jars of food.  If it wasn’t at an emergency shelter, it was in somebody’s kitchen, feeding a family who had no idea how long they might be without power.

Without power, without television, back in those days before ubiquitous hand-held screens, we relied on the newspaper, the Canberra Times, to give us images of what had happened.  Humans understand an event through images most of all.  Yet the pictures that filled the newspaper on Sunday, the nineteenth, were impossible to comprehend: whole hillsides aglow with fire in the treetops; houses warped and buckled and destroyed; roads – our quiet roads, our empty pristine roads – choked with smoke and embers.  No more colour, anywhere, in our green city: just fearsome orange, and red, and black.  Mt Stromlo observatory was completely gutted, its priceless telescopes destroyed, years of data lost.  There were stories of near-misses – fire-fighters who’d abandoned their vehicle moments before it was consumed by flames; people found running down streets in a panic and bundled into fleeing cars.  Four people were killed as their houses burned around them – only four, astonishingly.  Only four.  Five-hundred houses were destroyed in a city of barely more than 300,000 people.  Most of the houses destroyed were in Weston Creek.

Among those houses were two belonging to families who were old friends of my family – people who were and are friends of mine.  A week after the fires I joined some of those friends at one of those houses – ruined, a scar, a void in the landscape – to try to salvage what we could.  All around us were the bricks and debris of flattened, incinerated houses.  Over the road a house still stood, but its roof was warped and buckled where the howling winds created by the firestorm had lifted the tiles and dropped them back down.  On the lawns in front of all the houses – Canberra’s famous nature strips – tiny daisies still flowered: they were so low to the ground that the fire had passed right over the top of them.

We didn’t find much.  There wasn’t much to find: only ruins.  Unrecognisable twists of metal that we surmised had once been a dishwasher.  A box of darning needles, family heirlooms, still intact.  A sheet of corrugated iron was wrapped like newspaper round a burned-out tree on the hill behind the house.

The other family, my other friends, found a new house, having lost everything they had.  In kindness their friends and acquaintances donated gifts of toys and clothes, chaotically rebuilding lives that had been chaotically destroyed.  The family was my piano teacher; his wife, a pianist; and their three young children.  The children had been carefully raised without television or video games or other impositions upon their imaginations.  When the fire took their house it took everything.  In pity and sympathy and nothing but good wishes, somebody gave them an old PlayStation.  Sometimes the life you’ve made is wrenched away from you.

Out in Tidbinbilla, when the firestorm came raging through the valley, the panicked shrieks of the animals must have been unbearable.  The fire destroyed the forest, and the buildings, and the fences – but too late, the fences.  Of all the countless animals at the reserve, only 25 survived.  In their enclosure, behind their high fence, in the cage that had kept them safe from predators and cars and extinction, all but six of Tidbinbilla’s Brush-tailed Rock Wallabies were killed.  One Koala, still alive but horrifically burned, became a mascot of the reserve in the aftermath of the fire: a sign of resilience; yet a nearly unbearable tragedy, as well.

If you go to the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve’s website today, you’ll see the following note:

Please be advised that due to a Total Fire Ban declared for the ACT tomorrow Friday 18th January 2013, Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve will be closed to the public.

Today, the 18^th of January 2013, is the tenth anniversary of the Canberra bushfires.  For a few weeks in the summer of 2003 Australia stopped hating Canberra, stopped making it the butt of jokes, and remembered that it was a city full of people with lives no more or less meaningful than the lives of anybody else, no more or less prone to sudden catastrophe.  But eventually the nation moved on, and so did Canberra.  The fires are remembered – but they’re not as well-remembered as they should be.

Image sourced from http://www.abc.net.au/