river, trees tangled in vines, gullies of rainforest teeming with birds and wildlife. It attracted people like Laena Stephenson, a marriage celebrant, who came to bring up her children in nature. “When we came here, we were all young,” she says of the group of families who settled in the district 33 years ago. “We started our families together, had babies together. We helped each other build our houses.” All that is left of Laena’s house are the remnants of walls, the twist of metal that was the television, broken crockery and a melted Rayburn wood stove in what was once the kitchen. It was a pretty mudbrick house, covered in climbing vines. She and her former husband had built it. “I massaged every brick in that house, I hammered in every bit of that earth floor,” she remembers solemnly. “I dug rocks out of the ground with a crowbar. I couldn’t walk into that house without loving it.” She keeps remembering things that are gone: “Oh, my grandfather’s banjo mandolin, oh this, oh that.” One of her four daughters, Kaya Jongen, owned the house next door. That’s gone too, and Kaya is now living in a tent. “There were many beautiful owner-built homes in Nymboida,” Laena says sadly, “homes made of mudbrick, rock and timber – really beautiful bespoke houses.” Now, for miles and miles, there are just burned, black, skeletal trees, sticks and scorched earth – an empty, desolate landscape. Twisted metal where 101 houses used to be. The fires roared through 51 per cent of the Clarence Valley, taking three million hectares. It’s deathly quiet now. There is no birdsong, no animals anywhere. Laena can be philosophical about her house. “It’s only a house. It was a beautiful house but in the end, it is material things.” But she weeps openly for the defenceless animals that were lost. “When I really break and feel it intensely, it is always to do with looking at nature, the wildlife, the flora and fauna who had no part in creating this situation and couldn’t get away from it, everything just screaming. One of the beautiful things about Nymboida
NYMBOIDA, NSW
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was that we had incredible variety – a number of threatened species, wallabies, wallaroos, brush-tailed rock-wallabies. Now people talk about seeing one animal – a possum or a pair of Eastern Greys. Just seeing a firefly can make a us happy. A team of wildlife people went around to the dams and watering holes taking food. And if it was eaten, they were so happy. But most of the time it wasn’t. I had leaf-tailed geckos in my house before the fire. Now I don’t know if I will ever see one again.” Laena was lucky. Her current husband, Dave, had insured their house. He also built the shed that they now live in with donated furniture. And he helped defend the community-owned Camping and Canoeing Centre, which became the hub for recovery operations when the district’s shell-shocked people were left largely with just what they were standing up in. After the fire, they had no phone or internet for five weeks and no power for 10 days. A month before the Nymboida fire, further north along the valley, the
16 The Australian Women’s Weekly | FEBRUARY 2020
community of Ewingar had sheltered in the local hall from a “monster” of a fire that had surrounded the building leaving them unable to escape. The fires came three times to Ewingar. Each time they had to evacuate. “There were times when we thought the fire was contained but then a month later, something would flare up. Without rain, it just doesn’t go out,” says Nadine Myers, 42. “Everyone has been touched by the fires,” she says. “An elderly couple died [Gwenda Hyde, 68 and Robert Lindsey, 77]. A lot of people around here knew Gwenda. That was horrible. We were surprised more people weren’t killed with the intensity of the fire.” Yet, in the midst of it all, Ewingar rallied. “We had periods where the fires were going crazy and we were feeding people, at the hall, who had lost their homes or had been evacuated,” says Nadine. “We fed the RFS volunteers too. All these people came forward with big pots of food and bread and everything we needed. The Red Cross donated food and
