Flames of Extinction

These defining moments of the 2019–20 bushfire crisis, captured as never before from the frontlines on myriad smartphones, were more like scenes from Blade Runner, or perhaps Dunkirk, than anything that usually comes to mind at the mention of an Aussie summer.

Though most Australians accept the reality of climate change, few could have believed its impacts would be felt so hard, and so soon. Perplexingly, those seemingly caught most off guard were our politicians, despite the warnings of fire chiefs and meteorologists that a monster lurked, waiting to be unleashed.

‘Red flames like giant devil’s tongues lapped up the trees around us, thunder from the fire’s own weather system boomed and crashed, winds threw flames to the side, above and beyond, koalas shrieked as they burnt alive,’ Mallacoota eyewitness Mary O’Malley wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald. ‘Nature has spoken, and she is furious.’1 With 200 fire fronts burning, and record heat bearing down, more than 100 000 people were advised to leave high-risk zones of NSW, Victoria and South Australia in the nation’s biggest ever evacuation. Navy vessels rescued people from Mallacoota, in East Gippsland, and other fire-affected communities along the coast.

Never before had severe bushfires hit so many states simultaneously.

‘This isn’t a bushfire,’ NSW transport minister Andrew Constance told ABC Radio. ‘It’s an atomic bomb.’2 A few days later, thousands of dead birds washed up on the beaches near Mallacoota. Crimson rosellas, honeyeaters, rainbow lorikeets, robins, king parrots, whipbirds and yellow-tailed black-cockatoos, which had also sought refuge in the ocean, had succumbed to smoke inhalation and exhaustion.

They were some of what University of Sydney ecologist Chris Dickman would later estimate were the nearly three billion wild animal victims of the catastrophe, making it one of the worst ecological disasters in modern history.3 This mind-numbing figure is an extrapolation from previous estimates of numbers killed or displaced by land-clearing and includes 2 | FLAMES OF EXTINCTION