It is December 2019 and smoke covers the entire Northern Rivers area in Australia. Fires meet and grow into one monstrosity all along the ridge of the Nardi mountain range. The Terania forest lies at its feet and our friends have to run, writes Eben Venter, a SA writer based in Australia.
Nobody would have ever thought that this subtropical lushness, where trees tend to not produce offspring, would be burnt to cinders.
The days are sticky and hot, the nights sweaty and scary. You wake with smoke-filled nostrils and that spicy, dusty woodfire scent.
“Marie and Harry and their Labrador Charlie stay over until the worst danger is over. Small-scale farmer Helen White parks her truck laden with stuff in front of our house; Ewen Tregellis, bohemian and prolific reader, stores an old doctor's suitcase with his gran's jewellery in our cupboard.”
500 million animals have burnt to death in New South Wales alone.
20 million hectares of land is gone.
27 people have died.
200 separate fires are raging in six states in the southwest of the country.
Read all about it in this week's edition of Afrikaans digital weekly Vrye Weekblad.
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