This article tells the story of Jann Gilbert and her experience losing her home and witnessing the environmental devastation caused by the Black Summer bushfires in Mallacoota.
When Jann Gilbert lost her home during the Black Summer bushfires, she couldn't have imagined a more profound sense of grief. But seeing the 'smouldering ruins' of her life in Mallacoota after fires swept through the Victorian coastal town on New Year's Eve in 2019 was not the worst of it. Jann lost everything she owned - seven decades of photos, research papers, irreplaceable furniture from another life in Europe, degrees, letters, notes, artworks and books, all burnt to ash.
Precious jewellery melted into abstract piles. 'I'll never forget seeing my mother's pearls on the ground. I went to pick them up, and they just crumbled; they were powder,' Jann says, sitting in her new unit. 'I'm still really angry about that night.' Jann was devastated to lose her home - she had only finished renovations three weeks before. But what hurt more was the environmental destruction. 'All you heard for the first two weeks was shotguns ringing out - because of all the animals that just weren't quite dead. I never want to see that amount of devastation again. I just keep thinking about those animals.' In Mallacoota, the waterfront is all-important - it's a source of peace and beauty, as well as money from tourism and fishing industries. For two weeks after the fires though, the whole waterfront was covered in ash and thousands of dead birds. The birds came out of the forest, trying to escape the flames. But the air sacs in their wings - very fine membranes that help them to breathe - were too full of smoke, and so they fell out of the sky, suffocating. Ecologists counted over 150 species among the corpses. Jann says it's hard to remember exactly, but she spent at least a week camped at the town's waterfront after the fire came through. Surveying the damage was traumatising. 'There was nothing across the road'
Bushfires Black Summer Mallacoota Environmental Destruction Loss
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