6 JANUARY 2025: In December 2019 and January 2020, across a surreal summer of choking air and blackened skies, the Currowan Fire raged across the southern Shoalhaven, destroying lives, homes and habitats.
We, like many others, are still reckoning with the physical, psychological and environmental impacts of these extreme fires on us, on the cattle, on our farmlands, and upon our neighbours in the local farming and residential communities of Milton, Yatte Yattah and Conjola.
Over the past few weeks, dozens of newspaper articles and television features have attempted to reckon with some of the experiences, traumas and impacts of Black Summer. Most have focused on people and businesses in regional and rural communities. Guardian Australia, for example, reports on the experiences of veterinarians and wildlife carers who treated injured koalas, kangaroos and echidnas rescued by firefighters and members of the public. A harrowing but important read because we must remember and acknowldge the impossible burden placed on veterinarians and wildlife carers by Black Summer - and which continued for months and years after the fires went out.
But other silent and invisible victims received less attention: billions of native animals and incalculable numbers of invertebrates were killed by the bushfires that burned 24.3 million hectares from July 2019 to May 2020.
Five years on, we have seen a few small signs of recovery across the farms' bush habitats within which insects, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and small and big native mammals, like the eastern grey kangaroos, live.
One of the biggest and most significant re-appearances in recent days is that of a 1.8 metre long goanna.
Image 1: Tree goanna at the farm's billabong (photo: Robert Miller)
This massive tree goanna is a lace monitor (Varanus varius) and, on sheer size along, it is certainly near the top of the food chain. Resident in one of the farms' billabongs, it has impressive reproductive and foraging behaviours - plus an ability to climb trees at speed.
Image 2: A swamphen keeping an eye on the tree goanna (Photo: Robert Miller)
Most goannas feed on carrion as well as insects, frogs, small birds and snakes. Some species of goanna hunt and eat venomous snakes with which, according to scientists, they're engaged in an evolutionary arms-race. (Interestingly, there's a D'harawal Dreaming Story featuring a venomous goanna and a red-belly black snake, as re-told by Francis "Aunty Fran" Bodkin, with illustrations by Lorraine Robertson.)
Image 3: The original treehugger (photo: Robert Miller)
So, while we plan to give our tree goanna plenty of space to do what it has to do, we'll take its majesterial presence in "our" billabong as a positive sign of environmental rejuvenation within our farms.
