One month after a bushfire burned the home they built from scratch in the northern New South Wales town of Nymboida, Stu Mackay is sifting through the rubble to find cast-iron tools. The tools are heirlooms, and the Mackays will need them to rebuild.
Theirs is one of 632 houses lost in NSW since Friday 8 November, when deadly weather conditions sent fast-moving bushfires through communities along the state’s north coast. Guardian Australia spoke to four people who lost their home or business on that first day.
‘Just ash’
The Mackays built their house from scratch using recycled materials. It started as a double garage and grew steadily, with rooms added according to need and the overarching, never fully realised vision of its creator: a Sagrada Familia on an Australian bush block.
“Every beam and panel had a story, of how we did it and what went wrong and what we were trying to do,” Stu’s son Ross Mackay says.
The loss is devastating. Stu is on a carer’s pension; his wife Heather is on a disability support pension. She was in hospital when the fire went through. They spent their savings on a house for their 31-year-old autistic son, Dylan, in Grafton, and could not afford insurance.
“Mum doesn’t know where she is going to go when she comes out of hospital,” Ross says. “It’s one thing living in a bush house that’s been built to what her mobility needs, but it is another thing to face months of camping. They lived in a tent for a year when they put the roof on, but they were younger then and mum wasn’t so bad.”
Stu is now couch-surfing in between sorting through the rubble to salvage bits of the house that can be reused. He saved his musical instruments when he evacuated but forgot to bring any clothes. The bush around the house, which Ross says once needed a machete to walk through, has been replaced with charcoal and ash.
“It’s apocalyptic,” he says. “We have had fires before, we have had bad fires before. We have seen what it looks like when fires go through, and it’s not like this … it’s like something out of a doomsday movie.
“Black trees, no topsoil – the topsoil is gone, it’s just rock. No animals. No insects. Just ash.”
‘Angry and hurting’
The loss of the forest has created a sense of “huge ecological grief” on top of more personal losses, says Nina Jongen. Her home, a mud brick house built by her parents 32 years ago, which she is renting from them, was among those lost at Nymboida on 8 November.
“My [nine-year-old] daughter is experiencing it too,” Jongen says. “She is really angry and she is hurting.”
It’s an anger Ross Mackay shares. He wrote an open letter to former prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott, who he says bear responsibility for turning the climate emergency into a political football in Australia.
“As a family, we hold them responsible for their part in creating the situation where the risk of a bushfire taking our home has become a reality,” Ross says. “We are not stupid, we know that fire is a risk if you live in the bush, but I do feel it has gone from being a risk to an inevitability. If you live in the bush, at some point you are going to lose your house.”
Bushfires have burned 2.7m hectares in NSW since the fire season began in August, and 122 fires are still burning. Total property losses are 741 homes destroyed and 288 damaged.
Jongen was working in Lismore when the fire went through Nymboida. She asked her family to save a photo album, but in the rush they grabbed the wrong one.
She is now staying at the Nymboida Canoe Centre, which has made its cabins available to bushfire victims.
“I feel really proud of our community,” she said. “We were absolutely bowled over with help, it was almost too much. We quite quickly realised we needed to coordinate it.”
‘A terrible bastard of a thing’
Coordinating donations and offers of assistance has been one of the jobs of Carol Sparks, the mayor of Glenn Innes shire council. Her home at Wytaliba, 65km west of Nymboida on the other side of the Nymboida National Park, was badly damaged: the roof is gone but the double-brick shell remains. Her neighbours were also burned out.
Two of the four people who died in the NSW bushfires were at Wytaliba.
“There’s lots of offers of help but basically we can’t do much yet,” Sparks says. “It’s a bit of a waiting game at the moment.”
Sparks is staying in a cottage owned by her daughter while she waits for updates from her insurance company.
Insurers have received more than 2,000 claims for bushfire damage in NSW and south-east Queensland, with estimated losses of more than $165m. That does not cover all of the damage. Many homes were uninsured or severely underinsured.
In lower socioeconomic areas like Taree, where 124 homes were destroyed and 67 damaged, almost no one had appropriate insurance.
“People do not insure their property to its value,” says David West, mayor of the MidCoast Council. “They insure it to what they can afford.”
West was forced to flee his home at Brimbin, 10km outside Taree, and expected to lose the house. He plugged the gutters with expanding foam — not a good idea unless you remember to put down clingfilm first, he says — and drove away with a few valuables.
They were saved by a wind change. The fire was capricious, destroying some homes while sparing others.
“This fire has been such a terrible, terrible bastard of a thing,” West says. “It chose to destroy what it chose to destroy, and the community could not defend themselves.”
‘The future is pretty bleak’
More than 500 people spent that first Friday night at the Taree evacuation centre. Most have now found somewhere to stay: in caravans, garages, and spare rooms, all via the generosity of neighbours.
St Vincent de Paul is handing cash to those affected so they can buy new clothes and Christmas presents.
A generous benefactor from Sydney has bought deliveries of water for Wytaliba, supplying 50 people whose tanks were destroyed. The surrounding rivers and creeks are dry.
Sparks says her community is worried about the rest of the summer.
“We have still got lots of dry trees sitting there,” she says. “We haven’t had that good rain that will see us through. The future is looking pretty bleak to me.”
Stephen Spears is praying for a specific type of rain. A heavy downpour would see the hills around his banana plantation at Taylors Arm lose what little topsoil remained.
“If we can organise it, it really needs to come nice and gently, or it will be that much soil and that much ash washed out to sea,” Spears says.
Spears lost most of his banana plantation and his packing shed and equipment in the fires. The heat melted the plastic banana covers to the fruit and destroyed his fledgling avocado trees.
His brother Michael, whose plantation is next door, was also burned out. Their houses, further along the ridge line, were spared. The surrounding forest was destroyed: if you’re quiet in the bush you can hear the trees falling to the ground, says Spears.
The plantation is the brothers’ livelihood. It will be 18 months before it is profitable again.
“The first thing I did after the fire was go to my local credit union and ask for no repayments on the principal of my mortgage for 12 months,” Spears says. “They have agreed to that, luckily, but it will be a rough year.”