Angels among us

It is the selfless acts of others – big and small – that buoy us through calamities.

After years of sapping drought, the big rivers that cut across the edges of the Outback are filled and flowing. The old towns far out on the plains 800km west of Sydney – Bourke, Walgett, Brewarrina – are lifting from the strangling dry. People can now water lawns, wash cars, refill swimming pools – and drink from taps rather than rely on acrid bores or emergency desalination plants.

Farmers – certainly not all, but enough – are sowing their first winter crops in years. Canola, wheat and oats are returning to lands that three months ago looked as lifeless as an empty car park – stripped not only of vegetation but also animals sent off early for slaughter in the tens of thousands. The late summer’s flooding rains by no means reached everybody, but they coursed through spirits, too long despairing over a drought that would not end.

Here in Sydney, our mild enough water restrictions have eased. No longer must we pour water into cans to replenish gardens. The city’s dams have filled. The parks are greening. The unwelcome nightly dumps of loose, dusty soil carried on hot inland winds have ceased for now.

Gone, too, is the bushfire smoke that invaded and stifled the cities over this last, brutish summer. The fires, too, are out and 33 lives lost – hundreds more, medical researchers now say, if those who died prematurely from the effects of the smoke are included.

In the midst of those January fires – the scenes of terrified families marooned on darkened beaches, the fleeing animals, the mangled, burnt-out towns, the choking cities – it seemed, then, that dread would hang around all the way into next summer.

Of course, it has passed.

Through it all – and even now – we were buoyed by the stories of the less selfless. Those volunteer firemen who drove their trucks through erupting forests to reach the trapped, those who gave up their summer to feed and house the thousands of homeless and displaced, and now the army of unpaid helpers putting homes and lives back together in the fire zones.

Louise Brown, 66, told me in the ruins of the town of Cobargo, 386km south of Sydney, that on the night the flames barrelled in from the hills and took the town, she knew what was coming. She left her own home in a forest, drove into her beloved second-hand bookshop on Cobargo’s main street at 10pm, opened up and made tea and plates of sliced watermelons for the town’s fearful. The flames hit at 1am. Her shop survived. The home she had left did not.

Outside the town of Port Macquarie, 390km north of Sydney, a relentless woman, Cheyne Flanagan, runs the country’s biggest koala hospital, packed with burnt and broken animals when she showed me around in February. Tens of thousands of koalas perished in the fires. The flames burnt through much of the precious little that remained of their eucalypt forest habitat – already eroded by housing developments and new highways.

Daily, Flanagan dresses the wounds and changes the bandages of the burnt koalas. In between, she has found the time to raise money to rebuild the creaky, not-for-profit hospital and to acquire land to establish secure koala breeding colonies.

It is the selfless acts of others – big and small – that buoy us through calamities. Another – unseen, unheard and far more frightening

– is upon us in the form of illness. May you find the angels that lift you and find yourselves closer to while standing further apart from others. And know that this, too, shall pass like drought and fire.

Daily, Flanagan dresses the wounds and changes the bandages of the burnt koalas.