Hope and hopelessness mingle in the singed Tarkine

We’re driving up from the Rapid River, a beer-coloured tumult capped with froth and busy with rain; huge myrtles the size of eucalypts were camped on one bank and the blackwood was just coming into yellow wattle-flower, an unexpected sunshine in the dim wet green; on the ground we had spaced our steps around conical mounds rising up like wide muddy candles, the fragile homes of burrowing crayfish.

‘After the fires were going, there was a group of us that were watching closely where they were going and where they might go, and we were pretty nervous about what might be taken out … will Beckett Falls go, will it get down to the Rapid River?’