About three months after Black Saturday dad and I drove up to the place where our house used to be. Anything left (and there wasn’t much) was still bushfire blackened or, if not, the dark colours of rained-on rust. The forgotten wrecks of a couple of our neighbours’ cars and burnt-out back-yard sheds lay untouched—dotted like abandoned cicada cases across the ridge. The only green was in the still-standing gums’ trunk bases, sprouting clusters of seemingly out-of-place leaves.

A plant’s last efforts at life, I read somewhere once—maybe in a sun-faded National Geographic, maybe online—can often be the most beautiful. Like cacti in South America’s Atacama Desert, flowering purple in the dry. But I had mixed feelings about the hints of lush wattle shoots about to unfurl from bushfire-scarred earth; I was at once relieved to see regrowth, but also fist-chested at the thought the bush I’d known as home would take more than my lifetime to regrow.