Five years on, residents have rebuilt or relocated

On New Year’s Day 2020, Barbara Rugendyke looked out over the twisted roof iron and scorched brick of her Cobargo home as the village smouldered below.

The previous morning, a fire sparked days before by lightning in the Badja State Forest had coursed through Cobargo, destroying dozens of properties, ultimately claiming the lives of four locals. As residents returned to discover their homes’ fates, journalists also began to arrive.

“But what do we say?” Barbara asked her adopted daughter Sarah, who clung to a doll thrown into the car as they left at 2am. “We can replace all that.”

Five years later, after living in tents, a caravan, then a demountable, Barbara sits with her husband Dave and Sarah in the lounge of their rebuilt home.

They have replaced some things, including presents their foster children lost just days after Christmas, and made some joyful additions, including three great-grandchildren, with a 31st grandchild on the way. Personal changes have proved harder to predict.

“We’ve both changed a lot,” Barbara says. “Before, I would think of this year and next year and the year after. Now I think – well, I can’t be bothered thinking about the future too much.”

The summer that changed us

As the Herald wrote in January 2020, the fire season of 2019-20 was “the summer that changed us”. It caused an estimated $10 billion of damage, destroyed more than 3000 homes and directly caused 33 deaths, many of them in NSW, affecting the health of many more. It also saw 3 billion animals killed or displaced.

As five years since the season’s end approaches, memories persist of orange, ashen skies, bushfire smoke in city streets, and televised public grief and anger, rekindled for many by the Los Angeles wildfires. Questions remain about ongoing fire preparedness ahead of the release of the royal commission’s final report.

Peter Dunn, ACT emergency services commissioner after the 2003 Canberra fires, who organised community support efforts in Lake Conjola in 2020, has a rough “rule of thirds” for the ways people directly affected have responded: a third chose to move away, a third to stay and rebuild, and a third, five years later, have yet to decide. It’s an idea which comes up with other survivors interviewed for this article.

But for all those who stayed as much as for those, like Dunn, who have left, there is, he says, “unavoidably, massive change”.

‘The little mouse that roared’

Almost 11,800 individual fires burnt 7 per cent of NSW between July 2019 and March 2020, the state’s most severe fire season ever recorded.

The 2019 New Year’s Eve fires on the South Coast were some of the fiercest on the summer’s deadliest day, with seven people killed, as winds pushed fingers of flame from multiple blazes towards Cobargo, into areas such as Mogo and Batemans Bay, and further north around Conjola Park and Lake Conjola.

Cobargo was the hardest hit, with its main street razed. The small village of old farming families and artistic newcomers drew international attention when then-prime minister Scott Morrison visited in early January 2020 and locals angrily confronted him.

Five years later, the main street is no longer an open wound but a construction site. John Walters, an RFS volunteer during Black Summer, now chair of the Rebuild Cobargo project, says while there is lingering division in the community over the interaction with Morrison, “it’s still part of our currency … that we were the little mouse that roared”.

Walters admits there has been some community “prodding” about the rebuild, originally meant for completion in June 2024 but pushed back a year. Rebuild Cobargo has had to wear the costs of delays, including a builder going into administration and undetected lead contamination from the fires, after their $20 million grant from the Bushfire Local Economic Recovery (BLER) Package was capped.

He laments the “expectation that a community group has the capacity to put together a funding proposal and run it to budget when no government can do the same”.

One of Rebuild Cobargo’s sites is a new post office to take over from the one run by David Wilson and Kyle Moser, which didn’t burn down but needs replacing. Five years after they spoke to the Herald as they sifted through the ruins of their home, Wilson and Moser still live in a small apartment above the old post office, with three cats and three dogs who survived the fire. Their unfinished home is being guarded by a flock of sheep.

Wilson says they were lucky with insurance, but it’s not just those who weren’t insured who are yet to rebuild. Some lost the money they paid a local contractor when the firm was stripped of its licence. Many on the South Coast have been left on waiting lists as small local builders tried to expand to meet demand and materials grew expensive following pandemic shortages. Some of those lucky enough to have built have experienced poor quality.

Wilson and Moser hope to move in later this year. “We’ve spent five years just treading water,” says Wilson, who feels sorry for the victims of the Los Angeles fires. “They don’t know how long it’s going to take them.”

Some of those who lost their homes were unable to see them rebuilt. Kevin Allen, who was living in a caravan on his farm when the Herald spoke to him in March 2020, sadly died in 2021. His son Daniel, a builder, says his father was “chuffed” to be able to move into a granny flat on the property, but was only able to see the frames and trusses go up on the main rebuild.

Daniel says Kevin had health issues before the fires, but some family members have speculated losing the family’s 130-year-old homestead was too much.

“[They say] the stress and trauma of losing his family history, he never could get over it – it was just all gone, just like that.”

John Walters insists while no one in Cobargo is still living in a tent, many are still in temporary homes, or “shouses” (shed houses), as they’ve come to be known.

Helen and Steve Stafford moved into their rebuilt home in March last year, after living for several years in a campervan which still sits in their driveway. Helen says they built their previous house, a two-storey wooden one, when they moved to Cobargo more than 40 years ago.

“Our whole idea was it’ll go if a fire comes through,” she says. “But we didn’t expect it to.”

The new house has a metal frame and walls with longevity, and bushfires, in mind. Steve, a carpenter, started sketching a design the week after the fires, but they waited three years for the build to start. Spartan living in the campervan motivated them to carry on.

“By doing that you didn’t get too comfortable – you made it comfortable enough that you could survive.”

‘It’s the community that’s disappeared’

Many survivors have found purpose in rebuilding to a higher standard of safety. As the Clyde Mountain Fire bore down on Mogo and Batemans Bay on New Year’s Eve in 2019, Jack Egan prepared to defend his home in Rosedale to the south, while his partner Cath Bowdler took shelter on a beach.

The intensity of the fire proved too much for Egan’s preparations – he took shelter in a neighbour’s basement. Afterwards, he and Bowdler searched for each other for several hours, unsure if the other had survived, before a joyful reunion on the beach.

“He’s lucky to be alive,” says Bowdler. Egan and Bowdler’s new home has stainless-steel shutters and an elaborate roof sprinkler system, but they say not all those who were insured and have rebuilt had incorporated safety features – some had even fought their bushfire attack level (BAL), which raises insurance costs.

But Egan, whose experience during the fires has galvanised his climate advocacy, is wary of safety measures as a cure-all. “The only real and lasting solution to the rising dangers and cost of climate change is to reduce and eliminate most fossil fuel use,” he says.

Bowdler, a curator and artist, has found her own catharsis in creating works inspired by the fire-damaged trees in her garden. But she says the biggest change was “not the house and all of that, it’s the community that’s disappeared”.

“In this street here, there were only three houses left standing. And we knew all those people – for years.”

Like Peter Dunn, some of those approached for this article have moved away. In January 2020, the Herald spoke to Averill Berryman in Mogo as she inspected the ruins of the property sales and dog grooming businesses she had worked “five months, seven days a week” to set up.

Speaking this year, Berryman says she stayed in the village for a year, relocating her businesses to a donated demountable, but after the temporary building was returned, she could not afford the now-high commercial rents, and moved to central NSW.

“It was a pretty horrendous thing to be in the middle of that fire. I still get cold shivers when I hear a fire engine going,” she says. “I didn’t want to see that again.”

The real estate agent says an unexpected consequence of the fires, as trees were pulled down and country cleared, was to “change the face of the South Coast”, transforming a “quirky little fishing village” like Batemans Bay into something resembling Surfers Paradise, with high-rise developments.

“A lot of people made a lot of money out of that fire.”

But Uncle Bunja Smith, a Walbanga elder, says development after the fires was an inevitable part of population growth in an area that depends on tourism.

Smith, who grew up in Mogo, defended his home in Batemans Bay on New Year’s Eve, and was unable to save the Aboriginal Land Council office in Mogo, which his father helped establish at a time when the village had a majority Indigenous population.

A new office building opened in December, but Smith transferred his voting rights to Batemans Bay following the loss of the original building, the site of joyful 21st birthday celebrations for him and his six siblings.

“It was traumatic on the whole community,” he says. “Even the ones who didn’t lose property, they were affected.” Some Indigenous residents of Mogo who lost their homes in the fires have yet to see them rebuilt.

Lasting trauma, public generosity and bushfire tourism

Many of the survivors the Herald spoke to for this article described long-term psychological trauma. Some survivors talk of suicides in the community after the fires, hidden deaths. There are also the at least 445 people who died from smoke exposure over the course of the season.

Although some communities held commemorations, others can’t stand anniversaries, which coincide with a return of the hot, windy days of that summer. Many, such as Sarah Rugendyke, still can’t bear the smell of smoke. (“Nuh-uh,” she says.)

In the years since Black Summer, there has been particular concern about the psychological impact on the high numbers of children affected by the disaster. A 2021 UNICEF report found two in five children and young people were either directly affected or knew someone who was directly affected by the fires.

Erin and Adrian Maher and their son Nate were among the hundreds who sheltered for hours on the beach at Malua Bay as the fires bore down. Maher was heavily pregnant with her daughter, Mahli, and Nate had just turned five.

In the years since, Nate has experienced continued anxiety and nightmares around the fires. Government funding for play therapy in Moruya ultimately ran out. Erin says staff at community care centres were helpful, but their assessment of Nate’s needs was sometimes insensitive.

“They said something like ‘are you scared of there being a fire again?’ He’s five, and he goes, ‘Mum told me that there’s not going to be a fire again’.

“And she [the staff member] goes, ‘Oh, he doesn’t seem too upset about it.’”

Maher says Mahli had also since been diagnosed with anxiety disorders, one of which doctors said could have been caused by prenatal stress during the fires. Maher herself has sought help in recent years, after she found she couldn’t bring herself to return to the beach.

In the years since what for many of them was the worst event of their lives, bushfire-affected communities have had to deal with public insensitivity – at its worst, looting and even “bushfire tourists” in the immediate aftermath.

Media requests have been overwhelming, including for those thrown into the public eye in broadcast coverage. Newcomers and non-locals are sometimes inconsiderate – a shopkeeper in Mogo says she often hears people make idle conversation about the fires in front of people she knows have lost their homes.

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But survivors also described incredible acts of public generosity and individual kindness. When artist Penny Lovelock and her partner Misha Dodos’ home was one of more than 90 razed around Conjola by the Currowan fire, they lost many family photos.

Dodos speaks about the little things that got them through; the small discounts from “people who didn’t know us at all”. Once his children’s high school principal called him at work: “She said, ‘We have pictures of all your children from every year of high school. Would you like to have them?’

“And I said to her, ‘I’d love to have them, just let me know what it’s going to cost.’”

Dodos goes on, his voice cracking: “And she said, ‘It’s not going to cost you anything’.”

Forgotten fires

In the immediate aftermath of the fires, survivors were left without power, running water and communications, but governments, charities and the public responded with a flood of grants and donations.

Dave Allen, the publican at the Cobargo hotel, who helped distribute aid at the village’s showground, says at one point they had to dig a hole to accommodate donated clothes that couldn’t be used.

“We ended up with that much bottled water … it wasn’t funny,” he says, adding future disaster responses need better systems to co-ordinate sending donations where they are needed, including for smaller communities, which receive less media attention – he was disappointed to see similar mistakes made after the Lismore floods.

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Many survivors describe being left to fend for themselves after the onset of COVID-19 and as resources were unavoidably stretched by other natural disasters.

Helena and Justin and their son Gabriel lost their home in Balmoral in the Southern Highlands a week before the South Coast fires. They were uninsured and faced a difficult few years navigating bureaucracy, which they say was confusing and complex, and more traumatic than the fires themselves.

But speaking five years later, Helena and Justin have rebuilt and say they are starting to move on and resume their “peaceful life” from before the fires.

Helena recalls a poignant moment from just the day after, as Justin spoke to journalists about the devastation of their home.

“The fires blasted our property but for some reason left my lemon tree with a solitary lemon and blossoms alone,” she says. “Tar was still bubbling on our steep driveway.

“But through all of this I have the lingering memory of the pervasive smell of lemon amongst the smoke and ash.”

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