After wildfires ravaged Australia, here’s how the bush is doing.
On a warm winter afternoon on Kangaroo Island, eight miles off the coast of mainland South Australia, I squint against the sun at a young male koala reclining against the trunk of a eucalyptus tree, lazily chewing leaves. From the heartiness of this grove and its resident marsupials’ fluffy coats and rounded bellies, I wouldn’t have guessed that only a few miles down the road, the Black Summer bushfires—the worst in Australia’s history—still scar the landscape. Although the heart-wrenching post-fire images and videos made recovery seem impossible, the bush has come roaring back to life.
“The Australian landscape has thrived on fires over millions of years,” explains Wayne Boardman, Associate Professor of wildlife biodiversity and ecosystem health in the School of Animal and Veterinary Sciences at the University of Adelaide. “The vegetation has the ability to come back, given the right conditions.”
A Land Built for Fire
During an unusually hot and dry summer in 2019 and 2020, a series of dry lightning strikes ignited brush in several areas around Australia. Aided by high winds, the blazes ripped through 46 million acres of land, including 48% of Kangaroo Island. Like a scene from the film Dune, some cities were enveloped in a thick tangerine haze. Farmers reported walls of black smoke streaked with lightning bolt‒like flames advancing across fields. Neither were the coasts spared; rescue teams described some beaches as a modern Pompeii, the air clogged with falling ash. By the time the fires were contained in March 2020, 3,500 homes and buildings were destroyed. Thirty-four people and an estimated three billion animals died.
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The bush has since regrown to about two-thirds of its original size. Bob Hill, Professor of Botany at Adelaide University, tells me this is due to a succession of mild winters and plants that have developed biological adaptions to cope with fire.
“This is vegetation that occasionally needs fire to clean out a lot of the persistent undergrowth, litter, and branches,” Hill says. “It’s to their advantage for fires to happen—up to a point.”
For example, plants with woody fruits, like banksia, retain their seeds for years at a time. When exposed to fire, the fruit opens and the seeds are released onto the ash bed. Others, such as yacca, a fan-headed grass tree, can live for centuries. Its scorched trunk sends out a 9-foot stalk covered in thousands of butter-colored flowers that drop seeds onto the disturbed soil. Even the trunks of high-oil-content, fire-promoting trees like the eucalyptus—the sole food source of koalas—bloom with recovery buds following a blaze.
The Australian government has been criticized for a lax response to climate change, and especially for allowing continued logging operations, which irrevocably upset the balance of natural ecosystems. But the biggest obstacle might just be our own short-term memory.
Hill explains, “Because of the mild summers we’ve had for three years, all the concern about extreme heat has gone…And the trouble is, it’s mattering more than it ever has, because now we have global [climate] problems, not just local ones.”
Wines, Wildlife, and Culinary Exploration on Mainland South Australia
Although the western side of the Adelaide Hills is still recovering, the eastern side was mostly spared from damage. Here I check in to Sequoia Lodge, a design-minded luxury resort that roosts at the hills’ highest point, overlooking the Piccadilly Valley. The hotel opened in 2021, and has attracted high-profile guests like Paul McCartney, who even signed a piano for a fan so determined to meet his idol, he wheeled the instrument up the long incline to the hotel’s patinaed gates.
Inside each of Sequoia Lodge’s 14 sustainable luxury suites are a glass-walled sunken sitting area with fireplace, a spacious bedroom with cutting-edge touch controls, a his-and-her bath with soaking tub, and locally made ceramics and glassware. The resort also has a spa, two excellent restaurants, and private thermal pools.
A quarter-mile walk from the resort, Cleland Wildlife Park shelters more than 160 native Australian species, mostly in open natural habitat. I get an up-close introduction to the iconic kangaroo, chatty blue fairy-wrens, curious potoroos, and yellow-footed rock wallabies who bound across boulders. I even come toe-to-toe with fuzzy-headed emus who bob their beaks into the pail of carrots tucked under my arm.
Cleland’s koalas, its most famous residents, will receive an even bigger spotlight when the park’s new Koala Loft opens later this year. About 20 of the marsupials were rescued from the bushfires on KI, where 50,000—two-thirds of the island’s population—were either unable to escape the flames, or succumbed to heat stress.
As part of Cleland’s private Hold a Koala experience, I cradle Florence, a four-year-old female who was raised in the park, against my shoulder. She’s surprisingly solid, her fur soft and woolly. I look down at her tufted ears and spotted nose, and wonder how we humans can do better to protect her and the world’s many spectacular creatures.
The fires that scorched the Adelaide Hills didn’t damage the Barossa Valley, Australia’s most famous winemaking region. But smoke taint, caused by volatile compounds that create unpleasant aromas or flavors in wine, scrapped at least one vintage for many producers.
Today, among the Barossa’s tumbling hills, punctuated by Valais Blacknose sheep who browse around stands of scrubby peppermint gum trees, there’s no trace of the issue. I stop at three wineries, including 20-year-old Tscharke in Maranaga, where sixth-generation winemaker Damien Tscharke has upended the traditional techniques of his ancestors and embraced organic, biodynamic production and styles that are more elegant and complex than the big, bold reds the region is famous for.
At Alkina, founded in 2015 in Greenock, the vineyard’s unique combination of soils gives their Semillon, Grenache, and rosé an unexpected brightness and energy. Wonderground Barossa is a new kid on the block at just two years old. I browse their superb rustic farmhouse‒turned‒art gallery, which features the work of local, mostly female, artists, and sit by the outdoor fire pit, sampling two aromatic, contemporary Shirazes that epitomize the new direction of this heralded wine region.
Beaches, Honeybees, and Iconic Attractions Reborn on Kangaroo Island
Flinders Chase National Park was in the midst of celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2019 when lightning struck. The fires grew so intense that they peeled flakes of 500-million-year-old granite from the face of Remarkable Rocks, an otherworldly formation of boulders that appear to teeter atop one another. Strolling the boardwalk, it’s impossible not to notice the native sedges, gahnias, hakeas, and mallees that and have transformed the landscape into a sea of green.
I snap photos of a fur seal colony sunbathing around Admirals Arch, and picturesque Cape du Couedic Lighthouse, built in the early 1900s. The park has more than a dozen walking and hiking trails, where wildflowers sprout along the path in spring and summer, including some rare species that haven’t appeared in more than 70 years. Visitors will learn more about the natural wonders of Flinders Chase when its $6.7 million visitors center opens in 2025.
I drop in at Southern Ocean Lodge, an uber-luxury resort above a stunning white-sand beach along the island’s southwestern edge. In 2020, the bushfire flattened the entire twelve-year-old resort. The still-standing Sunshine, a supersized sculpture of a kangaroo welded from old farm machinery by American-born artist Indiana James, symbolized hope for the hotel’s rebuilding.
“The design of the original lodge was pretty close to perfect, but there was certainly some opportunity to improve,” says Craig Bradbery, chief operating officer for parent company Baillie Lodges. This meant renewing their focus on sustainability: enhanced solar power, new energy-reduction initiatives, and a more efficient rainwater capture system. Around the lodge, which reopened late last year, they created a 65-foot wilderness buffer and replanted 45,000 native succulents, which can slow the progression of fire.
Outside the spa, I pause in front of a mixed-media artwork by KI artist Janine Mackintosh, who incorporated post-fire found objects from the hotel, such as nails and cutlery, into the piece—a declaration of resiliency and a “remember this” for humanity.
On the eastern portion of the island, I stay at three-year-old Sea Dragon, a cozy boutique hotel whose location within a protected flora and fauna area gives it a safari feel. I leave my screened porch door open and fall asleep to the sound of the waves crashing on Pink Bay Beach. Although I never spot the elusive resident echidna, on my first sunrise walk to neighboring Cape Willoughby Lighthouse, I startle a pair of timid wallabies and spy no fewer than two dozen kangaroos.
My guide takes me to Seal Bay, home of 800 Australian sea lions. We walk carefully among the pinnipeds, watching mothers nurse their infants, youngsters chase each other through the waves, and adults haul up on the sand by their flippers, exhausted from the hunt, before slumping over for a nap in the sun.
In the afternoon, we have lunch at the excellent on-premise café of the Emu Bay Lavender farm, followed by a cocktail-making class at Kangaroo Island Spirits, which has been crafting vodka, liqueurs, and gin since 2006.
I end the day at Clifford’s Honey Farm, one of a handful of Ligurian bee apiaries on the island. The pollinators, known for their docility, were originally imported to KI in 1884 from the Italian Alps. Since then, interbreeding and diseases have decimated the population in their native land. KI is the only place you can find pure Ligurian bees and their floral, mildly sweet honey.
I lick a spoonful of Clifford’s homemade honey ice cream, savoring everything I’ve experienced—and everything we were lucky enough not to lose in the fires. Like finding Sunshine rising from the ashes, there are plenty of reasons for hope in South Australia. But it’s up to us to not forget the hard lessons of the not-too-distant past.
Loved all the places mentioned to include cuddling the koala. However, rapid growth and housing is destroying the habitats. Road kills accompany the growth and seriously undermine the kangas, wallabees and other creatures. AU needs to get it's sustainability together. We saw almost no recycling, wind farms, grey water.....A special continent that needs special care to meet its challenges.