Many animals suffered in the recent Victorian bushfires. Many died. Those left alive depended on human compassion for their survival. The fires had exhausted and traumatised them, and only our pity, kindness and ingenuity was going to help.

Ash gives death a colour, a texture, a smell and a flavour. To see a once-lush forest or lively township eerily frozen under warm cinder is to see death in its pomp. Fire passes through, sometimes with determined force, sometimes as a malicious afterthought, as capricious as a wind change. Then, when it’s wreaked its ruin, life stirs. But these first stirrings are not heartening to see or hear.

The Victorian and Australian people showed an incredible capacity for compassion, generosity and bravery as they rushed to the aid of others in need. The capability of organisations like the Salvation Army and Red Cross to take prompt action, organising and moving enormous quantities of goods, food and people, has been astounding.

The consequences for our wildlife only became apparent after the initial shock of the human toll. Within a week, we’d heard estimates that at least a million wild animals had been killed. Endangered species of owls, lizards and possums may have been all but wiped out. The loss of habitat won’t be repaired easily. You can’t reconstruct a forest.

Four wildlife shelters, including Stella Reid’s Wildhaven shelter at Kinglake, were destroyed. While Reid escaped with her life, they were unable to remove any animals before the property was devoured. Psychologically, Stella’s loss shook everyone.

Animal lovers organised themselves swiftly and efficiently in the aftermath of the fires. Government departments such as Department of Primary Industries, NGOs and private organisations swung into action.

Triage centres were set up in Kilmore, Whittlesea and Redesdale. While wounded animals streamed into the centres, at nearby shelters, vets were busy making heartbreaking decisions as animals in distress, physical pain, or worse were brought to them.

Household pets were given accommodation by the RSPCA and Animal Aid. Horses were agisted, transported, fed and stabled with the help of organisations like the Triple R Equine Welfare Crisis Network and Project Hope Horse Welfare. The Lost Dogs Home offered vet supplies, shelter and food. Cats, alpacas, birds—all manner of domestic and wild animals—were looked after by associations with specific and general clientele. The University of Melbourne Veterinary Clinic and the Lort Smith Animal Hospital offered treatment and supplies.

Many individuals, some heralded, some anonymous, toiled on behalf of homeless and hurt animals.

Three weeks after the initial nightmare, Denise Garratt was preparing for another hellish day. It was 38 degrees—the first really hot day with northerlies since that date now branded Black Saturday. It seemed that on 7 February, 2009, everyone’s thinking changed forever. A tree was a potential enemy; a gentle, warm breeze might transmogrify into fire’s mischievous aide. Every morning, the sun peeped over the horizon like an awakening fiend and, filtered through the smoky air, it covered the hills in otherworldly hues of blood. Another day of life might bring death.

Denise was uneasy. The warnings were again dire, and her home was right in the middle of the fire path. Her neighbours had evacuated, but she’d decided she’d stay at home in the Yarra Valley with the animals she had collected, and put her faith in the CFA fire fighters and her fire plan.

“I’ve got about ten macropods here, plus a lot of domestic pets. We’ve got our sprinklers ready and our cages, we’ve got our fire plan ready, but when you see what went through places like Kinglake, it wouldn’t matter what fire plan you have in place. Incredible ferocity.” She is still haunted. “Nothing would have helped there.”

Denise heads up the Help for Wildlife Response Team, a non-profit, community-based outfit that receives no government funding or corporate sponsorship.

The team, a 24-hour emergency response unit, is a collection of practical people who devote their time, funds and resources to the rescue of animals. Volunteers are farmers, office workers and unemployed people dedicated to the task. They conduct their own training. The Team pulls together people and organisations from all over Victoria, so membership numbers are unclear.

“Our teams are hand-picked for their skills. We’ve got first-aid people, paramedics, tree climbers, vets, vet nurses—there’s an enormous amount of skill, and we continually upgrade training. We do a lot of bush work, and we’re also bushfire accredited, because there’s training you need to do before you even go near a bushfire.”

Armed with apparatus such as catching poles and nets that they often develop and make themselves, members of the team had been wandering into the burnt out areas and rescuing injured or dazed animals, domestic or wild.

“Sometimes the poles aren’t strong enough, but we get one or two goes out of them, enough to bring down animals, sedate them and handle them.” Climbers and abseilers on their roster come in very handy. Recently, they were able to rescue two wallabies that fell into a mine shaft.

They’d been in Kinglake for three weeks, and Denise had only just returned home to this present danger. The Team had set up a mobile surgery before anyone else. As well as rescuing animals in the wild, they responded to the requests of distraught pet owners. “We went up to the mountain and brought horses down. Some had injuries where they’d run into fences. We had pet goats, sheep, dogs, cats.” The vets’ full range of skills was put to the test.

Much of the work was onerous and sad. Almost everything they’d seen had been terrible. “Up on the hill there was an old gentleman, and his wife was very ill. We buried his pet goat for him. They were very distressed. Someone else, we buried their dog for them. We just did what we could when we could help.”

The farmer volunteers for the response team had been handy for dealing with distraught, injured or spooked horses.

By the time I interviewed Denise, the teams had reduced to smaller, four-member strike forces, for the sake of mobility and speed of response. Each had four-wheel drives fully armed with rescue equipment and full fire protection gear.

The sum of missing pets in the fire’s immediate aftermath, and their needs when they were found, were incredible. One early action the team took was to tell remaining residents to put out water for dazed and lost domestic animals.

“One of the things we found was that animals get very disorientated and they’ll run for miles. Someone at Kinglake found their little dog ten kilometres away. So when you have high fire danger days, it pays to keep your pet inside. Have your evacuation gear all ready, have your pet pack all packed up, if there’s any medical supplies, have it packed up. Make sure the pet is identified, whether by microchip or whatever. Sometimes collars can be lost or burnt.

Amidst the pandemonium, there was occasional cheer: “A peacock was in a burnt-out boy’s camp and the police asked us to go in and have a look. We found the peacock perched on a boys’ urinal. We put him in one of our holding pens and his owner, who had lost his home, actually saw him on Channel Seven. He thought George had gone in the fires. Their peacock was best friends with their dog, and the dog was fretting, so it was a really special reunion.”

Nigel Williamson’s small outfit worked closely with the Wildlife Response Team. Nigel, the face of Nigel’s Pet Rescue, deals mainly with domestic animals in ordinary times. In these extraordinary times, his brief was all-encompassing.

Domestic animals had mainly been taken care of. The cost to our bush was yet to be estimated.

“There’s a lot of people out there dealing with wild animals. I’ve only seen one dog”, said Nigel. “The main ones left behind are cats that have been burnt and caught in culverts and drains to protect themselves from the fire. It hasn’t been easy to coax them out. We’ve had to set up traps to try and get them.”

Nigel’s offsider, Brendan, does search and retrieval. Other members of his team are assembled from other organisations, Help for Wildlife, WRAP (Wildlife Rescue and Protection), and BADGAR, all of whom have been finding the animals, and then calling Nigel to do the climbing rescues.

Nigel’s biggest job has been removing koalas from trees. “I’m a tree climber. All the wildlife people are ground people and none of them really climb trees.” Sometimes, he’d get a call to rescue a group of half a dozen koalas in the one place.

Of all the jobs, his is probably the most dangerous. Many of the trees have been burned out, their integrity affected to such an extent that it’s not certain whether they are merely a pile of ashes. “Sometimes the tree is so high, I’m looking down at these little red spots, which are people in overalls.”

Kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, peacocks—Nigel is helping them all, but in the middle of the chaos, his role has, of necessity, transformed. It began when they got involved in giving out stockfeed and pet food.

As time went on, Nigel saw people too proud to go to the relief centres, or unable. “It’s a matter of going out and finding them.” Nigel has done plenty of radio interviews to inform people that they have food if they need it.

“I never got one response. But when I get out there and start driving up people’s driveways, you should see their faces. Overwhelmed. Yesterday in the Strzelecki Ranges, I went to help a lady who had a koala up a tree. She’d lost two dogs and her bantam hens were wandering around the property. She’s going to round them up and bring them up to me, and we’re going to load a trailer up with food for her to have and distribute to all her friends. All we can do is say to people, ‘if you know of anyone out there in need, spread the word.’

“You do what you can, where you can. I’ve seen all the destruction, and seen where people have been laying on the ground where there’s just ash. No remains of a human whatsoever.

“We’ve become a donation centre for food, kennels, beds. We’re going directly to someone that’s survived, going up their driveway and saying, ‘Here you go, Merry Christmas.’”

Never is the fate of all living things, human and animal, so entwined as it is during such disasters. In the end, Nigel no longer distinguishes. What’s the point of making distinctions when you’re out there in hell trying to save souls? You can’t walk past a suffering person to save a possum, and, on your way to deliver food to someone’s front door, you can’t ignore a koala that’s been stuck up a tree for three weeks, poisoning itself on regrowth, killing itself to stay alive.

“I just hope I never in my lifetime see anything like this again. I’ve seen places vapourised. Just absolutely vapourised.

“They say there’s a million animals gone. Well…double that.”

Like Denise, Nigel was again on high alert this day, waiting for the phone calls. Meantime, he was heading to the Upwey area, in the hills, “to get some roos, put some signs up warning drivers about roos, because the wildlife is just everywhere. I’m working with IFAW (International Fund for Animal Welfare) to design portable feeding stations that are GPS marked and monitored, and fill them with roo pellets. All the wallabies and roos are just eating the white fungus that comes out of the ground. There’s absolutely nothing out there. And the new growth for koalas is highly toxic to them. So even regeneration is a double-edged sword.”

What does he hope for this terrible day that is causing so much apprehension? “No more fires. Just…no more.”

Published in Pet Lifestyle, Spring, 2009