Unbearable loss

WHEN PAUL WAS handed to Barbara Barrett in a washing basket to take home last November, he was given a slim chance of survival. He lay curled up in a ball on old towels, burnt, traumatised and barely moving.

“We thought he might not make it,” Barb, a koala carer with two decades experience, recalls of the young male koala. But there was a chance, so he was patched up, made comfortable and entrusted to her to try to rehabilitate him. He’d been rescued by a man named Paul, hence his adopted name, from a still-smouldering fireground near Port Macquarie, on the New South Wales mid-north coast, after one of the first of the fires that went on to rage throughout summer across south-eastern Australia. His ears were singed and the fur on his rump and quite a few of the nails on his paws had been burnt. Some of the claws dropped off a few weeks later meaning that, if he did survive, climbing vertically up a tree trunk would be near impossible.

His thick protective coat was still intact across much of the rest of his body, protecting his skin as it should have from direct searing. But it was thought likely that, because he was singed, he would have radiant burns beneath it caused by the intense heat of the fire he’d survived.

ULTIMATELY more than 16 million hectares of bushland, much of it national park, state forest or world heritage area, burnt.

The world watched in horror and understandably wept along with Australia at the tragic loss of human life and properties that resulted. But perhaps what was unexpected was the widespread and heartfelt dismay about what the fires