Overview

During Australia’s catastrophic Black Summer bushfires, a little town in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains found itself in the path of a megafront. Between November 2019 and February 2020, shocking bushfires burnt 18.6 million hectares of land and forests in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. These megablazes killed 34 people, destroyed thousands of homes, and claimed three billion mammals, birds and reptiles pushing some to extinction as their habitats were annihilated. On January 2nd 2022, the township Batlow, population 1313, on the edge of the Great Dividing Range, was declared ‘undefendable’ and its citizens advised to flee. While most evacuated, many stayed to fight for their beloved community. And in the end, the undefendable town was saved by volunteers – by farmers, teachers, electricians, retirees, and boys barely out of high school. A great deal was lost, but much was saved, including Batlow’s sense of itself. During and after the fires, the world’s media descended upon Batlow. They told the story of the battle for the town, or the parts of it they saw. The townspeople didn’t object to that, but later felt the need to tell their story in their own words; if for no other reason than to have a record for history before memories faded and legend and rumour expanded into the gaps. Undefendable is a collection of stories, poems, and photographs from the people of Batlow about those terrible days. Curated, by Sulari Gentill and Sarah Kynaston, to form a memoir of a town under fire, the stories and oral recollections have been only lightly edited to preserve the voice of each person and the community as a whole. Like everyone else in Batlow, Sulari and Sarah lived on the edge during that horrible summer, not knowing whether their town could in fact be saved.

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