Leanganook/Mount Alexander has suffered catastrophic fire damage, especially at the North End. Some areas were thankfully spared in the January Harcourt fire.
This grid shows just some of the damage.
I wanted to illustrate the way the Harcourt fires have changed the Mount so I thought of re-visiting the location of a photo that I took about ten years ago.
The moss tells us that it was taken in winter and I remember a foggy morning, just after dawn. This time I went on a warm spring afternoon, so I expected many differences.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the extent of the changes. First of all it is now physically impossible to stand in the same place as I did before. A large tree has fallen from behind and now lies in a tangle. Beyond that, the number of badly burned and fallen trees was far more than I expected, and even though the mossy rock remains it isn’t so easy to orient yourself in the landscape. The widest tree in the above photo now appears to have fallen and many others have almost disappeared. The fire must have been intense here.
The photo below doesn’t do justice to the amount of destruction, and the angle is different, but at least the mossy rock hasn’t gone away. Plenty of weeds have seized an opportunity though. I think the two burned half-trees in the middle are most likely the two prominent trees on the left of the original photo. The fact that I can’t be sure even though I know this place says something.
Bronwyn Silver
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