More than 1,500 homes have been destroyed in the apocalyptic inferno that’s ravaging Australia. Their owners left everything behind and have nothing to come back to. No amount of insurance pay-out can possibly compensate for the loss of objects whose value can’t be measured in money: kids’ drawings, gifts from old friends, and family photos are all now gone forever.
66-year-old Phil Sheppard evacuated his property in Hunter Valley, NSW, when the flames began to close in. He watched online as the fire seemed to swallow up the main house and the huts adjoining it, and he anticipated devastation on his return.
But Phil was wrong: “I came around the bend and could see my hut still standing, I just couldn’t believe it,” Mr Sheppard told the Sydney Morning Herald. “It burnt right around the house … it was as if somebody had been here watching it and putting it out, but there wasn’t, there was nobody here at all.” Phil ascribes this seemingly miraculous survival to what the Australians call cultural burning: an indigenous land management technique that is not only practiced by the First Nations of Australia, the US and Canada, but also by many other indigenous and tribal peoples across the world.
