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Steve Garlick at Possumwood

Life on land

“The size of the fire ground is near impossible to comprehend. This could be an extinction event for vulnerable species. A billion screams of horror that you did not hear”

Steve Garlick, Peter Hylands

May 21, 2023

Among the people who have worked so hard to defend the wild animals of the Australian landscape is Professor Steve Garlick from Possumwood Wildlife in New South Wales. We visit Steve and Rosemary at Possumwood as the fires rage in the nearby Australian Capital Territory.

Join us as we ask Steve to talk to us about what is happening to Australia’s wildlife.

The devastating impact of the mega fires in New South Wales

Nature destroyed

In these bleak blackened landscapes of South Eastern Australia the sound of silence, of nature destroyed. Even as a billion or more native birds, mammals and reptiles and countless other life forms perished in these horrific fires, wildlife was still being killed on mass and in those precious places that had escaped the fires.

These are the crimes against the natural world that are a constant in the vast and increasingly empty landscapes of Australia. Unique animals, a unique natural world, are being destroyed in front of our eyes. In my hand below one of many dead Light-flecked Sun-skinks Lampropholis guichenoti.

Sun-skinks Lampropholis guichenoti

Little things

“In the ash and the burnt earth, the millions of creatures, so perfectly formed and so perfectly dead, make it very difficult for me to comprehend what is going on here. Dead skinks are all around. Sometimes we get to a point where life cannot exist, all possibilities are lost. However beautiful they still appear, all life has gone. This is the possibility we make”. Peter Hylands