The Death of Epping Forrest

OK you have to use your imagination here...so i am using some descriptive words and trying to revisit the visuals i experienced and then describe them to you...so you have to use you photography minds.... so close your eyes ...hang on this doesn't have sound so you will have to read then ponder....... the reason being this blogger forgot her camera when she took her grandkids home to Hobart on Thursday morning this week..... Remember i told you about being diverted at Conara last week on our way back from Hobart well it was because of a rogue fire along the highway at Epping Forrest.... (when i lost my mobile remember????) Well thursday when I was going to Hobart to take the girls back we saw the devastation from that fire... Blackened ground where once there was pasture for cattle and sheep albeit parched and dry but still stretching short and golden cream on both sides of the highway..even huge rolls of hay and chaff waiting in the paddocks to be collected and stored for winter fodder...totally gone now with out a trace, burned power poles laying lifeless and cut into stumps lying there discarded beside new sleek treated pine ones, no boundries to stop you walking from the highway onto the land where lies just lines of fence wire laying there in the blackended earth with no fence posts ...there wasn't even a pile of ash to say that there once was posts that were holding the fencing wire...the wind had done its best to blow away the evidence of a boundry. Beautiful majestic gum trees that lined the sides of the highway so thickly you could not see through to the farm land behind them now blackened all the way up their trunks and their shade giving leaves singed to a reddish brown, all shrivelled up, just hanging there in morning air waiting for the last vestage of moisture to leave them so they too will float finally to the earth.... trees that had been felled already by the ferocious heat from those flames and those dying blackened gums still waiting to be cut down because they teetered on the edge of the highway's boundries being a danger to those travelling the higway...some had already been taken to with a chain saw and had their bodies disected into huge blackened circular logs left exactly were they had fallen..... the car windows down brought the morning air laden with the pungent smell of charcoal and ash mixed with gum sap from those dying trees..... the death of part of a very old forrest...Epping Forrest ...but it will grow again i am sure...we saw the re-growth in the gums along the Bridport road when we were travelling back after our Australia Day visit to the beach.... there was a huge fire that went through there last year...so i am sure there will be recovery soon in those trees for me to report in the spring...the trees seem to sprout from all up the trunk...they look bizzarre really....but unbelievable really that new life can rejuvinate from such devastation....Nature truly is amazing.