Back in April 2010, my friend Britta came to visit, and together we went on an Australian Adventure.  After spending a week in Perth, we flew to Melbourne, then spent a few days in Yarra Valley, a wine region to the east, before driving the Coastal Highway to Sydney.  We planned that while in Yarra, we would indulge in a hot-air balloon ride over the vineyards.

So after a wonderful day-and-a-half in Melbourne (really, it’s a cool city), we drove east to Yarra Valley, passed through pretty vineyards and crossed over the “Black Spur Drive”, a windy road crossing the mountain between Healesville and Marysville (and if you like drives, this is definitely one to do), to land at our B&B where we would stay for two nights.  I never really noticed all the burnt tree-trunks along the Spur.  When we met the proprietor of Wombat Cottage, he showed us the grounds and started talking about all the trees that had burned, and showed us a recently-build shed.  “This replaced the shed that burned down in February.”

And I instantly felt stupid.  It hadn’t occurred to me that when the horrible, terrible “Black Saturday” Victorian Bushfires of February 2009 occurred, the majority of the fires were centered in this area.  Over the course of three days – I don’t know, I don’t really want to get into the statistics – probably thousands, or hundreds of thousands of acres of forest and farmland burned.  OK, fine, I’ll delve into Wikipedia: over a million acres burned, 173 people died, 414 were injured, it took five weeks to put out.  It is the eighth deadliest bushfire event in international history, the third in the last twenty-odd years, and the worst in Australia. It has prompted a ‘Royal Commission’ (a federal investigation) to look at issues on bushfire policy and management.  Fun ecology fact: scientists found ash at record heights over Antarctica, and kangaroos would suffer burned feet in order to return to home territory.

At the time of the fires, my grasp of Australian geography was pretty poor (well, it still is), so all I could say was that these fires were somewhere in the state of Victoria, which is in the central-southern part of the country, two states away.  It is the smallest mainland state (Tasmania is geographically smaller) but has the second highest population.  It turns out we were galavanting around the “ground zero” of Black Saturday.

I asked the B&B owner – thank God I have an American accent, it affords me a little ignorance – if there were fires here on Black Saturday.  “Oh yes,” said he with the knack for Aussie understatement.  “They were here.”  And then he pointed out the field that had burned, the ring of trees at the far side of the paddock that had burned, the mountains beyond that had burned.  “The cottage you’re in was saved, but that shed over there, that had to be completely rebuilt.”  It was… what, twenty feet away?  Thirty?

burnt/dead trees on the left, rebuilt shed in the center, and the parked car is at the front door of our cottage

We got a few hours of sleep that night and met our balloonist and fellow travelers in the pre-dawn cold at Chateau Yering, an historic house and hotel next door to Yering Station Winery.  We were then transported to a paddock in Glenburn, 22mi/37km north of the valley.  Ours was a large balloon, with perhaps twenty people compartmented in the basket.  Just before dawn, the balloon was fully inflated and we all climbed aboard.

Because of the wind direction that morning, we weren’t so much as going over vineyards as approaching them.  We floated south back toward Yering Station (the Mondavi of Yarra Valley), rising to a maximum elevation of 3400ft/1,200m just over Kinglake National Park. As we crossed over Kinglake, our surly, taciturn pilot pointed out the burnt areas of the mountains. The ridges in this area form a series of petal-like concentric semi-circles, with developed areas nestled in the valleys. The mountains burned so aggressively that those in the valleys were stuck with few options to evacuate.  “You can see how escape was impossible,” the pilot said.

Having said that, the balloon ride was AMAZING.  To be able to see the landscape, even one I wasn’t familiar with, from above was extraordinary.  And when the gas-burner wasn’t afire, it was so quiet, so peaceful, way up there.  The pilot said we peaked at 3400 feet. If I were to do it again, I’d go for a smaller balloon which might not be able to fly so high, but would carry fewer passengers.  We were stuck in a compartment of the basket, so most of the time I was facing east – which is why so many of these photos are overexposed; yet, with the haze of the morning fog, the long shadows and the reflection in the lakes, I’m pleased with the pictures.  Hope you are too.

After we touched down, Britta and I had a nice breakfast at Chateau Yering, and spent the rest of the day wine tasting around Yarra Valley.  It’s a beautiful region, and reminds me very much of Sonoma County where I grew up.  It was nice to see mountains and hills and vines again… Aside from charred tree trunks and bare mountain sides, the landscape looked remarkably green and lush.  I asked several of the pourers how the grapegrowers and winemakers were coping with the aftermath of the bushfires – were they getting tourists’ attention?

Most wineries were doing very well for visitors, they told me, but the crop was so badly damaged in the fire (it occurred just before harvest time) that no one even bothered to pick the grapes.  Apparently the smoke can be absorbed into the fruit (and even the stems and soil) so that it ruins the flavour of the juice, not only for that season but for the next as well.  Yarra vintners won’t be putting out a decent bottle until 2012, they say.  Some cellars were pouring and selling bottles from ‘sister’ wineries from other wine regions in WA and South Australia, who offered to share or entirely relinquish the profits.  Other cellars had enough in their stocks from past vintages to keep up sales, but it must have been heartbreaking to watch their libraries go down the gullets of non-buying tourists.

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