Halfway through the second week of January, I returned to work at the ABC to help my colleagues cover the ongoing crisis. Most days I was out in the field meeting people who had lost everything and helping them to share their stories. At the end of each day, I would cry while driving the 40 minutes home to Bermagui, watching all the way for active fire along the road.

A fire was still burning on the mountain just a couple of kilometres inland from our house. At night, we could see it from the back of our property – and we would try to measure how much closer it had moved that day.

It felt like death by a thousand cuts and, after evacuating three more times over the next month, we were begging for it to burn us and be done with it. The psychological game just had to end, even if it meant we lost everything, as strange as that is. We couldn’t bear the anxiety of waiting any more.

But in the end, it didn’t burn us. More than a month after fire first entered our world, it finally left us.

Torrential rain fell and fell and fell – pouring hundreds of millimetres of water onto our blackened, scorched earth. It brought with it new challenges, polluting our estuaries with bushfire run-off and causing the region’s dam to fill with debris.

But, overall, people collectively exhaled an enormous life-changing sigh of relief. Suddenly dams that had been empty for 18 months were full. Grass seemed to be growing right in front of our eyes, somewhat hiding the very deep scars that we were all now carrying.

Life as we knew it had changed – and I know that I, for one, will never be the same.

Claire Wheaton