The Burning of the Brumbies
Judith Nangala Crispin
All summer, black leaves fell against the house.
We cleared gutters, moved sticks from the yard.
Each day the wind returned them.
Emergency radio mapped bushfires
that were always burning
elsewhere,
Residents of St Albans, it is now too late to leave,
take shelter from the approaching fire.
We drew the curtains,
watched the Boxing Day test match,
while all around us, smoke filled the dividing range
like an ocean.
In the bush, ants rebuilt their towers
and retreated underground.
Coloured rings appeared on the torsos of snow gums—
warnings we’d forgotten how to read.
The parrots vanished.
Sometimes, walking the dog,
we’d glimpse clouds that could be brumbies,
sloping, like holy beings, under trees.
Once an Appaloosa mare crashed out of scrub,
turning mid-flight, and paused, a strange tangerine light
tracing the muscles of her neck. Rays slanting through smoke
and for a half-second, held us in her startled gaze.
All summer, black leaves fell into our hair.
Country spoke to us
in pyrocumulus clouds above the range.
We herded cattle through freak dust storms,
the farm ute swinging left, then right
over landscapes we could no longer see—black rain
from fire clouds streaking the windscreen.
In the night, we climbed an empty watertank
to watch fire crest the mountains in glowing lines—
grasshoppers, flying on a heated wind,
battered our faces.
And then Country’s tone changed.
Exhausted fire fighters slept at the pub,
their cordons pushed back as flame bladed through acacias,
rising on columns of explosive oil
igniting air.
Wavebanks of heat rolled
into firestorms, like napalm, before a head of wind.
And we listened then—
watching weather patterns,
drawing fire predictions on a map,
but it was too late.
We turned utes into fire fighting machines,
with pumps and hoses, watertanks tilting on the trays,
and we fought—
ash in our mouths, ash settling
like white moths in our hair.
We held containment lines for a week.
When the front came, it sounded like thundering horses.
Our cows suffocated. Peaches boiled in our orchards.
Across the plantations, in an unspeakable violence of light,
pines fell in black lines.
The scrub was smoldering when we saw the brumbies again,
hooves flying, their flanks bright against charcoal,
against the flashing red of firetrucks—they came out of smoke
like tongues of flame before an immolating Pentecostal wind.
And last among them, the Appaloosa mare,
scrambling out of ash,
her mane and forelegs burnt.
Along the Snowy Mountains,
between the chalk-white bones of gums,
Wedgetails perch in ash.
We bulldoze small bodies into trenches—
Koalas, who’d dropped like fireballs.
Wombats cooked in their burrows.
But it was months before we found the Appaloosa mare,
half-hidden in a field of regenerating grevillea—
just a trace of something equine
shot through with light.
JUDITH NANGALA CRISPIN is a poet and visual artist living and working on unceded Yuin Country on the Australian Southern Tablelands. She is the author of two collections of poetry, The Myrrh-bearers and The Lumen Seed. Judith has served as poetry editor of The Canberra Times and was the winner of the 2020 Blake Prize for Poetry. She is a proud member of FNAWN and Oculi Collective.
