The photograph went around the world in January 2020. In it, a circular structure, like the remnants of a burnt-out flying saucer, sits in a strafed landscape of ash and charred trees. The only thing that distinguishes it from countless images of the aftermath of nuclear war, and gives it a sense of place, is the enormous black metal kangaroo rising from the ashes under ribbons of collapsing roof.
For Australia’s third largest island, Kangaroo Island, and the country’s most highly regarded luxury resort, Southern Ocean Lodge, this was the apocalypse. Bushfires that had been ignited by lightning strikes in December, the start of the Southern Hemisphere’s summer, joined up on January 3 to form a more than 300-foot-high wall of flame, which tore through the drought-stricken landscape and roared over the lodge, incinerating everything in its path.
Even for a country where bushfires are a regular part of each summer, this was a tragedy on an unimaginable scale. Kangaroo Island, separated from the mainland by a stretch of treacherous ocean southwest of Adelaide, has been called “Australia’s Galapagos” for the richness of its abundant wildlife, diverse plant species and unspoiled beaches. It’s teeming with kangaroos, wallabies and koalas in their natural habitat, as well as platypi, echidnas, maritime birds, sea lions and the world’s only disease-free colony of Ligurian bees. When the smoke cleared, the inferno had not only claimed the lodge but also consumed almost half of the island and thousands of its animals.
The 2020 “black summer” would go on to engulf the continent from east to west, north to south, burning more than 42 million acres of land, claiming 51 human lives and killing a heart-wrenching billion native animals by conservative estimates. The extent of the tragedy is still hard to fathom. Photographs of holidaymakers cowering on once-idyllic beaches under a shower storm of embers, along with the graphic images from Southern Ocean Lodge, have been indelibly seared into the Australian psyche. Even now, after a relatively mild and wet 2021 summer, the faintest scent of bush smoke can make Sydney residents, who lived fifty miles from the closest fires but suffered from a summer-long blanket of choking smoke, extremely anxious.
As Australia slowly recovers from the trauma of that summer, Southern Ocean Lodge is also gradually coming back to life. The blackened landscape is once again shot through with green and humming with insects and other wildlife. The kangaroos have returned. Construction of a new lodge will begin mid 2021. What’s happening on this isolated tract of Kangaroo Island is emblematic of the healing that is underway throughout the country, both physical and psychological.
The bitter irony of the destruction of Southern Ocean Lodge by fires, arguably made catastrophic by climate change, is that it was built with the lightest footprint possible on the natural landscape. Owners James and Hayley Baillie are pioneers of an Australian style of laid-back luxury that values sense of place, sustainability and genuine experience over ostentation. The lodge building itself, situated on limestone cliffs overlooking the pounding surf of Hanson Bay, is at equal distance between the island’s two major attractions, the Remarkable Rocks and the Seal Bay sea lion colony. It only occupies one percent of the 250-acre natural reserve it sits in, and the Baillies protect the remaining 99 percent to preserve its pristine state for future generations.
The couple was more than a thousand miles away at Capella Lodge on Lord Howe Island, one of the five properties in the Baillie portfolio, as the fire destroyed their flagship lodge. Guests and staff had been evacuated to nearby Adelaide on the mainland while the hotel managers, husband and wife team John Hird and Alison Heath, along with four remaining staff, huddled in a bunker under the lodge’s Great Room, the curvaceous lobby lounge that once afforded guests undisturbed views over the wild ocean, peering through a little hole as the fire swept over them in five waves.
Two hours later, when the staff emerged, they were confronted by “a moonscape of black twigs sticking out of the ground and white ash everywhere,” says Hird. The Baillies chartered a plane and arrived the next morning. James Baillie says he was in utter disbelief. “Arriving on the island was like arriving into a war zone.” Makeshift camps were set up around the airport for emergency services, and the smell of the fire and the stench of burning flesh was sickening. “Really, you’re in a state of shock,” he remembers. “Especially with something that that you’d lived and dreamed and built from scratch.”
