As the car makes its way up the road, blackened paddocks on either side, a wedge-tailed eagle glides far above, hungrily searching for anything that might have survived the inferno that swept across this landscape ten days earlier.
Jim Billings is returning to Upton Hill, east of Avenel in Victoria, for the first time since a bushfire destroyed his home.
The landscape leaves you in no doubt: this was an intense fire. In some places the ground appears to be not merely burnt, but baked.
It’s grape country. Harvest time would have started in a month. Yet the lush vines haven’t slowed the fire at all. We drive past row after row after row of charred grapevines.
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