Wombats, roos, ashes & dust.

My first night as a volunteer for Wildlife Victoria left me tattooed with too many facets to detail in a blog post. Here, instead, is a compilation of what I'll never forget.

• The dedication of fellow volunteers who've spent hundreds of hours searching for wombats, kangaroos, wallabies and any other wild creature that managed to survive Black Saturday's inferno.
• A surreal landscape that looked, smelled and sounded like ground zero of a post-apocalyptic world.
• Wonder of a night sky ablaze with stars normally obscured by a canopy of foliage that instead extended from horizon to horizon behind the shadows of blackened & burnt trees.
• Adrenaline rush that accompanied each sighting of a wombat or a roo, followed by a Starsky & Hutch-like bolt from a still-moving car -- one hand trying to follow the fleeing creature with a flashlight, the other carrying a blanket or container to capture it with -- and subsequent chase over, around and into impediments like charred tree trunks, charred logs and things too charred to be identified.
• The bloody speed of a wombat racing to its burrow.
• Enormous, starfish-shaped holes formed by tree trunks turned to dust by the inferno.
• Miles of terrain formerly covered by brush, bark and leaves turned to an ash- and dust-covered moonscape with the consistency of sand revealed by a retreating tide.
• Complete, devastating silence.
• Blackened trees covered with leafy growth, sprouts of bright green ferns and scattered tufts of yellow-tipped grass proving nature's resiliency.
• Image of a coal miner at the end of a long shift reflected off my bathroom mirror at 2 am after I returned home, covered in ash and dust.