Five years on from Black Summer there are still signs of the firestorm

Property owners Alison Baker and Paul Williams put it there for guests to read, because if you didn't know, you wouldn't be able to tell their family home and large parts of their 100-acre property burned to the ground five years ago.

On a hot December day in 2024, the holiday accommodation park is lush and green, with Christmas bush blooming and thick foliage everywhere.

Ms Baker is there, with her dog Sam, waiting for a southerly buster to cool things down.

A goanna runs across the asphalt outside the property on Radiata Road; rainbow parrots hang in the trees sucking nectar from flowers; and there's a roar of cicadas: nature has returned.

But if you look close enough, there are signs the property was among many in the western part of Kangaroo Valley that bore the brunt of the Currowan firestorm swept up from down the coast just after New Year in Black Summer.

The stumps of gums that line the roads appear almost fuzzy from the bright green regrowth, while their tops remain bare with sticks pointing to the sky.

Along the ridge line the trees still grow unevenly: some in clumps, some sparse.

And there are brand new homes, like Ms Baker's, built to stringent fire standards in the hope they'll make it through next time a fire comes.

A picture in the Banksia Park guest book shows the aftermath of January 4.

The house, two of the holiday cottages and many of the other structures are charred and flattened, the sand from the pool filter was turned to glass in unimaginable heat and everything looks a shade of black, white or brown.

"People couldn't tell that any fire had come through here, and they would ask us 'oh, where were you placed, or how close did you get to the fire?'," Ms Baker said.

"We were devastated.

"We've been here for 30 years, we raised our family here and on the night of the fire we were next door."

The couple had been hosing their home all day, and left sprinkler systems operating with a back-up generator set to kick in when the electricity failed.

They sheltered in a "fortress-like" neighbour's house equipped with sophisticated fire systems and firefighters to protect it after the blaze came through.

In their guest book, Ms Baker and Mr Williams described the experience.

"Towering smoke columns funnelling higher into the sky formed a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, which then collided with southernly buster, creating windspeeds over 200km/h and temperatures above 1200 [degrees]," they said.

"This collision impacted approximately 10kms, centred around Radiata Road, 60 homes and a further 40 buildings lost on the night."

When they returned to their property they needed chainsaws to get in, and found their home of 26 years totally destroyed.

"It probably exploded from the heat," Ms Baker said.

Years on, as she sits and waits for another of the famous cooling winds to arrive, Ms Baker remains struck by the power and whim of the southerly buster which pushed the blaze in the direction of her home.

"It was all about when the southerly was going to come through, and where it was going to send it," she said.

"Had this southerly buster arrived five minutes earlier, we may not have been impacted by this firefront, five minutes later the village of Kangaroo Valley would surely have been destroyed."

Despite the devastation, which left the town in a smoke-filled haze for days, Ms Baker said it took no time for her and Mr Williams to decide to stay.

"In the past five years, I've seen this community be a resilient, organised, tight community who are very mindful of the events that we could face in the future," she said.

"With climate change, everything is more extreme - whether it's the heat or cold or rain or dry - so we're going to be massively impacted by all these sorts of things as time goes on.

"In some ways, we are fortunate because this house will stand the test much better than the previous one, and we would hope to not have to rebuild again.

"But this is a place where we decided within two days that we would rebuild because we didn't want to live anywhere else."

Unfortunately for Kangaroo Valley, Black Summer was just the start of an extraordinary run of events that some residents say have changed it forever.

In the days after the fire, the Mercury visited the town, where smoke was mingling with rain clouds and cafes were handing out free coffees to the Rural Fire Service crews taking a break from snuffing out fires.

At the Maddisons in the Valley cafe, Maddison Codie was there, and feeling hopeful as it began to rain, yelling "Bring it on" to the heavens as a thunderclap rang out over the town.

The problem is, it rained too much, but not before a global pandemic stopped tourists from coming for months on end.

Since 2020's bushfires and the arrival of COVID-19, there have been multiple flooding downpours which have broken records for Kangaroo Valley and shut down many of the roads around the town due to mudslides or sinkholes.

Even now, one of the main roads into town, Moss Vale Road, is still being repaired and has stop/start traffic, which slows down residents and stops some tourists from coming.

And then a cost-of-living crisis has meant tourists have less money, which has further hampered the recovery for tourism towns like Kangaroo Valley.

On a quiet weekday before Christmas, Maddisons in the Valley worker Marijke Parker, a long-time resident who supported colleagues whose homes burnt down in the fires, is weary after such a bad run.

"I don't think Kangaroo Valley is the same town it was before," she said.

"A lot of people have sold up, and with everything that's been ongoing it has really affected local business and employment."

She said the fires felt almost like a distant memory with all that came afterwards.

"It just feels like there's been disaster after disaster," she said.

"You just keep going, but it's quite hard to get out of that thought that something else will happen. It's hard work, just waiting for the next thing."

Ms Baker also acknowledged the run of devastating events for the town which started even in the months leading up to the fire.

"The town was evacuated weeks ahead, because we were aware that a fire can travel 60km in minutes if in the right conditions,"

"There were no guests in town, so all of the businesses suffered with that ahead of the fire, then just extrapolate that out after the fire and then COVID comes along and nobody was coming anywhere, going anywhere.

"The community returned, but that's not really where the retailers get their money from.

"And now, of course, people don't have the money, so it's been a tough time for the town."

However, she said the strength of the community kept her going.

"We just got on with it, we had a massive amount of support, we were well insured and we reopened our property, about a year later," she said.

Around the new house, she and her husband have installed multiple artistic flourishes that look like sculptures but are actually bits of molten metal that they picked up and kept in the days after the fire.

In the newly built camp kitchen, a mural is being painted based on photos of charred bushland that appear in the guest book.

It shows new plant growth and the artist has added in images that show the return of kookaburras and kangaroos.

"The fire is a part of our story now," Ms Baker said.

On January 4 this year, she and Mr Williams will be flying into Sydney, heading back home after visiting family in their native New Zealand for Christmas.

"I'll probably text my neighbour, who we stayed with that night," she said.

"We were saying the other day that we wonder when we'll stop having the date as a yearly anniversary.

"Maybe this year is that year, where we start to mark it once every five years instead."