“When we first started making this film, it was mid-March, when we all stopped going to the office and were dealing with the pandemic. The news around us was so horrible and grim, and so we thought: Let’s try to make something uplifting.”
After the fires, there was a glimmer of hope.
Only a glimmer, mind, but there it was: A patch of green where Adrina Selles’ home still stood, surrounded by the blackened devastation of January’s wildfires that ravaged vast tracts of wilderness across Australia’s state of New South Wales. A now semi-retired nurse, Selles had opened a homegrown wildlife care centre several years earlier, little thinking that one day she would be in the centre of a firestorm — literally — and yet now there she was.
This Wednesday, on an hour-long documentary on US public broadcasting’s PBS Nature showcase (Australian Bushfire Rescue, Weds. 8E/7P), science filmmaker Anja Taylor takes viewers on a personal journey through Selles’ story as she tries — and in some cases succeeds — nurturing wombats, wallabies, kangaroos and other wild animals badly injured in the bushfires back to health. The idea is that, eventually, the animals may be released back into the wild, or what’s left of it.
It’s an affecting program that shows that while one person can only do so much, it can still make an important difference to making this a better world. The program, although scheduled months ago, could not be better timed. Fierce wildfires are once again ravaging large tracts of wilderness area across the US West, even as climate deniers insist it’s all some kind of hoax driven my a Machiavellian desire to kill the oil and gas industry and create fake jobs in green energy projects that conservative right-leaning climate deniers insist are government featherbedding schemes.
The number of animals killed in the fires — in both far-flung US and Australia — is estimated in the billions, not tens or even hundreds of millions. This is no hoax.
Australian Bushfire Rescue focuses on Selles’ animal sanctuary and her rehabilitation efforts in the immediate aftermath of the fires. Her home doubles as a centre for rehabilitating injured and orphaned animals for eventual release back into the wild.
It was miraculously spared from the fires that swept through the area on New Year's Eve, and went on to serve as an emergency hub for rescue volunteers and vets. Since the fires, local and international support for Selles’ sanctuary has resulted in new enclosures, including a new triage centre for wildlife. Selles now has around 40 wallabies and kangaroos in her care.
The program itself is an encouraging glimpse into human resilience, and the humanity that reveals itself through catastrophe. The program gives one hope for the future, something we can agree we all need a little bit more of these days.
In a Zoom conference call with TV critics this past summer, Selles spoke at length — despite it being 6am local time Down Under — about her experience and her memories of those fateful days. This is not the first time wildfires have ravaged wilderness in Australia, and it will not be the last, just as wildfires are devastating the US West right now. This will happen again, and the very thought angers her.
“Going through the fires and these kinds of emergency situations really highlights everything and teaches you about the care and the needs of these little guys,” Selles said during the Zoom call. “It makes you more aware of their needs and environmental needs, what these animals hear and what they see, the disasters like the fires and floods and everything else. It highlights everything. Things like: what are we doing? What are we doing to our environment? What are we doing to these animals? Makes you question a lot of things.”
Selles said she learned a lot about herself during the experience.
“It’s funny how, at times, even though you feel your energy draining away, you have other people you can rely on. Somehow, with all the people working there, there's an understanding of the support that comes out, not only the physical support, but the emotional support that everyone gives to each other.
Adrina Selles ©Anja Taylor/WildBear Entertainment
“The wombat and the joeys surviving was just amazing. That was the respite. We had one little joey come in the middle of that devastation. Every kangaroo was burnt. But this little joey was perfect, its feet were beautiful, not a mark on it. Somehow that little joey became our mascot.
“People needed respite, so they would go and say, ‘Okay, it’s my turn to feed this joey.’ And they would look after it. There was another one, and then another one. They kept coming in.
“I have a group of volunteers that come in and help, and they are a really good team. They are out here all the time because I live there. They understand that. They will say, “Okay, it's time. You got to go away. You have to go on to something else and we'll do this. We'll take over.’ There's a kind informal backup.”
This isn’t about keeping house pets. The animals will have to be released eventually. At least, that’s the hope.
“That's where the carers need to be trained to go through that process. In the beginning, obviously, when the animals are (injured), they’re handled quite frequently. As they get bigger, we step back more and more, to prepare them for release, to the point where we might be in their enclosures only once a day.
“We have a couple of ways of releasing, some of which what we call a hard release. They have to be a bit older and have more weight on them. The hard release is, we just put them out there and push, and hopefully they have enough skills and weight on them and things like that so that they are going to survive.
“The other option is a soft release, where you — I can just open the gates at my property and they'll go as they please, and I support them. They slowly take their time. They do. They return to the wild.
“They won't actually let you touch them anymore. After a while, they’re only coming for food.
“They’re only coming for food; they are not coming for you anymore. They make that break themselves.
“Especially the boys, they leave and go elsewhere. Some of the girls will stay around. They’re only coming around for food, though. If I stopped feeding them, I wouldn't see them anymore.”
Veteran Nature executive producer Fred Kaufman — the program has been on the air for 39 seasons now — says the decision to produce Australian Bushfire Rescue was a no-brainer, even given the competition from other ideas for natural history programs. Especially now, during these trying times.
“There’s a very poignant scene in the film where the carers are out there and a mother kangaroo is trying to care for two young ones,” Kaufman recalled. “The mother was really very injured and she would not have survived. That kangaroo had to be put down.
“One of the keepers, rehabilitators, goes back to his truck and he gets a rifle and he shoots the kangaroo. We just had to take that out of the program. Even though every care was taken to put her out of her misery, it's just too hard to watch. We just couldn't go with it. But we made the point that that particular kangaroo had to be put down.
“While making this film, I really wanted us to highlight the work of Adrina and so many others caring for these animals, because it is very grim and the footage can be very disturbing and very hard to watch, and yet the work that the carers do, rehabilitating the animals and caring for them, just gives us all hope.
“When we first started making this film, it was mid-March, when we all stopped going to the office and were dealing with the pandemic. The news around us was so horrible and grim, and so we thought: Let's try to make something uplifting.”
Australian Bushfire Rescue airs Wednesday in the US and Canada on PBS at 8E/7C.
©Anja Taylor-WildBear Entertainment