When Garry Morgan arrived home on Friday afternoon, his rural mid-north coast property was surrounded by a “big plume of smoke”. Less than 24 hours later, two houses on his street would be lost and the surrounding forest reduced to blackened skeletal remains.
Morgan’s township of Bulahdelah, about 200km north of Sydney, was where a veteran firefighter died on Sunday evening when he was struck by a falling tree, marking what the NSW premier called a “foreboding start” to the bushfire season.
