Former long-time photographer with The Canberra Times, Graham Tidy, has captured the resurrection of a street in Chapman that was devastated by the January 18 firestorm 20 years ago.
Lincoln Close in Chapman resembled some otherworldly dystopian landscape when he first trained his lens on the street in the days after the firestorm.
"Well on the day, I wasn't actually working. I was at home in Jerrabomberra filling the gutters with water. You just didn't know where it was coming from or going to," Mr Tidy, now 70 and retired, said.
"So later on that day, I went into the office to see if I could lend a hand but all the fire had passed by that time.
"Over the next few days, we visited all this area and I spotted this place and thought it would make a nice panoramic shot of all the devastation. And then thought maybe I could come back at different intervals to see how it's going."
"The first couple of times I came was on a fairly regular basis, maybe once a fortnight, and you could see the clean-up was happening but it was very, very slow. And probably a year later, you could see things come back to some sort of normality."
"A lot of the trees were obviously gone and so desolate. But now you wouldn't recognise it as the same place. It's just grown again, more homes have been built. Yeah, it's lovely to see."
Tidy left The Canberra Times in 2016 after almost 27 years with the paper.
He went back to shoot Lincoln Close again for the 20th anniversary, even though he no longer worked for the paper, because he appreciated the significance of the milestone.
The street is now green and lush, so different to that barren brown image of 20 years ago.
"The Canberra firestorm was certainly one of the most memorable events during my tenure, along with the Thredbo Landslide and the Royal Canberra Hospital implosion," he said.
"I think the fires had the most impact on me because of the lead-up smaller fire events in the preceding days that we covered and then the amazing stories of both loss and survival we uncovered, in the days and weeks after the fire.
"Of all the natural disasters, I think it affected Canberrans the most. Being a fairly tightknit community, I would reckon every Canberra resident would have known at least one person who was directly affected by the fire."
Graham Tidy's photo timeline
See how Chapman Close rebuilt over the years after the destruction of the 2003 bushfires in the following series of images.
January 2003
March 2003
April 2003
May 2003
June 2003
October 2003
January 2004
April 2004
January 2005
January 2006
January 2009
January 2010
December 2012
January 2023
