Australia will never forget the 2019 Black Summer bushfires, wherein flames seared across our country, burning 19.6 million hectares of land, destroying thousands of buildings and dozens of lives. It’s an event that will live in infamy, and one that the nation is still healing from.
At times like these, the best in our communities can often be brought forward. From the heroism of our firefighters and front-line responders, to Australians and our friends overseas digging into their pockets to donate to our recovery, we quickly acknowledged that the fastest road to recovery from this calamity was to work together.
The Darlings played their own small part in the response to this in June, travelling to Milton to help their Rotary Club plant new trees to replace some of the ones that had been lost in the fires. As of this week, our District Governor has sent us evidence that one of our saplings planted on his property is going strong and rising from the ashes of those horrible days.
The Environment is now one of Rotary’s areas of focus, and tree-planting will be a regular activity that the Darlings are engaged in. The photo of this young sapling should spur us on in planting new trees that our descendants will enjoy the shade of.
