The capacity of the Australian bush to bounce back after fire is truly remarkable. In the year since the Currowan fire ignited, great swathes of scorched forest on the South Coast are now cloaked in the deep green of rebirth.
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Trees blackened and blistered by the flames are now covered in epicormic regrowth. But it's not only the crowns that are recovering at a spectacular pace.
At ground level, ferns and native grasses are returning with a vengeance, helped by the breaking of the drought. The La Nina weather pattern we are experiencing now is helping to carpet the forest floor with green.
This is wonderful news this season but, as the bushfire calamity ought to have taught us, one rainy spring and summer is all too easily replaced by hot and dry ones.
So while we can rejoice in the new green, we should remember that it doesn't take much for all the lush growth to brown off and become fuel for the next run of fires.
As the RFS keeps telling us, there is no room for complacency, especially with a warming, increasingly unpredictable climate.
Peter Dunn, who helped lead the recovery effort in Lake Conjola, was one of a number of former emergency services and fire chiefs who warned the government about the peril Australia was facing well before the disaster struck.
He knows too well that once one disaster passes another forms over the horizon. He knows we have to prepare for and adapt to much more volatile conditions.
The way we deal with fire in the landscape needs to change, he says. We simply can't afford to let it burn in the hope it bypasses areas of human settlement.
To deal with outbreaks in remote and inaccessible country, we need a permanent fleet of aerial firefighting appliances which can respond with retardant quickly.
Peter says we also need a large number of remote area firefighting teams which can be dropped in to ensure blazes are properly extinguished.
As we saw last year, a blaze that seems remote and of little consequence one day can run out of the forest and threaten lives and property the next.
Now is the time to be acting on these things, not in two, three or 10 summers' time, when we are scrambling to deal with a massive emergency.
As the RFS keeps telling all of us, we need to prepare and plan for bushfire now.
