“Hope Too Is Contagious”

Two women battled a firestorm to save the historic church and convent at Cobargo. Deb Taylor and Cal More invite Samantha Trenoweth into their community of resilience, compassion and hope.

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There had been smoke in the air for weeks but that Monday it was thicker, more pungent. Night fell and the sun went down “but the skies stayed red,” Cal More remembers. “We could hear something on the roof that sounded like rain. So we went outside to see, and it was black leaves just falling from nowhere. It was eerie.”

One of the reasons Cal and her partner, Deb Taylor, had bought the old convent at Cobargo was because they thought they’d be safe from bushfires. On the far side of Wadbilliga River, just beyond the western edge of town, it’s nestled between the Catholic church and the old schoolhouse, surrounded by gently rolling pasture, well clear of the dense bushland in the hills. Cal and Deb had both been through fires before – Cal as a child in the Blue Mountains and Deb in the rugged country west of Sydney near Warragamba Dam. Neither of them wanted to face a wall of flames again.

Of course there were other reasons they chose Cobargo. Cal, who is 59, had been working as a Uniting Church chaplain. “I was an LGBTQI support chaplain during the marriage equality debate,” she explains, “which was a bit of a stressful job as it turns out.” So after the plebiscite, she handed in her resignation. Then, one night she saw a news story about rainbow displays in shop windows all along the main street of Cobargo. “It just gave us a sense that we’d like the community here,” she says.

Deb, who turned 60 this year, works in finance by day, and is an amateur astronomer and astrophotographer by night. She liked Cobargo for its clear, dark skies. Then the old convent came on the market and they both fell in love with its lofty ceilings, its stained glass windows and its rambling old verandas looking out to grassy paddocks and forested hills.