NEW HOPE RISING FROM THE ASHES

One year on from Australian bushfire disaster...

- Amy Sharpe

KOALAS are still being nursed back to health a year after Australia’s worst bushfires.

A veterinary site set up on Kangaroo Island after the month-long blaze still has 22 in its care.

But some 250 of the 650 marsupials rescued from the flames have since been released back into the wild.

Brit Georgie Dolphin, of Humane Society International, said: “That is actually a pretty remarkable success rate, given the dreadful injuries the animals suffered from the fire.”

But the charity warned some animal populations will never recover – and the fires could easily happen on the same scale again.

At the start of 2020, apocalyptic blazes dubbed Black Summer killed 26 people and billions of animals, destroying 3,000 homes and many wildlife habitats in the process.

More than half of famed Kangaroo Island, south-west of Adelaide, was flattened.