We met through mutual friends. On New Year’s Eve, we became more than friends and have been inseparable ever since. Geographically worlds apart, I (Dushan) was born close to the equator (in Sri Lanka) and Ilona spent her formative years by the North Pole (Latvia). Melbourne has been home for almost two decades.
We’ve lived together in almost ten countries, and dance in the universality of our diverse stories. As nomads, our relationship embraces every colour of the emotional rainbow and we’re richer because of this. It’s a rare trait to find someone who isn’t constricted by social pressures or the rigidity of cultural norms, so we’ve been happily stumbling down the rabbit hole reinventing the relationship wheel and figuring it out as we go.

This is our first project together. When we embarked on this journey, we didn’t have a specific outcome in mind. We were planning our first trip away and Ilona voiced her interest in doing a road trip where we hugged the Eastern coastline and visited some of the fire-affected towns. I happily jumped on board. It’s a unique project for both of us because nothing could quite prepare us for what we witnessed. We hadn’t worked together before but really wanted to, and after many conversations about how the trip impacted us, it made complete sense that we should share our experience.
We’re both incredibly grateful for the privilege of living in Australia and are always searching for new ways to understand and experience the land. We have both grown fond of this beautiful, rugged landscape. Ilona and I have spent a lot of time outdoors hiking in nature. It’s nice to earn a view with a long walk in the bush. It’s hard to ignore the fact that we are all somehow involved in contributing to the traumas of climate change. As artists, we felt it was the least we could do to shed a little light on this gigantic global issue, so we just took our proverbial paintbrushes and started painting. 

Every summer, Australia is confronted with bushfires, but the devastation this year had a visceral effect on us. Living in urban Melbourne, we rarely get to experience the carnage first-hand but spending multiple days in thick smog drifting in from the north and seeing the sun turn blood red from the smoky particles turned our city into a hellish scene out of Dante’s Inferno. Even breathing in the city was a struggle.
The media coverage was overwhelming, and while it really brought the magnitude of the issue home, hearing that over a billion birds and animals lost their lives was conceptually unfathomable. It’s hard to imagine the weight of the situation.
We were planning a holiday and heard that many of the townships that relied on tourism were struggling to make their ends meet, so it made sense to do what little we could and headed for the coast. It started off as a curiosity but quickly became a calling, and this project is the result.

The South-Eastern coastline is renowned for its beauty and is usually a tourist hotspot. Mallacoota was our first stop. It’s a stunning part of Australia with white sandy beaches and granite peaks, prehistoric rock formations (some date in excess of four hundred million years). With a tiny population of just over one thousand people, the place would be sparse at the best of times, but as we drove in, it felt as if we’d driven into an abandoned town.
We spoke to a couple of locals and at the height of the fires, holiday-makers and locals were forced to retreat to the foreshore only to be rescued by Navy ships later. Even the firefighters were eventually told that they were on the bitter end of a losing battle and had to abandon their posts. Miraculously, at the last minute, the fire took a turn and the town centre was spared.
We drove through roads laced with burnt tree lines for what felt like hours through Croajingalong National Park, and the ghostliness of our surroundings made for some sleepless nights. Honestly, the barrage of haunting imagery we are often exposed to via social media cannot in any way compare to the experience of seeing the forests in the flesh. But there was a keen sense that everyone was interested in bringing as much normalcy back to the town as possible and the spirits were up. The rest of our trip was influenced by road closures and we stayed in some of the few campsites that were still operational at the time.

Ilona: It’s a tragedy that has affected me mostly on a humanitarian level. Seeing how the fires have affected the livelihoods of so many people is devastating but being surrounded by the silence in an environment that is usually in abundance of bird and animal life is just heartbreaking. Documenting our journey has helped me process the grief. It also gave me a tool as the world is confronted with a new disaster of a different scale. For many, the road to recovery from the fires is still to take shape.
Dushan: As an actor, I was taught to approach Shakespeare on the floor. Not by reading it but by engaging with it physically. In motion, the magic of his language comes to life and it starts to make a lot more sense. When confronted by tragedy, I try and approach it the same way. The bush fires were a stark reminder that Mother Nature is hurting and that global warming is more real than ever before. If done right, it could be argued that one of the wonderful strengths of artists and art is in their power to influence in a way that is inclusive, entertaining and heartfelt. I think we are waking up to the fact that our way of life is not in harmony with nature, and hopefully, we could nurture our artists to help impact lasting positive change.