Esperance community reflects on lasting effects of deadly fires five years on

Driving down the highway towards Esperance, on Western Australia’s south coast, travellers pass the blackened trees lining the roadside — stark reminders of the fires that devastated the region five years ago.

For some, those reminders conjure painful memories of the horror that struck the community on November 17, 2015, when bushfires took the lives of local farmer Kym Curnow, and backpackers Thomas Butcher, Anna…