Tuesday February 10, 2009
Tuesday February 10, 2009 Australians are in shock with the terrible bushfires over the weekend in Victoria. Here in the Sun Sydney office the mood is somber. On Monday the office was much quieter than normal. People did not want to talk about what had happened.
I love this country. Australia is a country of such natural beauty and such contrast. I love the Australian bush, in fact our house back onto a bush reserve and is in a bushfire prone area and yet I live 20 mins from the center of city.
Bushfires are part of living in this country and have been part of the Australian landscape for thousands of years. However Man needs to understand the power of bushfires. What we saw on the weekend were shocking conditions with temperatures over 47 degrees C, that is 116 degrees F, with extremely strong hot winds, which is a receipe for a firestorm. The fires were moving at close to 100kmh and those in the path of the firefront had no hope.
The events of the weekend remind me of an iconic poem by Dorothea McKellar called My Country
- The love of field and coppice
- Of green and shaded lanes,
- Of ordered woods and gardens
- Is running in your veins.
- Strong love of grey-blue distance,
- Brown streams and soft, dim skies
- I know, but cannot share it,
- My love is otherwise.
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- I love a sunburnt country,
- A land of sweeping plains,
- Of ragged mountain ranges,
- Of drought and flooding rains.
- I love her far horizons,
- I love her jewel-sea,
- Her beauty and her terror
- The wide brown land for me!
- The stark white ring-barked forests,
- All tragic to the moon,
- The sapphire-misted mountains,
- The hot gold hush of noon,
- Green tangle of the brushes
- Where lithe lianas coil,
- And orchids deck the tree-tops,
- And ferns the warm dark soil.
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- Core of my heart, my country!
- Her pitiless blue sky,
- When, sick at heart, around us
- We see the cattle die
- But then the grey clouds gather,
- And we can bless again
- The drumming of an army,
- The steady soaking rain.
- Core of my heart, my country!
- Land of the rainbow gold,
- For flood and fire and famine
- She pays us back threefold.
- Over the thirsty paddocks,
- Watch, after many days,
- The filmy veil of greenness
- That thickens as we gaze…
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- An opal-hearted country,
- A wilful, lavish land
- All you who have not loved her,
- You will not understand
- though Earth holds many splendours,
- Wherever I may die,
- I know to what brown country
- My homing thoughts will fly.