Bushfires in Victoria

I haven't posted for a few days. I meant to, on several things, but like the rest of Australia I have been in thrall to the news of the Victorian bushfires. I am nowhere near Victoria, but it's truly a national disaster. For many Australians this could so easily be on our own doorsteps. At present over 180 people are confirmed dead and well over 1,000 homes lost. This is the worst natural disaster in the history of the Australian nation. I am not sure what more I can write and other topics have seemed a little trivial until now.

In January 2003, bushfires destroyed over 500 homes and killed four people in Canberra, the Australian capital city. We were living in Canberra then, in a suburb not directly affected, but close enough to the action to be on evacuation standby. We were in town on that fateful day and watched the firefighting helicopters flying back and forth, from lake to fire front, over and over. We escaped unscathed, but friends lost their houses and everything in them.

To give an idea of the scale of the Canberra fires, and how bad it must have been for the people in the heart of both these and the current Victorian fires, here are a couple of photos I took in 2003. The first is taken near the city centre about 1pm on a summer afternoon. We went to a movie and walked outside to drive home through this.



The second photo is taken from our suburb. The fire was stopped from crossing a major road just the other side of the hill in the picture - otherwise we'd have had a different story.



Nothing else to write on this right now. My thoughts are with those who have lost loved ones and their homes in Victoria this week.

In the news today

Well, there are lots of things in the news today of course, but two in particular caught my eye.

First, one of my all-time favourite people I've never met, Sir David Attenborough, on receiving hate mail from religious fundamental types. Sir David Attenborough: 'I get hate mail telling me to burn in hell for not crediting God'.

Sir David also said it was "terrible, terrible" when creationism and evolution were taught in schools as equivalent, alternative perspectives.

"It's like saying that two and two equals four, but if you wish to believe it, it could also be five... Evolution is not a theory; it is a fact, every bit as much as the historical fact that William the Conqueror landed in 1066."

I'm with Sir David on this one!



Second, a bit of "well I never!" or "how cool is that!". A NSW couple got to see a red belly black snake eat a brown snake - cool enough alone you might think - but THEN the brown snake managed to escape from the belly of the red belly black by exiting head-first from its mouth. Now that is seriously cool!

Mr Barton reckons that somehow the brown snake turned itself around inside the black snake.

"When you tell these stories no-one believes you, but I have the photographs," he said.

I have seen both these snakes in the wild, but never doing anything quite so exciting. Although S did a good job of almost stepping on a brown snake on a bushwalk late last year - that was exciting for us! Here's a nice red belly black I befriended (from a safe distance) at Jervis Bay a couple of years back: