Fire.

I am sitting here feeling very lucky. Lucky that I still have a house and contents, lucky that I still have electricity, and lucky that no-one I know (so far) has died in the awful bushfires that ravaged my home state yesterday.

I live about an hour from where the Bunyip fire was (and still rages now). The conditions yesterday were horrific, beyond description. Not just 46 degrees Celsius (that's about 115 deg Farenheit) but gale force winds. The world just seemed to explode. Ten years of drought, along with last week's heat wave of over-40 deg temps for days on end.....it felt like the end of everything. And I say that having survived the Ash Wednesday Bushfires in 1983. I was smack in the middle of those fires, too, and equally lucky. Sadly, many friends and relatives were not so fortunate, then.

About 5pm yesterday the power went out. The winds went crazy, and the only thing I could hear over the seering, howling gale and the crash of trees braking apart, was the lunatic screech of sirens.

But I'm one of the lucky ones. By all accounts the township of Kinglake, on the edge of Melbourne, is all but gone. And I heard a little while ago that there is just one building left standing in Marysville. Victoria is being declared a disaster zone, and I heard that they are bringing in the armed forces to help the brave, but hopelessly overwhelmed emergency services. Even more terrible is knowing that so many of these fires were deliberately started. I heard a fireman on the radio this morning refer to them as 'lighters'. The name made me shudder a little. Somehow it seems more ominous than the official 'arsonist', or the jokey 'firebug'.

The death toll rises every hour. The last news bulletin put it at 30 and rising. People got caught in their cars, trying to get out. Every time I think of it my breath catches in my throat a little. The mortuaries are full and they are talking about bringing in refridgerated containers to house the dead.

I was a horticulturist for many years working in bush regeneration. I have no doubt that the land will come back. But how do people come back from this?

This is a dangerous land to live in.

It's calm here now. The wind has dropped, and the temperature is a comfortable 20 deg C. There's even been a little rain. There have also been some fearsome thunder and lightning, but hey, you can't have everything. I'm going outside for a little while. I need to go and pick up all the dead birds in my front yard and bury them.