There's those special days in Australia.

[reynardo]

All Australians know them. New arrivals get to know them pretty darn quickly.

If you live near (and by near I mean "within 100km") of bush, you learn about them even faster.

They're the days of summer that arrive with a rush of hot air. And it keeps coming.

It's not the heat build-up before a thunderstorm, where the humidity is trying to send you nuts and you can feel the pressure of the oncoming clouds.

It's the dry, desperate heat, the one that sucks the very moisture from your mouth and your nose, that leaves you panting with a quick walk out to the letterbox. It's the wind that sweeps past you and leaves your eyes dessicated and trying to blink. And it's the heat and the wind combination that has you scanning the horizon and praying that the schoolkids are being entertained somewhere. Under a sprinkler. Inside a cinema.

Because it's the sort of day that bored, hot, stupid children think would be a fun day to play with matches and cigarette lighters in the bush. The sort of day that teenagers who have had their Christmas and now can't think of anything to do think that it might be cool to light a fire. And it's the sort of day when one tiny little flame will flare up in moments and become a flare, a fire, a burning tree and a runaway grass blaze and suddenly the whole area's burning.

Sometimes it's not the kids. Sometimes it's not deliberate. A spark from a tractor. A flash from an electrical wire shorted by a branch blowing onto it. Tiny points of heat from an angle grinder in a shed next to long, dry grass.

But it starts.


And you scan the horizon and you look for that cloud - the one with the dark red-black centre that's heading straight up, even in this wind or that's opaque when there's not another cloud to be seen, or you just sniff the air for that touch of scorching, and you curse and you check where and how and whether you need to start thinking of packing or just bracing for the stories that will take over the news.

And you hope that the cool change will bring rain and moist cool air and not just a change in the wind direction that will turn the 20km long fire scar with a 200m wide front into a 20km long firestorm that sweeps down the hills and across the valleys and the fire leaps from treetop to treetop where the very air is burning. And the sparks and the embers blow ahead for another 5km so the fires start up where people thought they still had a few minutes...


I'm lucky where I am. I'm in the midst of suburbia, and even the creek nearby is built up enough that while things might burn, we're not going to have a full-on bushfire near us. Been there. Done that.

But you still worry. Every summer.