The Watermelon Blog Green on the outside, social justice inside
"We can do better" (Kennedy)
Richest fluency
"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman
What can you think that hasn't been thought, say that hasn't been said? I keep waking in the night, some new horror from the fires seen and heard on the news running through my brain over and over (one night the death of an elderly couple found arm in arm; another the car driven into a dam; another a fire racing towards a lovely house on a hill; another a lady found dead in a car where she had fled with her precious china on the seat beside her; last night it was a description of dogs screaming inside a closed burning house). All, well, almost all, Australians have identified with the victims and survivors in Victoria. But I suspect that those of us in rural areas all round Australia identify even more strongly than do our city cousins. We can see, I think, fire running across our own farm, exploding into our own town. We can picture our friends and neighbours, wonder how we would bear their loss as the people of Kingslake and Marysville and all the rest have had to bear the loss of their friends. We look at our own dogs and cats and sheep and horses and wonder what we could do to save them. We think about losing the houses we built, the homes we furnished so lovingly, the gardens we struggled to grow in a drought, and we picture all that effort and achievement wiped away in an afternoon. Someone talked about the guilt feeling of survivors who had escaped when others had perished, and I think that feeling extends to some degree to all of us. There we were, going about our normal business while they fought for their lives; here we are with everything safe in our lives, there they are with nothing.
And then there are the heroes, for once not applied to footballers but to real heroes - the firefighters who battled so hard, the police and emergency services and paramedics who rushed into help, the neighbour who risked life for neighbour. Would I be so brave I wonder? But also villains - the arsonists of course, the people who failed to maintain power lines properly, the looters, the conmen collecting "charity" money. And people who have just behaved badly (I've got them on a list) - the commercial television reporters exploiting misery and intruding on grief and privacy and provoking lynch mob behaviour: the shock jock columnists who wanted conservationists strung up from lamp posts; the "fire managers" demanding ten times as much "prescribed burning"; the business leaders pretending that the fires had nothing to do with climate change.
People looking for answers as to why the fires occurred and how they can stop it happening in future? Well, the answers are complex, and the Royal Commission is going to have its work cut out sorting through the complexities and distinguishing submissions from ratbags with axes to grind (literally and metaphorically) and hobby horses to ride, from the genuine ones by concerned and knowledgeable people.
Some of my older readers will be familiar with the Vietnam War phrase - "We had to destroy the village in order to save it". A few people were suggesting a similar thing for Victoria long before the flames had died down. People were taking the opportunity to ride hobby horses - bulldoze all the trees alongside roads (in much of Victoria the only pieces of remnant vegetation of various kinds surviving); remove all trees on farms and for hundreds of metres around towns and individual houses; burn burn burn much more than we now do ("ecological burning" one man had the nerve to call it). All of those would irreversibly damage the environment of Victoria that people making such suggestions often profess to love.
On the other hand real solutions, involving compulsory fire proof building in fire prone areas; major restrictions on developments of housing estates and retirement villages in forested areas; stringent regulation on the maintenance of power lines; longer total fire bans; much greater support for rural fire brigades in equipment and fire suppression research; investigation of arson and developing methods for preventing it; and, the big one, the elephant in the room, joining with the rest of the world to get greenhouse gases reduced, to try to turn around the climate change that is creating the conditions for major fires.
I'm betting that the government follow the populist suggestions of the hobby horse brigade, and do nothing about the too hard basket of the real solutions.
"You are a person of some interest,one comes to you and takes strange gain away." (Pound)
"I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world." (Keats)
"nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights - or if a sparrow come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel." (Keats)