Black Saturday - one year on

Last Sunday was the 1 year anniversary of the devastating bushfires in Victoria. Several memorial services were held and televised along with a number of documentaries (Inside the Firestorm on ABC TV) detailing the timeline of the events occurring that day. I found the ABC documentary compulsive viewing and was interested to note my recollection of events was not the same as the detailed timeline provided.
The major difference was the time I remember hearing that Marysville and Kinglake had been destroyed. I remembered driving down the Eastlink Freeway at 5pm that day listening to very bad news about the fires and subsequently driving through the bush burnt by fire in the previous week . Afterwards we watched the unfolding news events on TV and were aghast at the devastation.The next day I took several photos of the fiery sunset engendered by the smoke generated. And I thought we knew about Marysville and Kinglake destruction earlier than what was mentioned in the documentary. Just shows how malleable memory is.

It is with great relief that we can see the reconstruction of the towns is now starting.  It has taken much longer than anyone would have thought and there is still an enormous amount of work to do. Reconstructing peoples lives and futures will take a lot longer. The stories of courage and resilience are very inspiring.
This week, 1 year after the fires, we are looking forward to storms and rain. The Bureau of Meteorology yesterday warned of flash flooding in Melbourne which happened while the power authorities are dealing with outages in the northern suburbs after Wednesday's storm. Such a city of extremes.

As Dorothea McKellar (1904) so eloquently declaimed: 

"I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, 

Of ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains.

I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea,

Her beauty and her terror- the wide brown land for me!"