Just a quick one before I take Six to school.
They reckon it’s going to hit 40C today so it’s going to be a hot one.
The Melbourne Cup is on this afternoon. Melbournites have a day’s holiday so the women can dress up in silly hats and stumble around in tart-trotter shoes and watch some horses run around a track while sipping Chardonnay – that’s the women drinking, not the horses, you understand.
We went to the local park for the Teddy Bears’ Picnic on Saturday, which was a nice day out sitting on picnic rugs and eating party food. The park is on top of the mountain so there’s almost always a breeze, and there’s a 360 degree view over the lowlands. You can see Sydney’s towers 60km away poking out of the haze and on a day like today you’ll look and be glad you’re not there. The park’s about four acres of grassland and stretches of trees, including some massive English oaks which were planted when the original English settlers struggled up here, so they are massive and you can sit under them and try and keep cool. Funny to think those acorns came up the mountain in someone’s pocket, all the way from Chorlton-Cum-Hardly, or somewhere similar.
The park was where the residents of this small enclave gathered every morning during the last Emergency, as they call the bushfires, about eight years ago, to hear from the fire people shouting above the clatter of the water bombing helicopters that kept dumping thousands of tons of water on people’s houses. One woman told me she went out one morning and suddenly got swept half way up the street in a rush of water. This Sunday the Rural Fire Brigade held Fire Wise which is a gathering of residents who sit in white chairs under the oaks and listen quietly to experts tell us what to do in the event of another Emergency this year.
The chief fire officer reckoned he was a bit of a joker, only there was tension in the air and no-one laughed at his silly jokes as he told us that detection of sudden bushfires is better than it's ever been, they get there quicker ("but if you hear the sirens, then it's already too late for you to get out") and they have more equipment than ever before. The kickers is, conditions have never been this worrying before so we had better get ready. It didn’t help that on a giant screen they had a dramatic music-backed film loop of last year’s Victorian fires and the people panicking as the inferno raged and roared across valleys in seconds and engulfed houses as if they’d been doused in petrol.
The fire officer said, “if you think it’s safe to just leave and go to the next village, well, think again. You will die there too.” Nice.