Aflame

The lovely rain I described in my last post - almost two months ago - was followed by only a few showers before the heat and dry wind swept in from the west, bearing the hopes, dreams, and topsoil of generations of farmers with it.  Those winds, as they whirled and tore at our gardens, have sucked most of the remaining moisture from our soil - Jamieson Creek no longer sings to us, but merely seeps down between exposed banks and tree roots, creeping towards the falls, and Lake Burragorang beyond.

It wasn't long before the smoke followed the dust, heralding the onset of one of our nastier fire seasons.  The Valley on The Mountain is so far unscathed by fire, apart from one escaped campfire in the scrub behind the lake.  The warnings of Catastrophic fire weather kept many of the usual tourists back down in The City on The Plain, and many of our local people decided it would be a good place to spend a couple of days, too.  We were fortunate that only a few, small fires broke out in the Blue Mountains this week, though they kept the firefighters and residents busy enough.

From any high point around here, in recent days, the huge clouds of smoke from the Gospers Mountain fire have made a startling curtain across the northern horizon.  Other days, The City has been invisible in a pall of smoke and air pollution, and I am glad my lungs are operating in a different part of the atmosphere.

My writer's conscience, despite the lack of blog posts in recent months, had not been bothering me as much as usual - this partly because of the progress I am making with the final edit of my current attempt at a novel, and partly because keeping the gardens alive, reconstructing an ageing and decrepit deck, tearing down old fencing, and filling vacant spots at the library have all but drowned it out.  Until now, when, suddenly, it has been awakened by circumstance.

With the worsening of the fire season has come the regular barrage of toxic politicking and trolling that inevitably launches itself at the throat of any who dare ask or suggest the question "Is this weather/fire danger/drought being made worse by climate change?"

Some of the nastier and loonier responses have come from our former Deputy Prime Minister, Barnaby Joyce, who dismissed the deaths of two people in the fires with the observation that they "most likely voted Green" - a comment that carried with it the unspoken implication that their deaths were thus their own fault for supporting the wrong political party. 

Could he say with certainty that they voted that way?  Well, no, but it doesn't matter because Barnaby was off on a new tangent, blaming the bushfires on changes to the sun's magnetic fields.  Does he really believe any of this nonsense? 

Probably not, but it serves to stir up certain parts of his support base for whom labels like "Greenie" or "Conservationist" or "National Parks" are triggers guaranteed to induce a frothing, apoplectic rage at those "others", while making sure that they are more likely to vote for Barnaby in the future.

Across all forms of media, but especially the internet, the old straw men are set up and knocked over, as the trolls manufacture posts to "prove" that the fires are all the fault of the "Greenies" who have obstructed all forms of hazard reduction until the inevitable firestorms erupt - or are the fault of the National Parks and Wildlife Service, who have "locked up" the Parks to prevent any burning off occurring in them.

My experience is the opposite of those lies.  I did twenty years of service with the VBFB and RFS, as well as some paid firefighting with NP&WS, in a rural area that consisted of entangled farms, State Forest, weekend properties, and National Parks.

My brigade had a large membership, and was one of the busiest in the shire - indeed, one of the busiest in the Hunter Valley.  We regularly worked with NP&WS on hazard reductions in and around the adjacent National Parks, and they helped us whenever they could - despite being perpetually understaffed.  The claims that no HRs happen in Parks is just completely untrue.  NP&WS not only planned these things well ahead, but talked to us about what they hoped to acheive.

As for those detestable Greenies that so quickly raise Barnaby and Co's blood pressure - many members of my brigade and the neighbouring brigades espoused Green or conservationist political views.  Did they vote Green?  I wasn't looking over their shoulders at the ballot box, but some of them did hand out Green how to vote cards, so probably.

The brigades in our sector were peopled by people - community members - of various genders - male and female, straight and gay - young (16) and old (up to almost 80) - from a variety of ethnic, cultural, belief, and non-belief backgrounds - and from all across the educational and social spectrum of Australian society.

They were all, no matter what political or personal labels some might like to pin on them, there when needed, sweating in the smoke and flames and dust and diesel fumes, risking their very lives for the sake of the community, near and far.  They attended small hazard reductions, huge blazes, long campaign fires, out of area responses to fire, flood, and other emergencies.

They attended house fires, air crashes, car crashes - some fatal, truck fires, flood rescues, and looked for lost bushwalkers and missing children.  They cut steps down steep hillsides to help the ambulance teams reach motorcycle riders who had unexpectedly parted ways with their machines and ended up in the bottom of a gulley, down among the thorns and death adders.

They worked all night with their own chainsaws, as well as the ones from the fire tankers, clearing away hundreds of fallen trees along the main road and private driveways, checking on the safety of every resident in the district, after a tornado carved a 40 km long scar through the forests and farms of our area.

Those "Greenies" that Barnaby and his ilk so despise and condemn lived in the bush too - they turned out with the rest of the brigade (Green, Liberal, Labor, Democrat, Country Party, or donkey voter) to carry out hazard reductions and other fire mitigation preparations, and they looked after their own properties and kept an eye on their neighbours welfare too.

When politicians write off people or classes of people by applying a sneering label to them, they are treating the whole community with contempt, and dodging their own obligations as elected members of our governing class to work for the benefit of all our people - not merely for themselves.