AUSTRALIA’S ARMEGEDDON                

I usually start my 3AW program by saying ‘good afternoon’. Obviously, I couldn’t today. Bad afternoon. Rotten afternoon. Grief-stricken afternoon. Stunned afternoon. Senseless afternoon. As this ravaged state battled through the third day of the worst disaster in our history. A continuing nightmare that gave new meaning to the expression ‘hell on earth’.

We were warned on Friday that the recipe for disaster was there. A prediction of the highest temperature in recorded history –and we reached it – combined with threats of dangerously high winds and a giant tinder box across the state.

 It could be as bad as Ash Wednesday, they said. There were demented arsonists out there, they said. Our firefighters and Police and ambos would be stretched to the limit, they said.

We were warned, but how many people -- except those who had already seen the eye of the tiger last week --  really thought it would not only be all of the horror of Ash Wednesday revisited but twice as bad?  With more than twice as many lives lost and hundreds more homes destroyed and townships obliterated. And some of those fires were deliberately lit by pyromaniacs who, if caught, should be locked up for life.

Who would have thought in Melbourne, as we selfishly wondered if the power would stay on and our air-conditioners would cope with temperatures in the Forties, who would have thought, that relentless, yet capricious, walls of flame were turning vast tracts of this state into Dante’s Inferno. Whole families were being wiped out? Whole towns –like Kinglake and Marysville – no longer existed. Incinerated in an instant.

And for every horror story there is a story of heroism. People driving through smoke and flames to save family, friends and strangers. That awesome army of volunteer firefighters risking their lives to save people and property while their own homes burn.

Two quick points:

In the midst of the shocking news reports I went back a powerful book about this country written by one of our best writers, George Johnston.

It was simply called The Australians. And the opening sentence sums up this cruel, often unforgiving, and crazy continent.

Johnston wrote: ‘It was never really intended as a place for people’.

And it probably wasn’t. The weekend news bulletins about the drought and bushfires in Victoria also reported on the floods in Queensland.

But we are here to stay. And the Aussie spirit, still surviving through the continuing nightmare, was epitomized by one soot-covered, devastated farmer standing in the smoldering and blackened remnants of his house. When asked if he’d rebuild, he said: ‘We love it here. Take more than this to drive us out’.
 
One other observation.  On radio and TV yesterday and last night, you heard about kids who’d lost their parents, parents who’d lost children, whole families in cars of escape that turned into gutted hulks of death.

And you felt for those strangers and cherished your own family just a little bit more and hugged them a little more tightly last night. 

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2009