Lately Australians have been revisiting some of the reasons that this country can be harsh and quixotic. Two years ago we had the catastrophic fires in Victoria. This week we have had the floods in Queensland. The continent has a habit of reducing human activity and the complacency of human occupation to a more realistic level. We set ourselves apart from the natural world and yet we are enmeshed with it, like it or not.
All school children once learned (maybe still do) the second verse of Dorothea Mackellar's My Country. The title for this entry comes from that poem, as does the more famous, 'of droughts and flooding rains.' Floods get a couple of mentions, actually, so it's probably right that we pay attention to them. I live in a bush-fire prone area and we will get a big one, some day in the near future. Every summer, they hove into our consciousnesses and we finally get to let down our guard come early autumn.
The loss of life and general destruction and dislocation is saddening, wherever it happens. Several hundred people appear to have died in terrible floods and mudslides in Brazil this week also. What can we say but how sorry we are. The world continues to defy our demand that it act in accordance with our wishes. As I say to Tom, there is just no telling how things will turn out in life, plan them how we will. But we have to keep on planning anyway. There is no choice, if you think about it.
Meanwhile, let us mourn with those who mourn.
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