Report from Down Under

Our Austrialian friend, Yahya Abdal-Aziz recently sent this report on the fires there. He also sent a comment on “The Impeachment.”

The Fires

Thanks for your concern!  We're doing better than we might expect. 

The Sunraysia region, centred on Mildura, is a semi-arid land, with much irrigation from the Murray and Darling Rivers that flow through it.  So we have large acreage farms with intensive cultivation that are, in drought times, particularly vulnerable to fire, and we've had a couple of major grass fires in the region in the last two months.  And the natural vegetation of the remaining bush lands is of course much drier than usual, because of the ongoing drought.  So there have also been a few sizable bushfires in the region, too.  Luckily (from today's point of view), we had some bigger bushfires in the last two years, which have somewhat reduced our present vulnerability.

Right now, the chief threat to those of us living in town is the poor air quality.  The prolonged drought has raised a lot of red dust, which often blows in and coats everything.  We've probably had six or seven days of major dust storms, when the sky is red rather than blue, despite blazing sunshine above.  And some days we've also suffered - along with most of south-east Australia - from the smoke pall generated by the bushfires in East Gippsland, at the opposite corner of the state.

In the medium term, people need to know that it's still safe to visit Australia.  Indeed, many of the smaller regions and towns depend largely on tourism, internal as well as from interstate and internationally, for a substantial part of their livelihood.  A program called "Bushfire Recovery" has been started by a major TV network to promote getting everyone back to business as before.

Long term, there's a lot of reconstruction to do; and - I hope! - some hard thinking on a serious plan to manage and reduce future fire risk throughout the whole continent, including Tasmania.  The Aborigines used to manage their food supply effectively, through strategically lit "cool burns", which also replenished the soil and the food supply for the animals and plants in their diet.  Their traditional knowledge of the land was both a sacred right and a sacred duty.  Their practices arguably changed the ecology of the land; yet they never created the dust-bowls we've seen in the Victorian Mallee and Wimmera, and also in broad-acre farms in South Australia.  Nor did they raise the water-table so high that millions of acres of land has been abandoned due to rising salinity.

This terrible degradation of the land is due to the extensive land-clearing programs of generations of immigrant farmers and their governments, and their continued reliance on monoculture techniques of farming.

"When will they ever learn?"

Perhaps we should instruct our lawmakers and governments that they, too, have a duty to us and to the earth, to manage fire effectively, based on the evidence collected here over a thousand or more generations of human habitation.

Regards,

Yahya Abdal-Aziz

Mildura - Victoria 3500