Woke to lots of fog sailing past smelling of smoke. DSE have now taken down ANY fire map, so (though they admit that the fire is now twice as large as it was on Friday), we can have no idea where it is. The Southern front of the fire is about 30-40 km away stretching all along the Northern horizon. In the 1939 fires the wind jumped the fire across that distance; from the Baw Baws to the Jeeralangs – so anything CAN happen. We were going to go for a walk along the tops of the Baw Baws during this hot weather if my back and the fire had not intervened! Good thing we are not up there I guess – or camped in the Wonnangatta-Moroka (as is our wont) in the path of the fire. Then I WAS going to spend some days with a friend canoeing the Thomson River – I think THAT idea is out this week, though I feel guilty for letting him down! We have three fire pumps and a sprinkler system set up as well as the garden watering system but have still more fine tuning to do on the plumbing today – and we will try to get mowing so we can extend the area of slashed/mulched grass even farther from the buildings, and move the sheep down to the creek where there is still some greenery which won’t burn. There is a fence to fix. The Sawyers (the original settlers here) survived the 1939 fires with only wet bags, so I think we will manage (we have the bags too!). The trouble is that back then there were far more properties with more stock and less rubbishy bush and long grass to burn. We are hoping the NOAA prediction of some rain comes to pass: our BOM can only predict global warming it seems, and neglect their day job of providing a welcoming shower now and then. You would think with all this fog and low cloud these might be ideal conditions for a bit of cloud seeding to put the fires out! The radio says the fire is burning into the Avon Wilderness (as I predicted). Nothing but good rain will stop it from getting into the Wonnangatta-Moroka. It may burn for weeks if it does not rain! Already countless innocent creatures have died needlessly because of this Green wicked madness! It makes me SO angry with them! They simply do not care for nature – as normal people do. They are just extremist ideologues and petty tyrants.
Destroyed as far as the eye can see (Bennison’s Lookout 2007)
