TheBanyanTree: Sydney spring

[Peter Macinnis]

The seasons have turned.  The first koel, a tropical member of the
parasitic cuckoo group, was reported the other day, and I heard one a
couple of days later. As more of them arrive, the early mornings will
become truly horrid.

In two weeks, all the football grand finals will be over, and then I
think we can start to call it summer.  Not high summer, just ordinary
summer, the time when lawn mower calls to lawn mower across the hot roads.

The pace has accelerated.  The sun rises a minute earlier each day now,
and sets a minute later.  On the streets, boys wearing cricket whites
may be seen, and barefoot children are everywhere, but the main sign is
smoke.  We are anticipating a fairly hectic year here, perhaps the worst
for Sydney since 1994.

As a forestry student, I worked one summer with some of Australia's top
bushfire people, and acquired a deal of understanding, because they were
evangelical in their zeal to catch the untrained and train them, so I'm
better able than the average person to spot signs like the heavy
concentrations of standing fuel, but the volunteer bush fire brigades
have been trained in the same way.  They observe it far better than I,
and they have been sounding warnings.

We are dipping back into an El Niño event, and that means dry
conditions, low humidity and dry fuel, perfect conditions for fire storms.

So today was perhaps one of the last days available before high summer
to do strategic burning, creating low-fuel lines that will block fires
racing towards houses, and lines that will allow massive fires to
perhaps be contained.  Some days will be too dry, too wet, too windy or
something else, so the skyline to our north and west has been full of
smoke.  When I drove out to get some hardware today, I drove through a
red sunlight.

Now, as the sun sets, there are streaks of smoke across the sky, the sun
is orange-red, but there are no columns of smoke reaching up into the
sky to feed the streaks.  Out in the burnt areas, volunteers will prowl
through the night, vigilant in damping down any attempt the embers make
to spring to life.

On Monday and Tuesday, there will be sweet rain, and in the bush, the
plants, long since adapted to fire, will be dropping their seeds into
the damp ash, where they will quickly sprout.  Other plants, burned back
to ground level, will call upon the reserves stored below ground, and
send new shoots forth.

By high summer, it will be hard to see the difference, but if a fire
comes, the people ho need to know will be aware of exactly where the
burn will falter and starve.  There they will make their stand, while
the rest of us go hedonistically off to the beach.

-- 

   _--|\    Peter Macinnis            petermacinnis at ozemail.com.au
  /     \   de Bergerac Reader in Comparative Nosology, and deputy
  \.--._*   cleaner, Tooleybuc School of Arts and Creative Lambence
       v    http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm