( Merlin spoilers under the cut )The antibiotics and puffer are working already - my coughing is much, much less than it was although it is still very bad at night. I went on a cooking spree on Friday, making salade nicoise for lunch, spring lamb soup for dinner, and a nommy citrus yogurt cake with orange syrup. SO GOOD. Making more salade nicoise today - I'm trying to keep up healthy eating.
I watched a doco on the History Channel last night called 'Firestorm' about the Black Saturday fires. It was obviously made for overseas sale, since A) they called them "forest fires" and B) they spent a lot of time explaining where Melbourne was, what eucalypts were, what the Stay or Go policy entails, etc. It was actually very interesting learning (from what they had to explain) where our fires differ from everywhere else in the world (such as that spotting doesn't happen anywhere near as much in other countries, or that radiant heat is a bigger killer here).
Anyway, while they did a good job of explaining the background, and included much of the most compelling footage from the day (including the film taken by
Daryl Hull, who they also interviewed, as Marysville burned around him), there were some big flaws in the program. First is that it seemed truncated. They spent so much time leading up to it, showing footage of CFA volunteers getting their gear on and stuff like that, but they didn't mention, for example, that 90% of
Marysville was destroyed. They didn't mention the number of deaths - surprising considering how much they talked about the "terrible toll" and " the state will never be the same again", etc. And worst of all they only mentioned the Murrundindi and Kilmore East fires - which, ok, they were the biggest and worst, but the Churchill, Beechworth and Bendigo complexes also killed people.
Lastly, and most insultingly, they said that "In rural Victoria, most residents went about their day oblivious to the looming danger..." Erm, NO.
Some people were oblivious, I'm sure - I have always been a bit peeved at the guy whose wife died, who was really critical of the government and emergency services and who said that "...my wife was very simple. She just listened to CDs on the way to work, she never read a newspaper, she didn't watch television news..." because if you live
anywhere in a civilized country, where you depend on public emergency services, you have a duty to keep yourself informed. And if you live in a rural area where you
know the fire risk is high in summer, you should bloody well inform yourself in summer of how the situation is going. You can't expect your own personal notification of danger.
However, I don't think that attitude was typical. I knew it was going to be an unprecedentedly bad day. I'm sure most people *did* know. Some people were cautious but had seen fire before and figured that if they were well-prepared they'd be OK. Some people were very conscientious and did everything they were advised to do, and some of them, no matter how well-prepared they were, still died. This was an event on a scale we have never seen before. But we'll be seeing them again, so we'd better bloody well learn from it, and vague generalisations about how oblivious "most" people were do not help.
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