Another Ash Wednesday?

I was nine, when Ash Wednesday raged across the state a day after my birthday. I remember scorching hot classrooms with the windows open, and gusts of smoke and warm cinders blowing in on the hot wind, sent down the Ferntree Gully Highway from Mount Dandenong. I remember my dad in his study next morning, glued to the radio, saying Cockatoo had been razed to the ground, and that I didn't realise he didn't mean a native bird, but a whole town. I remember being asked to choose clothes and shoes and toys to give to kids whose houses had burned down, and my mum volunteering at the shelter where hundreds of people now slept.

In Warrandyte, we grew up with fire plans and a wary eye on days where there was a hot northerly wind in summer. My mum has stood on the roof of our house stuffing the downpipes with rags so she can fill the gutters with water, and has put out spotfires in the garden from burning embers carried on the wind. I was 17 and raged with helplessness from a mile up the road, because they wouldn't let me across the bridge at the Yarra to help her.

Melbourne's outskirts are burning again today, and people have died and they say there could be hundreds of homes burned. Towns that once marked stages in my journey as I drove from Mitchelton at Nagambie to Melbourne and 'home' will now be remembered for Black Saturday, February 7: Broadford, Kilmore, Wallan, Clonbinane... and others from 'the back road' down to Mum's: Whittlesea, Kinglake, Hursbridge. They're all in trouble tonight, along with Gippsland and Horsham and other places too.

Folks here in England can't possibly understand the concept of a fire so out of control that it's all you can do to get the people out. It can race up a hillside in seconds, gut a house in minutes. Flames roar 70 feet high and generate their own 100km an hour winds as they suck all the oxygen from the air.

A couple of years ago, one such fire burned out an area the size of Portugal in the high country - although few if any lives were lost. This time, the area is much, much smaller, but the results are much, much worse...

I don't much feel like watching the rugby any more.