I miss arguing with you, trying to learn stuff by watching you, wondering why one wine tastes better than another, having a slab of butter melting in a burger you barbecued, your stubbornness, the worried brow, the bloody-mindedness, the golf swing, the purple saloon, getting greasy hands under the ol’ hillman, irish folk music.

I see you in my children, my brothers and my life.

I miss the single-minded determination that kept us together.

Mostly I wonder if you’d be proud of me

(Also, I was interested to see what a bushfire could do, having been a protected suburbanite all my life.)

When we arrived, the place was buzzing, or at least rumbling. Bikies everywhere! There’s a great ride through those hills I hear.

The bakery cafe is still intact and open, and a little cafe up the road has set up on the nature strip, so I had a choice when it came to coffee! The main street has been otherwise cleared, the rubble removed.

Going up a side street the remains of houses still lie waiting. There are green shoots. The destructive force has left. There is an indifference in the landscape. I don’t feel shocked?

I imagine the commerce of the town will get back on its feet quickly. Portables will be brought in for the ski season. Accommodation will be tight; people will daytrip from the city instead. But you’ll get a decent coffee, maybe even some booze by then. You’ll get ski-hire, and some pottery.

But I wonder if the people who lived in the rubble away from main street will be back. Perhaps this is the Marysville visitors didn’t know. The people who lived in a little slice of heaven.

As you ride back through the Black Spur, there are blackened areas, slightly blackened areas, and completely untouched, green areas. You wonder at a force, that on its day forced a wide front of fire by fluke of timing and wind changes through a small township and valley, wiping the township out as though it were a fleck of dust on an old roadmap.

If you have time, read the department’s quick history of bushfires in Victoria.

Some interesting historical points:

• 1851 – 6 February ‘Black Thursday’ – Fires cover a quarter of what is now Victoria (approximately 5 million hectares). Temperatures of 47 degrees alleged but Bureau of Meteorology not formed until 8 years later.
• 1939 – 13 January ‘Black Friday’ – Fires burnt 1.5 to 2 million hectares. The fires destroyed the township of Narbethong. The fires affected almost every section of Victoria. Temperatures reached 45.6 °C in Melbourne. “Black Friday was the culmination of a long, dry and hot summer that followed a drought that had lasted several years.”
• 2009 – 7th February ‘Black Saturday’ – 450,000 hectares – Temperature reached 46.4 degrees in Melbourne.

Severe bushfires occur  here. The time between major catastrophes seems to be long enough so that we can’t test and ratify our fire plans. We also have enough time to become complacent.

Even the heatwave was not the worst on record. Melbourne’s most sustained heatwave occurred in January 1908 when temperatures reached 39.9 (15th January), 42.8 (16th), 44.2 (17th), 40.0 (18th), 41.1 (19th) and 42.7 (20th). This year we had 43.4 followed by 44.3 follwed by 45.1 degrees – hotter, but not as long.

Were Victoria’s 2009 bushfires and extreme weather days caused, even partially, by global warming? Absolutely no proof.

Busted!

“So, in summary, it appears that the government is trying to make up for the failure of an earlier PC-based filtering program by rolling out an alternative, ISP-level filtering program that they know won’t fully prevent access to illegal material. They promise not to state what sites are being blocked, even as they promise only illegal content will be. To prepare for the roll out, they’re doing live testing of equipment and protocols they haven’t used in the lab, and not telling the ISPs when the program will be ready. It sounds like all of the worst clichés about government incarnated in a single program.”

Associate Professor Robert Nelson (Monash University) has sold out middle-aged men: “This was a photo taken not by a middle-aged man but the mother of the child. It seemed quite a responsible thing to do.”

He could be just reflecting social norms though. Qantas, British Airways or Air New Zealand have a policy of not seating adult male passengers next to unaccompanied children.

Boris Johnson, writing for The Telegraph, sums it up better than I could.

A few years back a male friend almost landed an assistant position at a kindergarten. The position was withdrawn at the 11th hour when several parents complained.

It came up in conversation tonight with a former colleague. My take on globalisation had been mostly indifference, as long as individuals could have the same benefits as multinational companies.

We pondered why Australian mortgage holders couldn’t transfer their debt to the US where interest rates are lower?

I recanted a story I’d read once of a US software developer who outsourced his tasks to India and kept pocketing his wage. (Google for it, I don’t want to dob the bugger in!)

There was interesting case recently in Australian Federal Court. The issue was whether genuine Ralph Lauren clothing purchased in the US could be ‘parallel import’-ed legally into Australia and sold here. Polo/Lauren claimed that its copyright had been infringed. However, the proceedings were dismissed with costs. My take is that if clothing producers can swan off to the cheapest place for production, why can’t consumers, or importers on their behalf, swan off to the cheapest place to buy the goods?

I picked up this book five or so years ago: “The Collapse of Globalism: And the Reinvention of the World” by John Ralston Saul. I literally picked it up off the bookstore shelf, just because I found the title cheeky and confronting, but I didn’t buy it. The word “globalisation” was everywhere at the time. The title seemed fanciful. Fast forward a couple of years and I found myself flicking through it again, and found myself agreeing with its tenets. I bought it.

Today national interests are to the fore. The US is at war. China and India are ascending. There are oil and food shortages and there is no common and binding economic consensus…. yet!