Droughts and Flooding Rains

A wide, brown land of drought and flooding rains is what Australia is all about — so says the iconic poem every Australian kid learns in school. And it's true. One part of the country is almost always gasping for water while another is drowning. But even for Australia, what's been going on here for the past month is extreme.

Of course, it's Victoria and South Australia that have been suffering from scorching heat, with temperatures so severe they went right off the record charts. Combined with strong winds, the bushland outside Melbourne was a virtual tinder box waiting for a single spark on February 7. We haven't seen anything like these bushfires since Ash Wednesday in the mid-1980s. Hell, we haven't seen anything like this ever.

Meanwhile, Karumba and Normanton in the Gulf of Carpentaria are completely isolated by flood waters -- and are expected to remain that way for at least the next month! Ingham on the north-east coast, flattened by a cyclone just a couple of years ago, is cut off, too. Down here in New South Wales, a series of low-pressure systems have pummelled towns around Bellingen. State Emergency Services are stretched beyond stretched trying to helicopter supplies to folks.

You've got to understand that when it rains here, it really rains. Rain so hard you can hardly think, let alone carry on a conversation, because the sound of it hitting the roof is so incredibly loud. Last January in the Northern Rivers region, where Melonie and I live, we received eight inches of rain in 90 minutes. Can you imagine? That's a quarter of Seattle's annual rainfall in an hour and a half! Huge boulders came tumbling down Crystal Creek, an innocuous creek turned river, with multiple tributaries each fifty feet across. I watched a 10-foot wide tree -- a whole tree, from branches to root system -- bounce through the valley like a toy sailboat. A million dollars worth of damage was done to the valley road overnight. Two brothers in nearby Chillingham, where we buy our Sunday papers, lost their mechanical repair business to rising waters. Only roofs peaked above the waters in Tumbulgum. My favourite story: Our neighbour, Don, lost one of his cattle. It was washed downstream for 50 miles and finally found, alive, several miles out to sea. The cow was plucked from the ocean and returned to Don. No shit!

Australia is a tough land. And it breeds a resilient people. A country of a little over 20 million people has raised more than $100 million to help the victims of the Victorian bushfires in the past week.

Here's where you can donate if you're interested:
• Australian Red Cross Victorian Bushfire Appeal

• RSPCA Victoria

Thanks, everyone, for asking after my friends and family in the Melbourne area. We are fortunate; everyone is okay.

Oh, and here's the poem, My Country.