Extreme weather

Anyone who has been following the news reports around Australia about the extreme fire danger in the last and coming week, may be interested in hearing from someone who it sitting in part of that extremity, watching, waiting and generally not knowing what might happen.  However as I hunker tensely down for my first experience of Australian fire weather, the town of Lockhart seems to be continuing life as normal around me.  Everyone I meet tells me we'll be fine here.  There's no bush to speak of around and grass fires don't have much fuel to get out of control.  However with a desert wind whipping dust and grit straight down the main street and in our front door, rattling sheets of iron that have been on the roof since 1930 and threatening to sweep them clean off the rafters, I am not as comforted by the sagely wisdom of the old timers as I should be.

I'm only just getting used to living in this country and the changes in the weather over the last few months has been like a rollercoaster of extremes.  We had thunderstorms over Christmas that provided us with a festive display of fireworks after a day of building humidity.  The short but violent downpours were followed by a welcome balmy cool and a stunning sunset.  I could however have done without the similar performance of weather just one week before when we had the laying of vinyl scheduled.  However, the weather is the one thing you can't do much more than simply work with, cope with, or battle against.  As I'm sure the old timers in town will tell you.

But now, just ten months after the second 'one in a hundred year flood' to occur in two years, we are being assaulted by a heat wave of 40-43 degrees with no foreseeable end (or that's how it seems).  Add to that the wind which is currently gusting to 75km/ph but hovering (yes that if a good term for the dust cloud hanging around the horizon) around 57km/ph.  I think I have reason to be a bit tense but as I say, no one else in town seems that concerned.  It's apparently character building.

In an era when a news cycle is gauged by the minute yet new information still happens at the same rate as it always did, we are under the illusion that we are the only ones to whom this has happened before.  But the Lockhart Historical Society will show you photographs of the town in flood and they will tell you stories of fire, of drought and dust that were the flip side of the boom time sheep stations brought to the town.  Isolation breeds strong communities and hardy people who simply go with it and work with, cope with or battle the weather odds, getting on with their day.

And with air conditioning in every home nowadays we wonder how they used to live without it.  But as I swelter in a nightly bed of sweat, I have no illusions of how hot and uncomfortable it must have been for the pioneers of Lockhart.  Living in the country means that the trials of life are always present, not some distant memory or story in a history book.  People in the country never forget that the land and the weather rule their lives far more than any government or global market.

So today my character builds and I learn to just get on with things.  We'll be right.