15 August

Every year the same dumb traditions play out. Would your backyard catch fire? No, because you maintain it. The reason we have huge bushfires is because we leave most of the country unoccupied, while we huddle on the coastal fringes. Even occupied areas don’t tend the landscape in any way. Only RFS volunteers venture into it, doing ‘hazard reduction’ burns. Our own landscape is a ‘hazard’ to us, how bizarre is that. Most of the country is so neglected it becomes a tangled mess of scrub, what we jingoistically call ‘the bush’. Even more perversely, another thing that maintains this tradition is that it’s become part of our jingoistic hero culture to fight the fires. You don’t become a hero preventing the fires happening, but you do if you put them out. Some firefighters even light the fires as secret arsonists, to fuel that heroic role. And much of what these volunteers do IS heroic. The point is that it shouldn’t need to be, every single year. All of this is too much part of our sacred myths of being Strayan to even discuss, you won’t be popular if you do.