The Fire Every Time
The bushfires started early this year but seemed to stop well before Christmas, leading me to foolishly believe that we might have the holidays without any big outbreaks. Instead, we’ve got extreme conditions, big fires up in the Central Coast, and even record temperatures - 44° in the city for New Year’s Day, higher by far than any previously recorded.

The dry conditions of Australia naturally give rise to fires, although surely the numbers deliberately (or even just stupidly) set could bring significant relief. Nobody’s burning off great swathes of grassland just to hunt kangaroos anymore, so other than lightning strikes, it seems most fires are the result of arson, which I wouldn’t limit by excluding idiots tossing their cigarette butts around. (I remember reading a 19050’s Ross MacDonald detective story featuring his hardboiled successor to Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe, Lew Archer, where he drives a client up through the summer hill country and has to stop the car to stamp out her carelessly tossed cigarette, making quite a point of the nearly sociopathic nature of the thoughtless gesture. This impressed me greatly at the time, not least for the environmental awareness it evidences as a significant part of Californian public conciousness.)

Last year or the year before or the year before that, back in Arizona or New Mexico, there were cases of wildfires set by seasonal firefighters looking to get a little extra work, and while I can’t recall any such incidents here, there are enough other instances of kids and adults deliberately setting fires, more often than not never to be caught out. Unless they are, they can do it again, and we’re left unable to understand their motivation and work to prevent future occurrences, which is, of course, one of the things we need to do.

The Rural Fire Services do a magnificent job under highly dangerous conditions, suffering injury and even death, such as the ambulance driver last week, but it shouldn’t come to this, despite years-long droughts. Maliciousness and ignorance need more than a few public service television ads to be defeated.

Update: Turns out there are known arsonists, all under surveillance by police. Good, but are they arsonists, or bushfire arsonists, because I'll bet there's a difference.