General Chat

Terrible news Allan. Last night was horrendous.

Glad to know you are safe and well. <3

on a positive note, the three missing people have been found alive and well. They'd been camping away from the area :-)

great news!

The destruction of Yarloop made our 7 pm news.

Sylvia, I'd much rather our region made the news for all the right reasons; fantastic scenery, produce, wines, hospitality etc., but there you go :-(

Stay safe Allan <3

Shocking!! Stay safe Allan <3

The fire has now doubled in area and smoke is beginning to drift in at a lower level.

It is already being described as WA's biggest bush fire in fifty years :-(

Thanks Fly and Mersey :-D

It was on Sky news earlier this morning, and included a televised statement from some official. It must have been before the missing 3 people were found.

Do you have evacuation plans in place Allan? We all hope it won't come to that and that you stay safe.

DET,

If it does happen, which I sincerely hope it wont, my evacuation plan is simply to get the hell out of here and go to Bunbury, about six kilometres south of here.

People are already stocking up on Petrol, but ironically, unless they are going to Perth on the one remaining road open, there is nowhere else to go.

Down south, there are bushfires in the Margaret River region :-(

Allan, don't leave it until visibility is hampered by the drifting smoke. I can remember driving home from work in that kind of atmosphere, with flames visible in the distance.

A friend who had spent a year doing up an old house was about to move in when fires struck Mount Macedon. He lost the house but his garage, complete with old banger, was untouched.

There's no rhyme nor reason to drifting flames that hop from treetop to treetop and roofs, so be careful with your life.

Allan take care :-)

JoyLouise ...........

was that the 1983 Mount Macedon fire?

My cousin's daughter and her family lost their house in that fire, and just managed to escape with their lives.


We drove through the Grampians in Victoria in October 2006, just 9 months after the fire that roared through there in January that year.

As botanists, we were amazed at the regeneration (epicormic bud-growth) that occurs on Eucalyptus trees after fire has ravaged them!

Yes, Sylvia, it was.

It was amazing to see how the fire bypassed some homes yet took others. Our friend and his wife had been about to move in and we were up to see the house when it was finished. He'd put a lot of work into it and it looked beautiful. The garage that was spared was going to be his next project as it was a real ramshackle. As I said, no rhyme nor reason to spreading fires there.

You are right, it is truly amazing to see how regeneration takes place - really miraculous, I'd say.

I know something of country Victoria because I worked for state and local government there at various times, not so much about plants but more about the geography of the place and land use.

Sylvia, we missed you by a year. The last time I was there was October through to November 2005. We have thought about visiting since we retired quite a few years ago but done nothing about it.

Did your cousin re-build? I think most did but our friends lost heart, sold the land and built a new home in Melbourne.

yes, my cousin's daughter did re-build, but they have since moved from Mt Macedon

I was out there in March 2000, largely to see that cousin who was suffering from cancer. She managed to hang in for another year, to see in her 70th birthday, but I lost touch with the daughter after M died.

We spent 10 months in Melbourne in 1975/76, on a sabbatical form OH's job here .......... he was at LaTrobe University, and we lived in Macleod.

I used to walk about 2 km to Rosanna to catch the train into Melbourne, and there were some very old carriages on those trains, some said almost 100 years old!!

I do know that some of the carriages had doors that would slide open whenever the train went round a corner ........... and I'd have to grab onto the umbroller with my toddler in it so it and she wouldn't fly out!

They'd be the old red rattlers, Sylvia. Not sure whether the rattlers were painted any other colour.

I remember them fondly.

You would enjoy the plants there as a lot of them would be quite different from Canadian ones. We have had various Auusie plants and bushes growing in our garden here. The bottlebrushes died, the eucalyptus took off before we got a grip on it and lopped it to a manageable height, one of the tree ferns died in the really bad winter we had - I had not wrapped it well enough. Our daughter has a thriving bottlebrush in her garden though.

We have no room in the garden here for anything else and I daren't buy any more plant pots. I do miss the variety of fruit we grew in Oz though.

Yes, they were the red rattlers!!


oh yes, the fruit!!

we lived in a small apartment block built in the middle of a single family area ... the other residents in the road were not too friendly! But our parking lot was lined with apricot trees in an attempt to shelter the neighbour house.

Very few others ate the fruit, but we loved picking the apricots straight from the tree.

We were lucky enough to spend a very short time on banana plantation in QLD ........ the owners were immigrants from Yugoslavia, and the wife grew a fantastic array of tropical fruits.

Now reports of looting :-|

Looting?

What scum they are......... I hope they are found, and locked up for a long time.

:-P

One person went further and said they should be put in a pine box, covered in cement, and dropped in the ocean.

I can understand the sentiment :-|