Maria Lanner: Fires and an Earthquake

So much can happen in Melbourne. One week, there's a storm notice via e-mail, and everyone packs up quickly, turns off the computer and goes home.  Another day, the temperature goes up to 45 degrees.  Another day it can drop to 20 degrees in half an hour.  And yesterday, there was an earthquake.

We were sitting in the office and had been meeting in the building when suddenly it began to shake.  We were looking at each other and wondering what was happening. It hasn't happened again, but we were all shaken right after. I have never experienced a earthquake before, and if it made this great big warehouse shake, it must indeed have been something.

Last Saturday we went on a trip to Healesville Sanctuary, where the children would meet kangaroos and koalas, etc. We decided to look at one of the many forests that have recently burned. The view and the feeling was totally impossible to capture in pictures, but it was eerie.

We felt that sensation as tourists, where we stood and tried to capture the frightening sight. We saw a little about the fires in recent news, but at home on the sofa, it has been a strange and incomprehensible.

Along winding mountain roads, miles and miles of forest were destroyed.  For the trees remain, but they are pitch black, and their leaves, now beige, were scattered on the ground. This area should really be green and almost rainforest like. But there are only these two tones. Black. Beige. And that silence. Stark silence...