House Down

I drove back along the Causeway today and around to Dargan, just to shoot the pictures I was too rushed to get the other day. I took heaps of images but have only posted these five.

The main blip (please view LARGE) features a house which burned down. Notice how the steel roof has melted and collapsed as if it was made of canvas or linen. Oddly enough the homes on either side had been saved but then I came across a row of about four buildings which had ALL been lost. All along the route there were literally dozens of claw cranes and cherry pickers and conventional lifters at work, replacing gutted telegraph poles, re-rigging cables, repairing fences, restoring railway equipment and removing dangerous trees. There were a lot of pictures I'd have liked to have captured but often there was nowhere to park safely. In other places there was so much going on I simply didn't want to be in the way.

The amazing thing about this highly intensive fire was that the burning seemed inconsistent. For some reason, large patches of forest had been spared while others looked like they'd been torched over and again out of sheer malice.

I'll be back for one more session before I start looking at things from a more positive angle. People the world over think Australia is a burned out ember. NOT SO. NOT BY A LONG SHOT. Arguably the biggest problem this country will face over the next twelve months will be surviving the outrageous hatchet job that has been done on it by an hysterical media seeking only ratings, footage sales, advertising and headlines. You'll see what I mean in the weeks to come when I start to try and offer you some visual balance.