Shock, disbelief and an outpouring of compassion have been the reactions across Australia as people struggle to come to terms with the unprecedented scale of Victoria's bushfire tragedy.
We're a generous-hearted nation and within 36 hours, more than $20 million has been raised to assist those left homeless and grief-stricken by the fire. In our small newsroom in the nation’s capital, staff are organising collections of clothing, toys and blankets. Many are also signing up to donate blood to the Red Cross for burns victims.
I have friends and family in the fire-affected area, and like many people, I'm relying on the Internet for updates as there are outages in phone services across the region. So it was while scrolling through online news coverage that I came across this piece in The Guardian.
By way of introduction, its author Natalie Bennett is editor of The Guardian Weekly, and according to her profile is Australian by birth "but British by choice", a feminist, books editor and Greens party activist. And yes, I find her smug tone and bog-ignorance concerning the area devastated by the fires absolutely appalling, patronising and pompous. If so many lives hadn't been lost, her prim-lipped take on the fires and Australian culture would be comically absurd. It's certainly way wide of the mark.
The small towns that were obliterated – Kinglake, Marysville, St Andrews, Arthurs Creek, Narbethong, Strathewen – were at the heart of the Victorian environment movement and had been so for more than three decades. The people living there did not build, to quote Ms Bennett, "heavily structured and highly flammable homes" but were pioneers in sustainable design, permaculture, mud-brick architecture, fire management planning and energy efficient housing. Among their number were architects, ecologists, builders, publishers and artists who drove environmental reform and intellectual debate on environmental issues. If any community across Australia was going to be well-prepped for a bushfire, this was it. Most had fire plans and emergency strategies. But record temperatures, wind speed and arsonists combined to produce a fire that was too fast, too fierce and way too big for them to defend their homes.
And these historic little towns don't match Ms Bennett’s condescending description of "extensive bushland suburbs" with a shopping mall "just down the road." When were you last – if ever - in Melbourne, Natalie?
Until last weekend, these towns formed an eco-activist green belt, around an hour’s drive form the centre of Melbourne. The Strathewen winery produced some of Australia’s finest shiraz. The St Andrews community Market was legendary for its craft, cakes and live music and the Kinglake region was dotted with art galleries, wholefood cafes, raspberry farms and specialist plant nurseries. Sorry we don’t fit your outdated Henry Lawson you-beaut-little- bush-battler stereotype, Natalie.
As for shopping malls and sprawling suburban development, it would be a brave developer who’d take on a region that could probably boast a pretty significant population of environmental lawyers. It has some of tightest planning controls and heritage preservation laws that make even building a backyard dog kennel a difficult exercise in negotiating council regulations. The point here, Ms Bennett, is we’re not talking about "isolated homes surrounded by highly flammable bushland." These were small towns with active community volunteer fire brigades and a high participation rate in local Landcare programs.
Ms Bennett quotes palaeontologist Tim Flannery as "Australia’s foremost science intellectual" (That’s a big call. Has she heard of Professor Ian Lowe? Professor David Lindenmayer? Professor Barry Brook? Professor David Karoly?) and an anonymous "distinguished agricultural scientist’" to shore up her arguments as to why "Australia's environment is incompatible with the way we live in it".
I'm going to quote H.G Nelson, one of Australia's foremost cultural commentators and exponents of "the spray’", right back at her. Bugger off.