An Australian long resident in Greece, I keep my gaze steadily fixed on the Wide Brown Land, which has now been doing its worst with regard to fire and flood for longer than anyone cares to think about. Dorothea McKellar would surely agree that the terror has been very much outweighing the beauty of late. Even as I write there is a huge fire raging on Wilson's Promontory, and NSW and Queensland continue to drown.
I am an email addict, and so it is easy for me to keep my finger on that faraway Antipodean pulse. My friends in country and city post almost daily in order to keep me informed as to how matters are developing.
My brother, who has been working with the SES, tells me of things that do not occur to me, such as the eerie silence in the burnt-out bush: there are no birds.
But he also tells me of the quirks of Fate: no birds except for some chooks that had a miraculous escape, as did their owners, who later collected 40 eggs. (Were they hard-boiled, wondered my brother?) The conscientious slog put in by the police in their search for the missing. The comforting and efficient organisational skills of the auxiliary service people, who are doing a sterling job of keeping the workers housed, fed and watered.
At the end of a long email, my brother, who wept on his return home, wrote: 'We did nothing wonderful or heroic, but we helped, and that is why we went.' He and his team may go again, in several weeks' time, and no doubt the efforts of huge numbers of helpers will still be going on.
And yet, my other correspondents are now ruefully commenting on the less attractive aspects of human nature. When I wrote some days ago that we simply had to maintain our compassion, one friend agreed, but noted that the recriminations had already started, and that 'the knives are out'. Another castigated herself for her own creeping numbness, despite the continuing reports of suffering, sorrow and danger.
This is the way it seems to be, always; perhaps it is a harsh fact that humans can take only so much of the adrenalin rush, and thus have only a limited amount of sympathy to give, with not much left over for later.
Most people over the age of 50 have experienced bereavement, and