Melbourne had the strange experience, this February, of reading and listening to bushfire reports for five days while neither seeing nor smelling smoke.
1983 was a very different memory. On that Ash Wednesday night the metropolitan area was completely covered with strong eucalyptus smoke. Blackened leaves and twigs flew overhead, many still burning, to land in streets, on roofs and in gardens.
But this February, the senses felt an absence. The body lived with emotional responses but had no sensory backup connections. The winds kept blowing north. Everything was happening over the horizon. Melbourne lived the fires in its head.
When the mind has no sensory leads to interpret, words become critical. On the fourth day, Tuesday, Michael Leunig published a cartoon. It was a white rectangle containing just two things: the image of a tapering green gum leaf, and above the leaf five words, 'her beauty and her terror'.
The picture was primal. In the retreat of his mind Leunig asked for a line of poetry that helped somehow to fix what was happening everywhere around Melbourne. The green leaf represents beauty, but unstated and by implication the terror is the flaming leaf, literally a taper, falling wherever in ember attack.
Leunig knew that the line comes from a poem learnt by most Australian schoolchildren, Dorothea MacKellar's 'My Country'. By stripping the poem of its panoramic elation, we were confronted with the essence of MacKellar's vision. Again at breakfasts across Melbourne, the question was asked, 'How does Leunig get it so right?' Black humour and sentimentalism, typical Leunig features, were missing; the cartoon used the pure elements of the moment to make a notice. By week's end 'Her Beauty and Her Terror' was being used in headlines and articles like a talisman.
Effective words from leaders are part of the definition of statesmanship. Premier John Brumby's powerful warnings to stay at home on Saturday and not to drive in the country no longer sounded alarmist by Sunday morning.
The Prime Minister travelled quickly to Victoria. One of his prepared lines became the sentence of the moment, here and overseas: 'Hell in all its fury has visited the good people of Victoria.' It is a consolidated line. Kevin Rudd is half-remembering William Congreve's lines, 'Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor Hell a fury like a woman scorned.' The verb 'visited' is unusual, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was thinking of