Of droughts and fires and floods

We all know Dorothea Mackellar’s famous words. More recently, Tim Flannery has told us our dams would never fill again and former fire chief turned Climate Council member Greg Mullins warned that we’ll be incinerated by holocausts as a consequence of dangerous climate change caused by our greedy desire for a good standard of living based on cheap and reliable electricity.

New South Wales disaster supremo Shane Fitzsimmons has certainly reaped a triple reward from flood and fire and famine, but not in the way that Mackellar outlined in her classic poem. She understood and loved the land in a similar way to traditional Aborigines, pastoralists, foresters, apiarists, farmers and anyone else who knows where their daily bread…