The Sun-Herald

Cruel country, brave people

Not long after I first came to Australia from the UK, I interviewed the headmistress of a small rural school who had gone to work despite receiving a snakebite wound that morning. They were understaffed, she explained, and she was needed there.

She carried on working as the toxin took hold and only stopped when her eyesight failed, her limbs began to give way and she realised she should probably get herself seen to. She survived. "I knew I'd be right," she said at the time. "But I probably should have seen the doctor a bit earlier."
She was my first encounter with Australian implacability in the face of the constant assaults inflicted by this country's volatile, savage landscape.
I quickly learned this is a place where a Great White shark in a feeding frenzy with a posse of hammerhead buddies just off a public beach makes a snippet in the Manly Daily, not a horror movie script. Where people routinely lose chunks of their bodies to bites and stings. And where many live in areas where their lives, loved ones and possessions are at the constant mercy of the elements.
But whenever I interviewed someone who had come off worst in a tussle with nature - no matter how bloody - they displayed the same dogged refusal to capitulate as the redoubtable country headmistress. Not only that, but also a genuine concern for whoever might be doing it tougher. There was no choice - you got on with life and you helped others get on with it.
I hadn't seen anything like it back home but I'd heard from my grandparents about Britain's famous war spirit during the Blitz. And it seemed to me that in certain parts of Australia, daily life unfolded in something rather like a war zone, where monstrous flames could suddenly rise up and devour you or raging torrents submerge you; a terrain peppered with animal snipers ready to pounce concealed in ground as lousy with dangers as a minefield.
It takes guts of cast iron to live in the Australian bush. Many of my compatriots can't even stomach the cities here, fleeing in the face of insects, hailstorms and heatwaves just moments from the CBD (I've even seen Poms driven home by the loud squawking of parrots). It isn't their fault - they're just not accustomed to deadly jellyfish underfoot or lethal spiders in the garden. And they don't have the leather-tough genes formed by decades of cohabitation with such neighbours.
To us, bush fires are the most terrifying of all Australia's strange and ferocious natural phenomena. They're the stuff of nightmares and we have nothing with which to compare their scale and intensity. British weather can be turbulent, but even its worst moods cannot come close to matching the fury unleashed in Victoria over the last few days.
I know I can only look on and wonder again at Australians' reserves of courage, compassion and humour in the face of sheer hell. And feel the sorrow shared by all that those reserves must be tested so brutally this time.