Stephen Pyne

The forgotten inferno: Victoria’s Great Fires of 1926 and the lessons that shaped a nation

The bushfires that swept across Victoria in 1926, a hundred years ago, are not as ingrained in Australian folklore as Black Friday in 1939 or Black Saturday in 2009. There are no monuments, no school references and no shorthand name etched into the national psyche. One reason is that there was no royal commission or formal inquiry to investigate what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again.

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A case study in folly #2 – the 2003 Canberra firestorm

But there is a sad symbolism in the tragedy of the burning bush capital, for Canberra was not merely sited in the political middle ground between Sydney and Melbourne but in an environmental middle ground between two Australia’s: that of the bush and that of the metropolis. When slammed together, the matter and anti-matter of Australian ecology are likely to explode.Read more

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