By Niki Bruce
Online Editor, herworld.com
niki@sph.com.sg

 

THE LAST time Australia suffered such deadly fires I was also living and working in another country.

Just like I’m doing now, I was logged on to the Internet, e-mailing friends and calling family members.

What I didn’t have last time was Facebook and messaging. This time around I’m finding out minute to minute how my friends, their friends and family are coping.

I was just checking my Facebook page when my friend Liz logged on to the Facebook message system. We haven’t spoken for a while, not since she moved  to live in north west Victoria — yep, the same place that is now an inferno.

Liz, who now runs a pub just up the road from the town of Beechworth, which is now a heap of smoking ashes, is currently on Amber Alert.

She can’t leave her home, she has friends and customers relying on her.

Liz told me that she hasn’t seen the sky for three days, it’s all just smoke and black ash falling out of the sky.

“Our friend, from Beechworth, lost everything. Their home, their cattle, their business. Then she found out that her mother and father died in the big one over at Kinglake,” typed Liz.

“Their grief is more than just ‘someone died’; they have lost everything...

“It’s going to affect millions of people for a long time,” said Liz.

While my friend Liz is waiting for her life to be burnt to the ground, at the other end of the country my family is coping with pouring rain.

My mother e-mailed me and told me that they’d had 100cm of rain in an hour. Her sister, my aunt, is isolated in the town of Ingham; they can’t get out and no one can get in.

Two men have gone missing, one found drowned, just south of the township of Tully, only minutes from my hometown.

A five-year-old boy has disapeared a couple of hours north of my family’s home; authorities fear he’s been eaten by a crocodile!

Australia is certainly wild and woolly compared to Singapore, but it is rare to have it pointed out in such obvious detail.

Sitting safe and sound in Singapore it is hard to imagine just how scary it all is — one half of the country drowning, the other half burning.

But the resilient spirit that’s being discussed in Singapore’s parliament, is being shown by the Aussies, literally under fire from mother nature.

Liz joked that she looked good patrolling with her hard hat on and said, “look, I can still laugh!”.

She wanted to make sure I was safe in Singapore, even though I assured her I was much safer here than there.

“LOL,” she sent back and promised to keep me updated, as long as her internet connection held out.

Thank god for technology!