Some pretty weird and funny things happen in the chaos and stress of dealing with a bushfire that threatens our property on a day the power grid goes down. Like the text from your partner, who is on ember watch at her elderly mum’s home, that pings when you’re outside hosing down the front of the house and watching the flames on the ridge 600 metres away. “Put the banjo in the car and get the flute from the study.”
Tension-relieving humour aside, none of this is at all funny. It’s not yet three years since we watched at 5am on New Year’s Eve the massive fire burning through the two farms opposite us at high speed. We didn’t know then that it had claimed four lives, destroyed more than 400 houses and a third of the Cobargo village.
