G'day Rowan,

With your academic background (Was that: "~ successional ecology"...?). I suspect you might advise the GUEST of your quotation that what we experience is no "brushfire". The 'bushfire' that burns through a large tract of Australian eucalypt forest can approach something like the volatility of a major fire in a petrochemicals plant!

Anyway, I was interested to see that Prof. Gerald Wilkes' 1985 quotations (about 10 posts up) were all on the betting sense - our local equivalent to the famous "London to a brick" phrase of one of our earlier racecallers. I should drag down my 1988 Oxford Australian National Dictionary to see what senses the Oxford "Australian Language group" added.

Regards,

Bob