I was listening to Geraldine Doogue's Saturday morning program on Radio National and heard her interview Roger Underwood (a past General Manager of the WA Dept of Conservation of Land Management) and Clive Hamilton, who has been researching changes in attitudes towards the bush in Oz over the last two centuries. Underwood is yet another who is lining up against conservation-conscious attitudes. He kept declaring that the only way for land management to be properly done is by burning forests and maintained that all WA forests needed regular burning.

It struck me that he was seriously derelict in his use of the term "forest"; although there are tall forests in WA they don't have much in the way of the tall forests east of Melbourne. Many of his listeners will come from all over Oz, including places where any group of trees taller than 8 metres is regarded, locally, as forest. There was a TV program on Thursday night where the same stuff was being presented by Tim Flannery et al.

Don't get me wrong, Tim has a few really good ideas but he's no bushfire ecologist, despite losing his house and manuscripts in the '94 fires around Sydney. He's a bit like the international physicist who uses his pre-eminence in that field to give his arguments about the existence of the Christian God "added credibility." And the young woman (who comes from Cape York and has done some wonderful work representing Aboriginal communities) chimed in with her comment along the lines of "Aborigines burned vegetation all the time and they should have been doing that around Melbourne." Well, she's right about her own community's cultural practices but seriously mistaken if she believes that all Aboriginal communities in Australia had the same cultural practices, let alone applied them in their respective areas in the same way as Cape York's communities practised theirs.

Fortunately, there has been evidence of a thriving sense of humour among the people affected. A woman took a TV crew to the incinerated remnants of her house. When they proceeded to walk willy nilly through it she admonished them; holding up the remnants of the handle to what had been her front door she directed, "Through here." And the fire crew driving through an incinerated landscape went past a couple of residents blacking out a small spotfire with knapsack sprays; the crew received hoots of laughter when they commented, "You can't get a decent fire anywhere her anymore."

I'm still feeling frustrated because the surgery has prevented my getting involved but the tears have passed and, with them, any residual fragility. It will get better.

Cheers, Rowan