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If Not Now, Then When?
Peter Christoff

“A day of bushfires, brassy sky; the air stilled, smelling of char. Fine ash falling, as if the sun at last had burnt itself out and the last flakes of it were descending to cover the earth.¹

Bushfires have long been part of the European view of Australia’s landscape, captured in our literature — the quote is from David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon — and in art. William Strutt’s Black Thursday, February 6th, 1851,2 with its terror-struck animals …”