Standing on the Wharf, Weeping

Greg Dening

  • The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia by John Gascoigne
    Cambridge, 233 pp, £45.00, September 2002, ISBN 0 521 80343 8
  • Looking for Blackfella’s Point: An Australian History of Place by Mark McKenna
    New South Wales, 268 pp, £14.50, August 2002, ISBN 0 86840 644 9
  • Words for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia by Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths
    New South Wales, 253 pp, £15.50, October 2001, ISBN 0 86840 628 7
  • The Land Is a Map: Placenames of Indigenous Origin in Australia edited by Luise Hercus, Flavia Hodges and Jane Simpson
    Pandanus, 304 pp, AUS $39.95, October 2002, ISBN 1 74076 020 4

Earlier this year, bushfires engulfed the east coast of Australia. In Canberra, where I work, five hundred houses were lost. The National University was in a state of shock. Mount Stromlo, an icon of Australian astronomy since Federation, is gone, with all its telescopes and research data. In Melbourne, where I live, the air was thick with smoke from fires 300 km away. The stench frightened us all day. In the mountains to the north and on the high plains to the north-east, there were fires along a 350 km front. The temperature was 44°C; the winds were blowing at up to 100 km an hour. The land, with its extremes of fire, drought and flood – and its beauty – is always in our faces.

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Vol. 25 No. 18 · 25 September 2003 » Greg Dening » Standing on the Wharf, Weeping (print version)
Pages 13-14 | 2854 words