The Blood in Wineglass Bay 7

                         “Fire has always been and, seemingly, will always remain, the most  
                           terrible of the elements.”
                                                                                                         Harry Houdini

Fire. Australians, despite their avowed dislike of Arabs, are not all that different from the object of their disaffection. Both tribes live in geographically isolated, mostly desert, hostile environments. Both are dependant on minerals and resources, foreign cheap labor, and western nations for development and investment. Both are ambivalent about their monarchies. Both have institutionalized racism, hostility and intolerance towards immigrants, non-whites and refugees. And both treat their women almost as well as their camels. But there are important differences. Australians show their maidens and hide their emotions, except at barbies where, as in most other cathartic social occasions, the men congregate near an outdoor source of fire, and the sheilas huddle together in an interior space.
And the tiebreaker, the one compelling distinction, separating the habibis from the hoons, is firewater. Alcohol is what makes Australia ‘The Lucky Country.’
The most I could remember, about the number of bottles of wine it had taken, to put enough corks around the rim of my hat to keep the flies away, was that it was odd. As were the stories I was telling, from the wine the corks had come from. There were a lot of flies.
Smutty and the other mates, and JB and I, were raging on out the back of the shack in Susan’s Bay. I knew we were getting along famously, because everyone was a ‘bastard.’ The conversation turned to barbeque lore. Fire dreaming. I believe I had made a disparaging comment about how Antipodean barbeques, reliant on a single large metal plate to cook the meat, was nothing more than a glorified frying pan, and lacked the finesse that aerated wood smoke and grill marks could achieve.
The criticism was received with more considered mental activity and less derision than I deserved, and I was invited to ‘give it a burl.’ In Tasmania, there was still sympathy for the devil.
The corks wobbled about my head, as I pulled the iron plate off the barbie, and dropped it into the dust. JB brought over a pile of blackwood and tea tree. I filled the bottom of the grill to the top, and lit a match.
Tasmania had certainly seen fires before I had arrived. In 1967, the Black Tuesday bushfires left 62 people dead, 900 injured, and over 7000 homeless. I wasn’t trying for a new state record, but my enthusiasm to bring sophistication to my out scrub relatives, was far too untempered by the ecology I was operating in. JB was the first to offer feedback.
“Fair dinkum.” He said, as the flames licked the top of the carport.
Fifteen years after I had almost turned the east coast of Tasmania into an inferno, the Angry Summer did. A heat wave that brought 41.8°C to Hobart on January 4, 2013, the highest temperature in 120 years, kindled a six month conflagration of forty fires that burnt out fifty thousand acres of bushland, and destroyed over a hundred properties. One of them came down with the northwest wind, over the hill into Susan’s Bay. The sky was just scarlet... It burnt right to the waterline. It was just unbelievable.
Luckily for JB and Debbie, daughter Kate and her boyfriend were at the shack, and managed to save it with a lot of quick thinking, and even more water.
The elements of earth, water, fire and wind, which pumped through the heart of Aboriginal myth, also gave life to their rock paintings. Earth was the first element, from which water was liberated, from which fire was taken, from which smoke became wind. From the blood of the Tasmanian Aborigines, and the Southern Right whales in Wineglass Bay, only the elements remained.
A red and black and yellow and white sunrise broke open the morning that Robyn and I left Susan’s Bay. Just after our departure, a strange form of facial tumor, capable of dissolving parts of the skull, began destroying most of Tasmania’s devils. In 2008 high levels of carcinogenic flame retardant chemicals were found in the affected animals. It seems that, in the race to prevent any more blood from being shed into the water, the new settlers of Van Dieman’s Land are caught in a perpetual struggle, between the devil and the deep blue sea.




   “Human kinds cling to earthly things, but I seek ever to embrace the
    torch of love so it will purify me by its fire and sear inhumanity from
    my heart.”
                                                                         Khalil Gibran