Leanda Lee
While Macau has been centre-stage of unequivocal messages of national sovereignty during the 20th Anniversary events, I am in Australia and Australia is burning.
Multiple times a day, my phone buzzes with alerts on the VicEmergency App with news of incidents in the immediate area. The Country Fire Authority (CFA), the Metropolitan Fire Brigade and State Emergency Services coordinate this information in one place. Buzz, there it goes again.
I am not even in a bushfire zone. While much of the country yearns for any whisper of moisture, our place still has some green in the paddocks, and yet “Fire – Not Yet Under Control” incidents keep popping up among the “Watch and Act” warnings. There were 23 fire-services’ vehicles attending a grass fire beside suburban housing up the road the other day. This is not normal.
It is Christmas and it is a Total Fire Ban. No prawns on the barbie. No driving through grass or crops. No welding, grinding or soldering. And my app buzzes again. No wonder we have restrictions.
The fires started early this year. On 11th November, volunteers from four of our local fire brigades joined the CFA Task Force of 50 fire Tankers to Goulburn in New South Wales. A Catastrophic Fire Rating level was called for 12th November for the first time since the 2009 February Black Saturday Fires in which 180 people died, 450,000 hectares burned, and 2,029 homes were destroyed.
Since then, fires have raged through 5-million hectares in a continent-scale emergency, sometimes combining into mega-blazes. In NSW which usually has 280,000 hectares burnt in a season, 3.41 million hectares have gone up already, only half-way through the season. A third of the grapevines in the Adelaide Hills have gone. We have lost rainforests that don’t normally burn. The human toll remains low, but tragically nine people are lost to their families and communities, two of whom were volunteer firefighters, both young fathers.
A family member, driving along the roads from Sydney to Melbourne to join Christmas dinner, told of the sights. There are miles of blackened earth, and yet more blackened earth with patches of brown in places where there was no vegetative fuel to start with, interspersed by charred trunks of trees with canopies all shrivelled. Unscathed farmhouses stood incongruously in their fresh intactness in the flat never-ending landscape of black and brown. Every single house saved. Not the sheds, not the outhouses. But every single home stood, testament to our country fire brigades.
Nearly 35,000 firefighters and 21,000 support staff are volunteers. In seasons past firefighters from California have helped with backup but now that fire seasons overlap, those resources are not so available. The valour, exhaustion, sacrifices over Christmas by these heroes are not lost on anyone. Our communities come together in such times of crisis. Together, we are resilient.
And in Macau, parenthetically, restrictions on freedom of the press, movement and public gatherings have raised the ire, angst and fear of what the first may impose upon the second system. Now that we have experienced what is possible, and now ever more likely should the road to the integration of the two systems be bumpy, a fire has been put in the bellies (there goes that buzz again) on both sides of the socio-political divide. Pseudo-intellectuals have been contesting the so-called ideologies of others with little more than big words, long, long sentences and the smugness that only opinionated tribal support can provide. Such has been the banter that outsiders have rightly characterised as penis-measuring contests.
In times of crises, whatever the fight, well-endowed and diverse groups of citizens need to work together in collaboration, with knowledge, experience and fact-based expertise. One cannot fight coercion with opinion, let alone divided opinion. Those words that only result in pitting groups of residents against each other – the infighting both online and in the print-media – serve Macau poorly. In their divisiveness, they are worth little more than bumfodder.
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