not far but fun

[jape]

Well the forum is china-bikes, but as you so well remark, people ride bikes and ride them through their own lands as well as to exotic places. What is home to me is exotic and hopefully interesting to others. I am surprised we don't get more conversation and input as we can find sometimes on other forums but that isn't necessarily a fault and Carl hasn't told me off for meandering yet, especially in my own threads!

Eucalypti are indigenous here and if we follow ecological values then we merely remove the many invasive weeds. The big problem is land use. The early inhabitants roamed a land used to fire, these plants evolved over time to use fire and smoke to reproduce and to form fertile soils which are otherwise depleted and ancient. For example, the area I live in, I have been told, would have been more like a meadow land with one large seed tree every fifty meters, with other species in the shades and in the hollows and watercourses. Then much of it was clear felled for firewood in the last hundred years, and some for grazing (often found to be barely profitable), some for settlements offered to soldiers returning from wars and much of it clear felled for gold hunting. Amazing what a few men, hand tools, horses and their domestic animals can do.

I may be wrong on the details of the history but I have seen remnant bush as I described and some of the early settler oil paintings show this. The 'aboriginals' came across this land at least 30,000 years ago and they wandered as a stone-age society, lighting fires to corner game and at the same time keeping the growth cycles going, slow fires, low heat fires that cleared scrub and weeds and killed many young invasive plants leaving the huge seed trees to survive through their deep tap roots or other adaptations and other plants to seed and fruit and provide food for the animals and the tribes. Now we have regrowth which is a hundred trees, even a few hundred trees, all competing for one acre. The ground is littered with branches and bark and leaves like cornflakes often a foot or more deep. This explodes into flame from the prevalant dry lightning storms we are getting more of and the flame roars up the trees and runs through the crowns up slopes creating fire storms, embers running miles ahead and a whisp turns into a crackle and a roar and off it goes again, then the wind turns and an arrow of fire becomes a long front which spreads and soon it is uncontrollable.

I have seen it, stood in the face of it when I was briefly a fire brigade member before I injured my back building. It turns your legs to jelly however tough you are, sounds like a jet-plane next to your ears and the heat drops you from fifty meters as flames roar two hundred feet high and roll into fireballs that burst around you. It is not fun! But loclas and bush dwellers are not allowed to clear, to manage to control. we cannot light fires, the agencies will not help. The governments local, state, federal allow and encourage properties and subdivision but do not mandate fire tracks, water, power, escape routes, sirens, shelters or even property building materials. We often cannot legally dig a 'dam' or small pond for water to fight a fire or clear more than a house site yet they encourage us to build here, to raise kids, pay taxes and buy lots of vehicles and household goods. They have run out of much of the good volcanic or alluvial farming soils, concreted over for cities and suburbs. And so people die! Meanwhile where I live has gone in twenty years from ten permanent dwellers to 72 families ... all ready to be burnt to crispy critturs. And many of them rushing around the bush on motorbikes - mainly jap but one or two of us have Deutsche or China bikes. have fun while it lasts is what I say.

[moilami]

Interesting and good writing. We have ice and snow here, but you are not without issues either with all that sunshine.