Fortnight and Fires

Hello! Is there anyone out there?

I wouldn't expect anyone to be reading this yet, as there have been no updates since my introductory post. That doesn't mean that I've forgotten about the blog, or have abandoned my plans to apply for the Hamilton Island job.

What I've been up to the past fortnight, is, well... living my life. And videotaping it. And cutting together the video. Probably tomorrow, I'll be able to upload the footage of what I've been up to over the past few weeks - nothing transcendent, but you'll get an idea of who I am, what there is to do around these Merseyside parts, and how good I am at communicating through words and images, which is, after all, what a lot of Tourism Queensland's new post will be all about.

In the meantime, I just wanted to post a word about the bushfires across south-eastern Australia. As I'm sure anyone who sees this will have heard by now, over 350,000 hectares of land north of Melbourne, mainly across dried-out eucalyptus forests, have been ravaged by the blazes. Thousands have been made homeless, authorities expect more than 200 people to have been killed, and it is thought that even if natural causes started the fires, they were re-ignited by arsonists.

Comprehension fails at a time like this. It's disgusting, shocking, tragic. To think that human hands could cause a tragedy of this scale through what possibly started as callous whimsy is unbelievably sad. And I couldn't possibly continue with a project about the fun there is to be had in Australia, or how I want to go there and frolic on the beach, without stopping for a moment to consider the unfortunate folks caught up in the middle of this horror.

God bless them, and good luck to them.


I'm not sure of the best way to help from far away, but Red Cross organisations across the world are organising emergency appeals:

UK: http://www.redcross.org.uk

Ireland: http://www.redcross.ie

Australia: http://www.redcross.org.au

New Zealand: http://www.redcross.org.nz

USA: http://www.redcross.org

And so on and so on... links to all Red Cross organisations can be found through Google.