Return

I think I've overdosed on public transport: buses, trams, trains, planes - this whole weekend I've barely seemed to stop moving.  But I must record my thanks to the Rowlands and the Pearces who had me to visit and to stay respectively, and I'm glad to have had the chance to go to the Missa cantata at Caulfield.

Probably the most striking part of the trip was when, en route to Seymour in country Victoria where I was to meet up with Pastor Pearce, the bus turned off the Hume Highway toward Kilmore, and drove past a large band of scorched country - surely the very patch, including the pine plantation, where the terrible blaze that destroyed Marysville and Kingslake arose (or at least which later joined up with that firestorm).  The busdriver drew my attention to at least one house that had been burnt down: only the chimney was still standing.  And the hills!  Streaked with grey and black, the ground seared bare, yet with pockets of unburnt trees right beside their luckless fellows charred from root to crown.  It was a grim sight, and yet was only on the edge of the bushfire-affected lands.