Flood or fire. A land of extremes.

I had thought at first to only write in this blog about things that are relevant to our narrowboat planning but following a comment requesting photos of Australia there will be the occasional non-narrowboating blog.

Today we have a pleasantly hot Summer day (29 degrees c) so it is hard to imagine that just a couple of days ago we were being inundated by flooding rain!  It's also hard to imagine that a couple of years ago we were gripped by drought and experiencing the devastating fires of Black Saturday.

Two thirds of Queensland has been flooded.  I've heard reports saying it is an area the size of Texas and another that it is the area of France and Germany combined.  Here in central Victoria the flooding wasn't quite so extreme but still there has been towns under water and homes and businesses have been destroyed. Sections of road have been washed away.

We are lucky that our house and our town are on a slope but we were surrounded by closed roads on Thursday and Friday and lost power from Thursday evening until Friday afternoon.  With the sky so dark it was extremely gloomy in the house without power so we decided to try the road to Bendigo (our nearest city) and go shopping on Friday morning.  There was water rushing over the road in several places but not deep enough to be dangerous or close the road.  It was already starting to subside in many places.

Paddocks on the side of the road.

Two years ago at this time we were about to experience the hottest, driest stretch of weather I could ever recall.  It was to lead to devastating fires. 
These photos are from the back of my brother's house.  Too close for comfort!

And the sunrise through the smoke at our place the following morning.

The flooding reminded me of a trip we took at the end of October 2008 to New South Wales.  We stopped along the way at Gundagai to look at the amazing old bridges there.  There were devastating floods in 1852 that destroyed the old town of Gundagai.  It was rebuilt on higher ground and these two bridges were built.