Everybody is shocked by what has happened in Victoria. The death toll tonight is 173, but it will go up again.

The advice from the fire brigades is "evacuate early or stay and defend. Do not leave at the last minute." Most of the people who were killed left at the last minute - a lot of people who escaped by the skin of their teeth had tried to 'stay and defend' but, in the end, couldn't. I think 'stay and defend' is probably basically the right strategy, but you need to know first what is defensible and under which conditions. And you also need an exit strategy.

Obviously most of these people didn't have any options once they realized defence was impossible. There was one couple who decided they should put their valuables in the shed because it would be safer than the house. The shed became charcoal, but the house survived. Another guy thought that 'defending' consisted of going out to to fight in flip-flops and shorts (no shirt even). You are supposed to cover every piece of bare skin because the radiant heat of the fire can burn you just as badly as a flame. One charred body was found with the garden hose still held in its hand. Other home defenders found that they couldn't defend when the power to their water pump was cut. Apparently nobody told them that you needed a backup generator in case the grid became disconnected. People didn't have alternatives. When the roads were cut by fallen trees or the smoke was too thick, they had nowhere to go. One couple drove through the flames rather than put their toddlers in the dam water. Luckily they made it. Nobody seems to have had a dugout they could shelter in. I don't know why these things happened. Could be stupidity, arrogance, carelessness, ignorance or whatever.

There's that famous line from the Dorothea McKellar poem (some would say doggerel), My Country, that every child knows:

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me!

"Her beauty and her terror". [Note: this is European terror not Indigenous terror.] Somehow in our urban-technological world we seem to forget the terror bit and think we can live on the edge of a national park (like in Kinglake) without making any adjustments to the usual European or North American-inspired urban planning. I don't blame the people. I blame the developers who build these residential estates and the governments that have failed utterly to adapt suburban building codes to the bush. As a nation we utterly lack imagination.

ETA: There is something sadly dogged about humans. The village of Kinglake has been totally wiped by bushfires before (in 1926) and it was affected by the Black Friday fires in 1939 and Ash Wednesday in 1983.

ETA+: Wikipedia shows how the initial reactions are blaming Greens and forestry policy. I would suggest that it is neither population density nor high fuel loads that is the problem, but our inability (and unwillingness of certain politicians) to live with these two factors.

Naomi Brown, chief executive of the Australasian Fire and Emergency Services Authorities Council, argued that the high number of fatalities in these fires, as opposed to earlier fires such as the Ash Wednesday fires, was partly attributable to increased population densities at Melbourne's fringes. David Packham, research fellow at Monash University, argued that high fuel loads in bushland led to the destructive intensity of the fires, saying that "There has been total mismanagement of the Australian forest environment". Federal member of parliament and former forestry minister Wilson Tuckey also identified high fuel loads as a key contributor to the destruction, saying "Governments who choose to lock up these forests and... treat them with benign contempt, well, others pay the penalty". Tuckey put the blame for fuel loads on the two major parties – Labor and the Coalition – asserting that they "go running around putting in more reserves to get Green preferences". Senator Ron Boswell also argued for changes to forestry management policies, saying that "I'm not blaming anyone for this, I just think we need to look at some areas we turn into parks and then can't defend them".

ETA++: Now 181 dead.

I've been forcibly weaned off the BBC this weekend. They turned the radio station over to reporting on the fires in Victoria.

So far they've confirmed 130 dead, but they'll find more as they manage to get into areas that have burned and are sometimes still burning. The last worst day of bushfires was in 1983 when 47 people died. Something over 700 houses - in some cases almost entire towns - gone.

Saturday was the killer day. People who are trained firefighters had to throw their plans out the window and run. There was less than half an hour between hearing about the fire and the house exploding. People had to put their foot down and drive straight through burning trees that had fallen across the road. Flames four storeys high. Tornadoes of fire. Most of the people who died, died in their cars - often after colliding with other cars in the smoke. One lady saved her crockery, but lost her life. Another hundred or so are in the burns unit.

At least some of the fires were deliberately lit - on a day of temperatures in the upper 40s and high winds. Scumbags.

I finished reading Naguib Mahfouz' trilogy. The volumes got thinner between the first and the second. I am really annoyed with myself that I didn't realise until after I'd finished that the person referred to as al-Nassah was Nasser! I'll have to go back and read it all again. I was also disappointed - though it probably would have been a departure from reality - that the story wasn't more sympathetic to feminism than it might have been. Only one of the female characters (a communist) showed any leanings in that direction. But generally, the third volume didn't have the depth of characterisation of the first two and it was a bit hard to see why he wrote it except perhaps as a kind of epilogue to wrap up the storylines in the first two. Whereas the first two volumes covered only a few years, the third makes a great gallop through the 1930s and the Second World War - so there wasn't really time to develop characters. It's strong point was the demonstration of how the old world was unravelling as well as the massive insecurity of life in an underdeveloped and politically repressive environment. The third generation in the family - who take a fairly central role in Sugar Street - are really a bit stereotypical, as if the author couldn't really empathise with them.

The city was covered in smoke haze all day - until a southerly came through in the late afternoon. The sky was brown and the smell of fire was in the air. There's a huge wildfire in the Blue Mountains - fanned by strong westerly winds, leaping up 500 metre escarpments in a single bound and racing towards various towns. I hope the change of weather will calm it down tonight.