Bush Fires

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 5, 31 January 1907, Page 9

Bush Fires

Somewhere in one of his sonnets Wordsworth says that all things are less dreadful than they, appear.. There is a small negative or positive element of consolation even in the 'fires that tore with such destructive fury through the forest in, Southland and Canterbury last" week. The flames that wrought such havoc to some, did for others some welcome pioneer work in turning forest into field. We in New Zealand are happily spared the devastating fires that are to so lamentable an -extent a feature of the summer landscape among our neighbors on the other side of the Tasman Sea. Year by year the spark of a passing engine, the match of the careless smoker, the .fire of the incautious camper or sundowner, the brand of the incendiary, or the flame of phosphorised wheat touches' the dry, slippery grass, robs, the thirsting stock of hundreds of thousands of acres of preJiOus food, and gnaws great black furrows for miles through the green-g,"ey bush. The high capabilities of the Australian bush-fire were never- in living memory so amply demonstrated as on Black Thursday, in 1851. On that day the Victorian forests were nearly all, in flaimies. Countless sheep and cattle were roasted alive. Many homes were licked off the surface of the earth by the long toiigues of flame. In G-ippsland the sun was ecMpsed by the smoke, and: a thick darkness settled do\vn on the earth at mid-day. Men tell how birds fell dead Of heat on the decks of coasting vessels, and how clouds of smoke and falling cinders went out for many a league over the Southern Ocean. Those who sustain losses find proverbs poor plasters for grief, and patience and fortitude much easier to prescribe than to take. But there is enough of La Rochefoucauld in most of us to .derive a melancholy negative, comfort from the consideration that there are others in worse rase. And one or two experiences of a first or secondclass Australian bush-fire would tend to make the- New Zealand farmer look upon his smaller blaze as, by comparison, a blessing in disguise.