Lovely Weather We're Having

I love my sunburned country.  I love it like I love breathing – the way I love my family.  I love it warts and all.  There’s not a country on earth like it.  Here in the land of Oz we have plants that literally need to be burned to the ground before they can reseed.  Then there’s the bush oak – a determined little scrap of plant which can bore through three kilometres of rock to reach the water table.  And that’s just the plant life.  The animals are worse.  Australia is the only place in the world where the herbivores have managed to extinguish the carnivores.  I remember reading once that out of the world’s ten most deadly snakes nine live on Australian soil.  And the tenth one is a sea snake that lives in Australian waters.

Australia is not a country to be messed with and the people who live here know it.  It has been raining solidly for three days now.  Everything is water logged, the creeks and dams spilleth over.  Plants are literally dying because they’ve had too much water.  After three years of being El Nino’s bitch, it’s La Niña’s turn and that little Spanish lady has us well and truly bent over a table.  It’s distinctly possible that now would be a good time to start wishing the rain would ease off.  Australians know better. 

As a nation we’re generally not fiercely religious.  We do not pray in schools, we haven’t enshrined religion in a bill of rights and we certainly don’t trust in God.  After all, he’s the bugger who commits acts of irony on us the way some criminals commit acts of assault.  Despite our refusal to attend the big house on Sunday and our perpetual taking of the Almighty’s name in vain, deep down even the most doubting of us harbours a weird wishy-washy fatalistic sense of Murphy’s law mixed with a curious sort of faith.  Basically we’re 99% sure that the last 10 years of drought and water restrictions was the big guy’s punishment for cursing the rain.  

Which is why the majority of the population are wading through the flood waters with permanently tight smiles, muttering, “lovely weather, isn’t it?” through clenched teeth.