{"id":1115,"date":"2008-01-18T07:00:12","date_gmt":"2008-01-17T21:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/?p=1115"},"modified":"2008-01-18T07:00:12","modified_gmt":"2008-01-17T21:00:12","slug":"canberra-bushfires-five-years-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/?p=1115","title":{"rendered":"Canberra Bushfires &#8211; five years on"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On 18 January each year since the 2003 bushfires that devastated Canberra, we photograph our garden as a measure of our garden&#8217;s recovery since the bushfires took it back to scorched earth. It is a time to reflect on our own lives and on what is important to us since confronting the fires head-on and realising that all that we had could have been snatched away in an afternoon. We were fortunate and escaped with minor damage to the house and no injuries. Our house was only three houses back from the main fire front as it crossed into Holder and Duffy. And even five years on the house next door still bears damage from that day.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/wp-content\/house2003.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>One of the biggest challenges in establishing a garden from bare earth in Canberra has been the five-year drought that has left us with annual water restrictions. We recycle gray water from the washing machine and air conditioner and focus on a few plants at a time to establish them &#8211; and hope for the best. <\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"image1113\" src=\"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/01\/counsel3-080118.jpg\" alt=\"Counsel Street 2008\" \/><\/p>\n<p>We learned a great deal about ourselves that day in 2003 &#8211; how we can depend on each other, how we stand up to a crisis, and how in the face of immediate threat we focus on our immediate needs and the range of our own effort &#8211; and that in a major disaster, those services we depend on in an emergency are quickly overwhelmed and we stand or fall by our own efforts and our wits.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"image1114\" src=\"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/01\/counsel2-080118.jpg\" alt=\"Counsel Street 2008\" \/><\/p>\n<p>We learned too about community and how in times of difficulty the local community works together. Those friendships formed in adversity remain solid five years on.  <\/p>\n<p>That tree pictured in the scorched image above is now our dining table &#8211; a lasting marker of a day that changed the lives of many Canberra residents &#8211; a day that helped us to appreciate what we have in life.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/10\/tablefinished21.jpg\" alt=\"dining table\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On 18 January each year since the 2003 bushfires that devastated Canberra, we photograph our garden as a measure of our garden&#8217;s recovery since the bushfires took it back to scorched earth. It is a time to reflect on our own lives and on what is important to us since confronting the fires head-on and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1115"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}