Nature

There is a strange atmosphere in Australia at the moment. As you may have heard there have been devastating floods in Queensland, a state thousands of kilometres north from us. Nevertheless, it has really introduced a strange, anxious quiet even this far away. That's exacerbated I think by the oppressively humid whether we're having down here as well as heavy rain ourselves (it is pouring outside at the moment). As a famous poem here says, it really is a land of "drought and flooding rains". A land of extremes, in which the precarious nature of human life in the face of nature is never far from the surface.