FIRE!

Northern Advocate, 16 February 1926, Page 4

FIRE!

For weeks past cable messages from. Australia have told of devastating bush fires which have swept huge ■areas in New South Wales and Victoria. Today’s news particularly reveals some of the horrors of the visitation. The reports of the fires make sad reading for those who know what such outbreaks really mean. It is impossible for one bred in a city to understand the real significance of the term “bush fire." No one who has never seen one of these conflagrations srveeping across the country, leaping roadeC'and rivers in its deadly race, thrusting crop and pasture and homestead into it insatiable maw, and leaving behind it a wake of desolation and death, can even begin to imagine how dreadful a visitation it is. Everything seems to conspire together to add to the terror of the scene. The dreadful heat, the roaring of the flames through harvest and scrub, the awful pace .at which the fire leaps upon new victims, the sight of the destruction which it effects so speedily and so remorselessly, combine to complete an ordeal ■which is as exhausting physically .and distressing mentally as any in the whole .gamut of human experience. Such an experience as this it is which hundreds of Australians, of both sexes .and all ages, are undergoing today, Sincere sympathy will be extended to them by their fellow colonists in New Zealand.