i have another question about your fires down there. do the australians share the american's value of having elbow room and a piece of the "frontier"?
it seems like here a great many people aspire to buying an acreage "out in the country" and building a fancy home on it. 20 acre chunks with a mcmansion on a ridge are super common. they then insure them heavily, since, if they are not aggressive in keeping vegetation away from their house, they have plopped their homes in the middle of a fire-driven ecosystem and then the inevitable happens. the rest of us pay for it in our home insurance premiums. Southern california homes above a brushfield are the classic in ecological ignorance, but they are learning, slowly but surely.
Does australia have a lot of homes out in the bush for people that don't live off their land but support it by commuting or whatever? the amount of wildland/urban interface that having them peppered all around the landscape makes defending them virtually impossible.
While i have very little sympathy for people that get their dream burned up out of ignorance, i personally have a log cabin i built in northern idaho that is such a place, and have long resigned myself that one day it, too, will succumb if i do not clear around it.
i am just sort of curious if building homes out in brushfields is an american phenomenon or if all immigrant-based cultures seem to share that proclivity?
AI
