As you might expect, it hasn’t taken long for the recriminations to start – not enough firebreaks, too many trees, disorganisation at the scene etc. No doubt some of this will prove justified, but there’s plenty of time to sort this out later. Given the kind of test provided by the worst drought in 100 years, and extreme weather conditions, it’s inevitable that mistakes will have been made.

Among the print media, PP McGuinness is predictably nasty and ill-informed. But as in many other things, the blog world outdoes the established media in nastiness. The prize goes to this piece from “Strawman” reproduced in full by Australian Libertarian Society* (summary: tree-huggers deserved all they got). I don’t know if this is meant as a joke and I don’t particularly care. Tim Dunlop has more.

A lot of the discussion has given a quite misleading impression of what the western edge of Canberra is actually like – you get the impression of a city built in a national park. Actually most suburbs are bordered by open grassland used for grazing cattle and horses. Judging by the media reports and the experience of the past, the big fuel source has been pine plantations that were set up (I think) during the Depression and have been part of the Canberra landscape ever since, though presumably no longer. Pines are more even flammable than eucalypts which, after all, evolved to be fire-tolerant.

* The ALS is based largely in Canberra – make of that what you will

Update In the comments thread, Jason Soon points out that the ALS site is organised as an unmoderated collective blog, and that “Strawman” is a member of the collective who can choose to repost his own thoughts freely. I had incorrectly assumed that some sort of conscious decision to reproduce this piece had been made by someone other than the author. As Jason says, his Catallaxy Files site is organised in the same way and he often ends up contradicting his own guest bloggers.

It was therefore, premature of me to suggest that the viewpoint of one ALS member, posted on their site, is representative of the group as a whole. I’ll be interested to see whether anyone chooses to put a different viewpoint.

Further update John Humphreys of ALS has posted a personal account of his bushfire experience in the Forum section of ALS (links are still not very good, but it’s not hard to find). This isn’t a response to “Strawman” and doesn’t seek to draw any political conclusions, but it certainly suggests that the post I referred to reflects on the character of its pseudonymous author rather than on ALS as a whole.