No that's just Queensland, back again

From news.com.au

Andrew Bolt

Saturday, February 05, 2011 at 12:54pm

A brilliant piece by Heather Brown. Make sure you read it all:

I am a Queensland northerner, born and bred, and, for better or for worse, I carry 100 years of history in the blood, 100 years of a family crazy-drunk in love with a wild and unpredictable place.

Every part of the sweat-stained map that makes up north Queensland is part of the flesh: weddings in Cairns, funerals in Townsville, honeymoons on Magnetic Island. Our history is shaped by disaster: fire and flood, cyclone and drought. The north was a place we built with our hands.

My father once told me that you can never expect southerners to fully understand, because they were different from the rest of us.On Wednesday night I sat up following the cyclone, sitting in the cool darkness between the twin stars of television and internet while my husband—who is a southerner—slept peacefully beside me.

It was true: I just hoped my husband didn’t really know how much I wanted to go home that night, to feel the force of my land again, the sweet dense wind, rain hard enough to bruise the flesh. That’s the thing the new settlers never seem to understand about the north. How fierce she is. How utterly unpredictable.

For the past week I have watched the papers and the people make their assumptions and declarations about the north: dangerous and destructive, a place that needs taming, a very bad place to be. And the sweet southern chorus—television, bloggers, texters, tweeters—started to preach from their mantle of safety in the south.

It was hard watching my fellow Australians panic and plead for their lives, one million human ants desperately running in all directions, trying to ensure their survival.

All the while, they kept asking the same question: how can the north do this to us?

And I wanted to tell them, sorry, but that’s how she is: wild and dangerous, destructive, unpredictable, heart-breaking.

And did somebody mention wonderful?

Is global warming alarmism really a symptom of an urban elite, conditioned to flick-the-switch instant comfort and grown too disconnected with not only history but the land and its seasons?

(Thanks to reader Kevin.)