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| NSW, Australia |
Bittersweat, symphony, by the Verve kept playing through his head. Old scums came scurrying through abandoned places. Chums, some of them, in the brief lumiscence of the night. Before all was gone. Humble yourself before God, came the dictate, and so he did, living quietly. It was too moronic, some of the things that had happened, and now he was just quiet. He missed the Vietnamese and their coffee in the morning, as if it was hard to establish a routine in such a place. He watched the handsome tradies in the morning, on their way to work. Sometimes lounging, sometimes flirting with a girl. All fit as. The old places, dying inside his brain, were vivid traces of past loyalties and betrayals. In his case, grossly misplaced loyalties. The cyclone had gone through his life and left it even worse than before. The pain was back. A shadow, but there were no shadows. Everything was too exposed.
So he just went through the motions and waited for the wheels to turn, as they always did. Collapsed and coaelescing. Ancient routines, ancient places which stretched back thousands of years. And then he went for his walks. They weren't evil, the people who said good morning as he passed, or made some form of acknowledgement as he walked past. Out with their dogs, or each other, or in lycra exercising. Nothing ever happened here. There was no danger. People struggled; and that was that. Cold, still, as summer crept slowly in upon them. The smoke that had pooled across the Illawara had disippated. A terrible thing, what happened, someone said. But more often it was just a chant: "I didn't know, I didn't know that about..."
He was born in terribe days, with the black clouds spilling over the escarpment. Yet here there was nothing but a gentle sound of birds; of people waking, of radios and televisions in surrounding houses. Yet most of them were quiet, too, as they went about their quiet, quiet lives. The houses contained and muffled every sound. An arch bitch, she curled up in the sky and screached: "I'm going to get you for that." And on the ground, in a spread of dark alleys, the rats scurried for cover. Their pert little faces and nasty teeth, their rodent like demeanour. They could do what they liked, have their temporary victories, but they would always be rats, thieves scurrying for cover in a web of lies. So he nodded at people on his morning walks along the edge of Lake Illawarra, as was expected. The bigger the city, the less they acknowledged you. Here they all said good morning.
So he had been robbed and thrown back to where he did not want to be. It was a shrug of a nothing in comparison to what else was happening. The pain kept cramping through his shoulders; but other things would happen soon enough. As if it all fell on to him. 2013, a difficult year, some said. Well yes, it was, and not just for him. All could be commandeered, wasted. But he wasn't going to surrender. Everything they ever did to persecute and intimidate him had backfired; as they exposed their own corruption. But he was not about to engage, not here, not now. He would live quiet, but not die quiet, not for now. The screaming of the light, the screaching of the dispossessed, the agony of thought, all would come forth. But not now, not now. With the light filtering through the trees, the water birds feeding at the edge of the lake, the water chopped by wind. And a nod, good morning, from a comfortable face.
THE BIGGER STORY:
The Rural Fire Service Commissioner has paid tribute to the pilot of a plane which crashed in rugged terrain while water-bombing a fire in southern New South Wales.
David Black, 43, died when his Dromader aircraft crashed while fighting a fire at Wirritin in Budawang National Park, 40 kilometres west of Ulladulla, around 10am on Thursday.
Reports say one of the plane's wings fell off before the aircraft plummeted to the ground.
RFS commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons described the death of the pilot as a "huge tragedy".
"It's a tragedy for the fire-fighting community, of course, but first and foremost we're acutely aware that it's a tragedy for this young man's family," he said.
"He's a husband with young children and we are all acutely aware that there's a family suffering because their dad hasn't come home.
"We will give all the support we can to the family, and I'm sure they know that the people of New South Wales will be eternally grateful for his work in trying to suppress those fires."
Fires burned near the wreckage, and water-bombing aircraft were forced to fly sorties to keep the fires at bay as teams attempted to reach Mr Black's body.
Key bushfire links:
- Blog: Pilot confirmed dead as fires flare
- ABC Emergency: abc.net.au/news/emergency
- Rural Fire Service: rfs.nsw.gov.au
- Bureau of Meteorology: bom.gov.au
Late on Thursday afternoon local police superintendent Joe Cassar said high winds had made it too difficult to retrieve the body.
"We are continuing to try to get the helicopters in there but where we find ourselves at the moment is, it is far too dangerous to send any personnel down there to retrieve the pilot," he said.
Mr Fitzsimmons says Mr Black was making a real difference to his community and the community of New South Wales.
"At the end of the day, we talk about firefighting necessarily so, but there is such a big human dimension," he said.
"There is a family that is not going to welcome home their dad and their husband, and they have got a lifetime of hurt, a lifetime ahead of them to mourn the loss of their father who was doing some extraordinary work."
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