F: Fire, Floods, Federation

Please read/watch the materials below.

1. Floods and Fires

Australian weather has never been easy on the settlers. Southern regions suffer from severe fires, while the North often faces tropical cyclones and floods.

Watch a heartbreaking account of Black Saturday - the 2009 Victorian Bushfires.



Watch the clip  below to learn more about the 2009 Queensland Flood.



And finally listen to this story of a survivor. Turia suffered her burns in a bush fire in Kimberly just two weeks after I was in the region, so this makes the story particularly emotional for me.





2. Federation

"At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve 1900, as the clock ticked into 1901 and the 20th century, whistles, gongs, church bells, rattles, pots, pans, accordions and all manner of noise-makers joined the sirens of boats on Sydney Harbour.
It was to be a special day"

Do you know what special day it was? No? Then go here to find out :-)

"Just after that midnight, a storm broke and winds gusting up to 50 miles an hour swept into Sydney. Forty points of rain drenched the harbour city.
But the New Year’s Day morning of 1901 broke clear and fine, and an eight-kilometre procession headed out to Centennial Park, just beyond Paddington, where the federation rites, uniting the erstwhile separate British colonies into one federal Commonwealth, finally took place."