The "lucky" country's luck has, it seems, run out. The fires that have raged in New South Wales and Queensland have created a major natural catastrophe - with shocking loss of life and property, wildlife such as koalas and kangaroos burnt to death, exhausted fire crews, huge economic damage and a continuing threat to the viability of human settlement in large areas of Australia. The country seemed to be, quite literally, burning up.
The pictures shown on our television screens testify to what is surely more than an isolated episode. They took my mind back to a lunch I attended in Oxford in the early 1990s. The lunch was hosted, if my memory serves me correctly, by David Butler, the renowned psephologist, and he had for some reason invited me and three or four young, Oxford-based, Australian academics to join him.
My abiding memory of the occasion is of the pessimism of the young Australians about the future of their country. Their primary concern was the failure of their government to recognise the threat posed by the endemic shortage of water.
Their greatest fear was not that the country would catch fire and burn out of control, as has now happened, but the related issue of the effects of drought on Australian agriculture. They bemoaned what they saw as the government's apathy and the absence of any remedial action.
I recall that they made a comment which I have since heard repeated many times. "If we could only prepare for our summer heat as well as the Canadians prepare for their winter cold," they said, " we would be in much better shape."