Hot Summer Land Part 3 Rivers

In December, as this intense summer got into full swing, most of the country dried out. Drought held tight in western Queensland, Perth swooned through a series of record breaking heatwaves, and then the south-east and west caught fire with powerful implications for human life, livestock, native animals, plants, and our landscape. In the Hot Summer Land project RN Earshot and ABC Open teamed up to ask our audience—you—to paint us a word picture of how your landscape changed over the three months of summer. You posted over 200 evocative stories from around the country. Some of these were chosen to be part of a three part series, tracking the impact of summer as we lived it. In part two we use some of these stories to show how fire attacked the southern part of the country, and how the bush and the community responded. Stories in this program are from: David Barton - First fire of the season, Polly Musgrove - October garden. Guests: Captain Steve Warrington, Deputy Chief Officer of the Victorian Country Fire Authority; Professor David Lindenmayer, Professor, The Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University Dr Andrew Watkins Supervisor, Climate Prediction Services at the Bureau of Meteorology, Captain Leigh Pilkington Deputy Group Captain for the Gosford district of the NSW Fire Brigade, Professor David Bowman Professor of Environmental Change, at the University of Tasmania.