Today it is sunny and hot in Lisbon, AGAIN. Yesterday we spent the morning in the Principe Real district, recommended to us by Inca, as she lived in Lisbon for a time whilst her father worked at the Peruvian Embassy. It is teeming with antique shops (ancient tiles) and art galleries.

We enjoyed a pleasant lunch in a Café Martinho Da Arc, opened in 1782, in the Praco do Comercio by the sea.  We had just returned to the hotel when we heard the most enormous “Boom”. It was thunder. For the next fifteen minutes we were spectators of a monumental electrical storm.

Large scale, majestic, terrifying thunder storms are commonplace in Australia. I love the offbeat song by GANGgajang, “This is Australia”, with the lyrics, “On the patio we sit, The humidity we breathe, We watch lightning crack over (sugar) canefields…”

Only 10 percent of Australia is inhabited and that includes the large tracts of land, which are grazing or arable land.

From the window of the many planes that have flown me home to Oz, I have gazed, amazed, at the sheer vastness of the uninhabited rust-red desert and the treeless grasslands that comprise so much of the interior. From hitting the coast at the top of Western Australia, to finally seeing settlement just before reaching Sydney, hours go by where there is no sign of life below. But, I would occasionally see thunderstorms and lightning striking the lifeless ground. No-one but goannas and kangaroos to witness the show. 

Lightning, as a child, meant get out of the water or be fried. It also meant bushfires if there was vegetation, especially eucalyptus trees, which release their seeds in the heat in order to reproduce. My parents, Stan and Bev, relocated from Sydney to the scenic Illawarra peninsula to settle near Shaun and his family in early 1999. The settlement along the peninsula is bookended by the sea on one side and a large, bushy ridge or escarpment on the other.

For one Christmas we were in Oz for the festive season and on the day itself, a huge cloud rolled in from the West. Not a rain cloud, it was smoke. The food stuck in our throats as we realised that out West people could be losing their homes and possibly their lives. Bush animals would be dying. The fires came precariously close to my brother’s, Shaun’s, house. Only the creek separated them from the flames. All it took was for a spark to fly over the water and it would have been curtains.

For days after we could see smouldering fires along the top of the ridge, threatening to erupt with a high wind and advance down to the houses. I was down at the beach with Shaun’s wife, Wendy and our children one morning in the early 2000s, when a huge helicopter came over the ridge. It was Elvis.

Elvis is a huge helicopter from Memphis that the Australian government hires during the summer bushfire season. It has a long nozzle like a mosquito, which sucks up to 9,500 litres of seawater and then spews it out on the flames. Everyone on the beach stopped their activities to watch the show and cheer Elvis on. In seconds the smouldering fires were quenched as Elvis chucked out its load of water. During these seasons the Australian Fire Brigade, including rescue fighter, Rob Kilham, work full throttle to save homes and lives.

Summer means surfing and sunshine and fun, but it is also a time of intense heartache for those who lose their homes or loved ones to bushfires. One summer I was down at the local fish and chips shop at Austinmer Beach, near Mum and Dad’s home, when an old bloke got out of his ‘ute (utility truck). He was covered head to toe in black soot and looked tired. I asked what had happened and he told me that he had disobeyed the fire brigade when he was ordered to evacuate. Instead, he had sat on the roof of his house all night and kept hosing it down as the street was engulfed in flames. The rest of the street burnt to the ground. This is the Aussie spirit. He told me, “I wasn’t bloody well going to lose my house!” A man’s house is his castle after all.

Today we are going to the Estoril and Cascais, seaside resorts, half an hour by train to the West of Lisbon.