Fire and Water

Yeah, I had no idea what they were doing either.

By Kathleen

The trouble with chasing summer is that you’re always inadvertently bumping up against winter. The week of rain seems to have ushered in fall with a bit more haste then we were expecting. It seems March Down-Under is in like a lamb and out like a lion.

We’ve been finding ourselves no longer just shivering in bed at night but well into the morning and long sleeves are becoming more necessary than optional. ( Which considering our wardrobes is a little limiting). The sun still shines down on us but now it is softer and less like its destroying your skin cells mitochondria or what-not.

With the end of summer comes those types of things that I’m used to seeing back home around this season, namely country fairs.

We were feeling more confined than usual yesterday and decided that only going for a drive would cure our boredom so we headed to Mooroopna, the next town over. There seemed to be a lot of excitement, fire trucks and people and white stalls set up. Realizing that once again we’d left our camera at home we swung back. Grabbing our friends Nico and Nelly and the camera we returned to investigate.

What lay before us was a strange scene, like no other I have previously encountered. From what we could garner from watching it seemed that team of men and women, who were all volunteer fire-fighters, were involve din some sort of competition whereby they raced 20 meters of so down a road with a fire hose on wheels and a metal pipe. Part of the team was in charge of unrolling and manning the hose, the other part when they reached the appropriate place, stuck the pipe in the ground and, water spurting everywhere, connected the hose. Then they sprayed a big target. Whoever sprayed the target first won. It seemed vaguely sexual to me.

We all know what this is really about.

After much discussion we were all still confused about the nature of the event. Do volunteer fire brigades us the hose on the wheel now? Is this something historic? What was going on?

It is true that in Australia because there’s so much space and so few people that there are many volunteer firefighter teams to help combat local and bush fires which during the dry months can rage uncontrollably, sometimes damaging vast areas.

Just another little something exciting.

Fiz and Nico practicing