SYDNEY -- At times like these, Australians are wondering whether they really do live upside down. While the Northern Hemisphere, shivering in the cold, was welcoming in 2002 with hot drinks, Australia has been battling bush fires.
Thousands of hectares of this country's forests have burned down to charred stumps, species of fauna found only here are threatened with extinction, and hundreds of families are homeless.
Japan has its earthquakes, North America has its blizzards. This self-styled "lucky country" has no such natural disasters. But once or twice in a decade a summer can turn our complacency into red-alert mobilization as we again face oncoming walls of fire that sweep toward the state capital cities, at times engulfing suburbs. So far this summer it's Sydney's turn to sizzle.