The next day Virginia went to day care (Lapstone wasn’t in the line of the fire) but Emma stayed with us as most of her class were evacuated in the dramatic night. We passed the morning with a nice visit to the Penrith regional gallery.

The girls enjoyed the exhibitions, origami and the shadow puppets

Angelina and the girls returned to the mountains, where their street was filling up with fire fighters. The week was spent with either fires being slowly put out or crews conducting back-burning (controlled burning of bush land to make a barrier against the advance of the blaze). Hahgoot suffered from many asthma and allergy related symptoms (heavy coughing, especially at night, itchiness, many nose bleeds), and was very stressed and highly agitated, so I kept her at home for a week.

The sky, especially over the mountains, had a sinister brown-orange haze for a week. The smell of burning bush is unique and not the most pleasant. For asthma sufferers, it is very bad. Despite not being affected directly by the fire, the situation certainly impacted on our life and schedule: one music lesson was cancelled as the teacher lives in the bush and was in stand-by to defend her home. Hahgoot’s class teacher didn’t come one day as well as there were road blocks. I was called into the gallery on a Wednesday afternoon to stand in for the Art Box teacher, who lives in Faulconbridge, where the fire was getting very intense and threatened to burn down the famous Norman Lindsey gallery (most of the artworks were packed and transferred to the CBD the night before it got too close for comfort). When you can hear the names of suburbs you know as the first item on the news, that is bad news…

Thick smoke covered our suburb for nearly a week. In our next presentation: we have a fun day at the Art Gallery of NSW with Mia and Sarah