Watching an old bushfire red as sin on a video, I saw an ordinary footpath outside some precious home. The house was burning giddily behind a high stone fence, but on the regulation footpath beds of fire were contained where pine bark burned in an ordered way— pine bark laid with loving care to keep down the weeds, and neaten things— nobody had thought of fire. It didn’t keep down the fire which blazed in right-angled beds— oblong, square, along the fence and around the trees which themselves burned aloud with fervour, almost blasphemy, above the rectangular beds of six-inch…