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| Australia fires live news: MP says at least 200 homes destroyed in NSW as Victoria bushfires continue – latest updates | Australia fires live news: MP says at least 200 homes destroyed in NSW as Victoria bushfires continue – latest updates |
| (32 minutes later) | |
| Four unaccounted for in Victoria after East Gippsland fires claim homes in Buchan, Sarsfield and Mallacoota | Four unaccounted for in Victoria after East Gippsland fires claim homes in Buchan, Sarsfield and Mallacoota |
| The Lake Tyers Aboriginal community has begun to run out of water this morning. | |
| The Aboriginal-owned Gunai/ Kurnai community, which is only 11km east of Lakes Entrance as the crow flies but about 25 minutes by road, has been cut off since Monday. | |
| About 45 people chose to remain in the community as the fire threatened and retreated to the health centre. Their only protection is the fire chief, Charmaine Sellings; her two volunteers, and one ute with a slip-on tank. They will have to fill the ute out of the water from her daughter’s pool, Sellings says, unless the power and water is switched back on. Their second fire truck was comandeered by the local CFA, of which Sellings is a volunteer, to fight fires north of Lakes Entrance. | |
| “There’s a lot of fuel, it’s really dry, most of the dams are dry, and our water has gone on the blink again,” Sellings says. | |
| The community is cut off from the Princes Highway by a broad stretch of forest, which turns into farmland about 2km from the settlement. The community began as a church mission in 1863 and Lake Tyers residents were granted the freehold in 1971, under the Aboriginal Lands Act. Many residents were born on the mission, and it’s a “haven” for many other koori, Suzie Squires, the CEO of the local housing corporation, says. | |
| Their last visit from emergency services was on Sunday, Sellings says — they have recieved no further information other than what was listed on the Emergency Vic app, and watched the flames at Nowra Nowra on Monday night knowing they were only 8km away and not knowing whether they would get close. Sellings’ biggest concern is the health of elderly residents, many of whom have respiratory problems. | |
| If the fire is blown towards them and reaches the community centre, Kerry Tregonning says, they plan to take to the water. | |
| “We have got the boats out the back we can use to accomodate about 20 people, we have 20 life jackets, for everyone to evacuate if we have to go to the water,” Tregonning says. “We are trying to source more life jackets now.” | |
| If fire does reach the forest surrounding the community, evacuation by water will be the only option. | |
| The Australian bushfire crisis continues to lead international news coverage: | |
| Friends in the UK, where Australia has just launched a multimillion-dollar tourism campaign, said it led last night’s news bulletins, ahead of New Year’s Eve coverage. | |
| Meanwhile, in the New England north-west, residents in the small town of Manilla are coming together as a blockade to stop water being taken from their town to ‘fill up Tamworth swimming pools’. | |
| A deadly bushfire went through nearby Glen Innes in November. | |
| The Victorian emergency commissioner, Andrew Crisp, was just asked about resources for firefighters: | |
| And in Moruya: | |
| Power has been out at Ulladulla on the NSW south coast. | |
| Residents are being urged not to ‘panic buy’ and just get what they need, with authorities reassuring people they will not run out of food. | |
| Scott Morrison is at Kirribilli. | |
| He is hosting the New Year’s Day Cricket Australia-The McGrath Foundation reception a little later today. | |
| The Sky News reporter Trudy McIntosh is on the ground in Cobargo: | |
| The NSW education minister has confirmed Cobargo and Quaama public schools have been destroyed by the south coast fires. | |
| That follows the loss of the Clifton Creek primary school in the East Gippsland fires yesterday. | |
| And for an idea of some of that – here is a satellite representation of what happened in eastern Victoria over the last few days: | And for an idea of some of that – here is a satellite representation of what happened in eastern Victoria over the last few days: |
| So there you have it – a unique and complex set of circumstances in Victoria – people isolated in the middle of fire grounds, people displaced by the fire and unable to return to their communities, and existing fires joining up to create bigger fires. Firefighters being brought in by air. | |
| Five Australian states have been impacted by this fire season. It’s not like the previous fire seasons that have scarred the landscape and the nation’s consciousness – fast-moving fires that devastated one particular area – this is hitting everything at once. | |