They say that if you are attacked in New York you should yell "Fire" because that is the only distress call that New Yorkers pay attention to

Well, it's that time of year again, I guess. Bushfires are happening all over the place. I've been caught in a few fairly fierce fires frighteningly frequently before without having to resort to alliteration to escape them and it's never fun. I'm a bit worried about the Moondarra fire, in particular. It wouldn't be very difficult for a blaze to become practically unstoppable in that country; it's steep, with few access trails and plenty of fuel. I guess it does have whatever they ended up calling that Thompson River Dam (Bluerock?) for those water dumping thingummies. Bugger's probably empty.

Which has nothing to do with the scariest fire I was in-

I was working at the time for a chappie who was (and still is) one of Australia's largest private landholders and one of the two blokes who vie each year for the biggest acreage of wheat. He grew 96,000 acres the year I was working for him. As well as about 5,000,000 acres of cattle country and 20- or 30,000 acres of cotton. He's got a few other odds and ends, too, like a transport company, a soft-drink company and apparently he has a slice of the Star City Casino, too. Although that last one might be a non-urban myth. Tight as a fishes arsehole, he is. Nice bloke, though. One of those old fashioned 'salt of the earth' types. For a fella who makes it into the whatever magazine it is 'top several richest people in God's Country' list every year, he's still just a bloke from Coonabarabran.

I wouldn't piss on his kids if they were on fire, though. Arseholes, every one of them. One of his sons was running the place I was working on. I was driving the fuel truck - an old petrol powered four wheel drive Acco army truck with a couple of 1800 litre tanks on the back. I used to shift 90,000 litres of fuel a week with this old clunker - keeping thirteen headers, about a dozen tractors and a few pumpsites full. As well as this, I was spending fifty to sixty hours a week with a great bloke getting his (the wheat tycoon's) workshop going and all his old pieces of shit operational.

Because it was a petrol powered truck, I used to fuel the headers up at the side of the paddock - wheat stubble burns fairly well.

The Son decided that was taking too long and told me to drive out into the paddock to fuel them up. This worked well for a few days - every time I came out of the paddock I would clear all the stubble from around the exhaust and all was right with the world.

Until it wasn't. I was filling a header one afternoon and saw smoke coming from under the cab of the truck. I ran over, opened the cab door, but the flames were already roof height. I ran back to the header and got old mate driving it to bugger off. He'd only gone about 100 metres when the tanks caught fire. No expolosion, but the filler caps blew off and flames shot about sixty metres in the air (they saw the smoke thirty kilometres away) Before long there was a crowd of people forming a perimeter and keeping the fire contained to the immediate area. Just when we were relaxing the petrol tank on the transfer pump caught fire. One last hurrah.

The next day, The Son blamed me for it. I reminded him that it was his idea to drive into the paddock. He told me that no, he he had in fact, told me to drive into (another) paddock. Which had the same variety of wheat in it.

The judge has called for the print to decide whether I quit or was sacked first.

I still like his dad.