Word: southwesterly
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...dangerous fires, he says, occur when droughts follow years that are unusually wet. That's because generous rains encourage trees, shrubs and grasses to grow, providing the fuel that stokes forest fires. This pattern of wet preceding dry, Swetnam thinks, helped feed the intense blazes that raged through the Southwest shortly after 1850, taking out huge stands of conifers. So, if a new El Nino materializes later this year, as some experts expect, it may bring rains that temporarily ease the fire danger only to increase it later...
...years ago, as the author was battling brain cancer, his children asked him to set down an account of his formative years while he still could. Booth finished just before dying in February. He was buried in his favorite cowboy boots - he had developed a fondness for the American southwest. Don't look for anything morose here. Gweilo is sometimes a bit novelistic for a memoir, but it is alive with delight in the new. The boy's golden hair is considered good luck by the Chinese, who cannot resist touching it. "I was a walking talking talisman," he writes...
...springs, postcode 0852, consists of one establishment: the Wanda Inn roadhouse. But the petrol station?pub?motel, 300 km southwest of Katherine, has the feel of a small town. Within its tidy sprawl of accommodation blocks, trailers, caravans and tents - powered by a shed-sized generator and watered by an artesian well - manager Terry Jones and her seven staff (plus Spike the dog, Pickles the wallaroo and a resident python) host a shifting population of local cattlemen and Aborigines, road workers, tourists and truckers. Isolated the place may be, says Jones, a former hairdresser, but it's never lonely...
...sullen Tasmanian winter sky threatens rain or worse. In layers of thermals, waterproof trousers and parkas, gloves sodden from slippery branches, Shaw and other members of the local Aboriginal community have scrambled for an hour through steep rainforest to reach this spot in the island's wild southwest. Here at the base of a rough limestone bluff, half-hidden by the immense arching fronds of tree ferns, a dark cave mouth gapes crookedly, big enough to admit a man almost upright. But Shaw, the head of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Land Council, suddenly feels uneasy - not about the bugs...
...Hand stencils have been found in only three other caves in Tasmania's spectacularly rugged southwest, all reachable by only the keenest of bushwalkers. Dating of those discovered in 1986 in Ballawinne cave, in the Maxwell Valley, provided the first proof that rock art in Australia had survived from the last Ice Age, which ended roughly 10,000 years ago. Tasmania was then joined to the Australian mainland by a land bridge, and though the island's stencils may not be as old as Arnhem Land's tableaux of long-limbed spirits, or as elaborate as the red spectral figures...