The fires started in the Namadgi ranges, a popular national park, and engulfed Canberra's south-western suburbs with frightening speed, stoked by drought, heat and searing winds.
SLIDE SHOW Garden spaces that are blooming in New York despite decades of fierce challenges by buffeting winds, searing heat, covetous landlords and evolving civic policies.
The streets of Egypt are brewing with discontent in response to a "politicised" verdict: protests in Cairo, Alexandria and Suez are already at full pelt and will increase as the searing summer sun winds down.
Searing images of wind-damaged homes, flooding and mass evacuations — all fraught with the memory of Hurricane Katrina — may well compete on television with Mr. Romney's bid to seize the initiative in his battle with President Obama for the White House.
They pass their days standing on black asphalt in searing heat or icy wind, with their polyester neckties knotted close to their Adam's apples, inhaling car exhaust and waving cars according to traffic laws and their own traffic philosophies.
The work is outdoors, without benefit of cover, in frigid cold, high winds and searing heat.
In other words, they routinely tromped outside, often enduring frigid winds or searing heat, to paint near their subjects.
"For millennia," she writes, "Saudis struggled to survive in a vast desert under searing sun and shearing winds that quickly devour a man's energy, as he searches for a wadi of shade trees and water, which are few and far between, living on only a few dates and camel's milk.
A breathtaking episode it was, and one that gives the lie to long-standing demonizations of Reconstruction, which films like "Birth of a Nation" and "Gone with the Wind" seared into public memory, and instead demonstrates that the courageous efforts of ordinary black and white people, women and men alike, brought a new nation into being.
