Tend to agree. It’s a bunker or dam (assuming it’s got any water in it) or get the hell out a long time ahead to Hawkesbury River probably. The cabin will be gone either way. Then again it’s the rock climber in me calculated risk.

I notice a big double brick pile in the district with a big ‘drain’ crease under the back of the house, visible from the road. Then the penny dropped … it’s a bushfire bunker, open to the rear split level landscape below the house. Smart thinking. This particular place has great swathes of golf fairway style mown grass very short compared to the farmland.

But as you say ember attack is the thing, and megafire is day into night stuff.

My local NSW rural brigade had an info session recently and I learned some big facts:

- they said ‘i will get in trouble for saying this but’ only about 20K of the boast of 60K volunteers are real in the NSW RFS

- they thought at least some people who died in Victoria didn’t leave the house on fire AFTER the fire went through. This reinforces your comment about ignoring the house was the fuel not the refuge anyway and they couldn’t ‘leave’ anyway.

- too true about bushburbia in this area north west of Sydney, their own maps prove it the assets are multiplying. Only 40 people turned up for the ‘post Victoria briefings.

This area at the base of the Mountains looks very similar to the ‘google earth’ style photographs of the land use matrix at Kinglake. Very.

It’s megafire material and all that implies as per your story above. So yes you could say I’m engaged. 20 pile burns so far, in the autumn rain mostly. Not so easy to do - a good test of bush skills.

As for “mainstream” science, I’m saying is that peer review is nowhere near enough. Dubious assumptions have taken root in the small, self-referential world of fire science. The total absence of critical commentary (not least because of lack of interest by the media and general public) has enabled this dismal state of affairs to persist for decades.

So, Mr Campbell, you have different ideas to mainstream fire science? Great. Submit them for publication in a peer-reviewed journal (hint: this does not mean Crikey, The Age, blogs or enquiries). If your evidence (you do have some, don’t you?) stacks up, you’ll have made a great contribution. If not, at least you’ll have made a few key people re-examine their assumptions.

That’s how science works. Its cogs may grind slowly sometimes, but it remains no more or less than the most effective bulls — t filter ever devised. If you have a philosophy you reckon works better, well, let’s hear about that.