TODAY'S edition of The Standard is about hope. Hoping for better times. Hoping that dark days will not re-visit us. Hoping that others may hope for us.
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Sunday marks one year since the St Patrick's Day bushfires.
It remains a miracle that no lives were lost and no serious injuries were sustained among the widespread destruction. But that happy statistic does not take into account the loss, the pain, the unrelenting grind of recovery.
What takes a lifetime to build takes even longer to re-build.
And loss, in all its variant forms, never, ever goes away.
For some farmers, their stock aren't just animals. And even if they are, to see them wiped out by fire in a night of terror and pain is a feeling hard to describe and much, much harder to endure.
To see the labours of years vanish overnight. To lose your possessions, from tiny personal items to others with six-figure pricetags, is pain writ large.
To garner the strength to re-build is titanic. To see the sense of community gather and rally around those who have had to fightback is inspiring.
The stories in today's edition of The Standard are the stories that define humanity. The stories that say we are at our best when things are at their worst. We are still standing. Life does go on.
But some fights are not over yet.
The struggle for fair and timely compensation through a legal process that has become convoluted, mired and often sees large proportions of costs won from those parties that caused the fires absorbed by legal fees. This leaves those people who lost so much through no fault of their own with far less money than they deserve.
Similarly the fight to make sure the region does not suffer from future avoidable catastrophies such as the St Patrick's Day fires must continue.
Strength to the arms of those brave and strong enough to do so. They will effect change for the better and to paraphrase a famous saying, never will be so much be owed by so many to so few.