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On the 21st of June, at 8.30pm, I witnessed a rare sight in Australia, the so-called “aurora
borealis”. Because of the strike, the whole camp was dark and when we went for a walk on the middle path we spotted an increasing redness in the sky to the south-east. The night was clear and starlit so we thought at first that the red light was due to a bushfire. But the sky turned more and more red and this high above the horizon, which was completely dark. Soon rays emerged from the centre, just as they would in a sunset, but instead of being yellow they were pink. In the first quarter of an hour the light seemed to grow more
intense but then it gradually diminished and, at about 9.15pm, disappeared altogether. It must have a similar origin than the aurora borealis in the northern hemisphere, probably deriving from sunrays that are mirrored by the polar ice. There is a circa 50-year-old police sergeant here in camp, born in Australia (NSW), who told me that he had often heard and read about this phenomenon but