A thirsty Victorian koala gets a drink from a Country Fire Association volunteer. "I can't believe he's drinking all this water," says the fireo as the parched marsupial quenches its thirst from a bottle of water. The camera rolls. "Are you getting all this?" asks the guy. "Yeah," says his mate.

A friend posted this Associated Press video from YouTube, on Facebook. It's titled 'Raw Video: Sam the Koala Gets a Drink After Fire'. "You alright buddy, eh?" asks the dusty fireman as he approaches the equally dusty animal isolated amid blackened gum trees and in a total absence of underbrush.

"Come here buddy."

It's a very touching vignette of what happened on 9 February. We got to see the news videos coming out of the affected area only on Sunday afternoon. Then it was suddenly that we saw major adjustments made to news splash pages and the saturation TV coverage.

In a piece published in The Age newspaper today, Marieke Hardy criticises the extent and nature of the coverage we've been seeing. She regrets the manufactured nature of much of it and condemns TV stations for chasing stories so energetically that tragedy seems to be something put on for our benefit, rather than something we sympathise with because it happened to someone else.

But the video clip featured at the start of this blog post seems to go some way to quenching her smart. A bit of real life well lived. Ahhhhh!