I love a sunburnt country / A land of sweeping plains / Of rugged mountain ranges / Of droughts and flooding rains / I love her far horizons / I love her jewel-sea / Her beauty and her terror / The wide brown land for me!
Dorothea Mackellar, My Country
I remember Christmas 2001, I was six years old and was just starting to get a good grasp on nihilism. As we always did at Christmas, my family left for family Christmas lunch and I was terrified to leave our home. It was a severe fire season that year and I was terrified that I would return home from the holiday frivolities to find the place burnt to a crisp. In retrospect, this all sounds a little bit ridiculous and I feel for my parents who would have been tasked with cajoling me into a state of calm. In 2009, aged 14, I remember sitting with my newborn nephew in my lap and watching the coverage of the Black Saturday bushfires. It was the largest loss of life we had seen from a natural disaster in Australia and it was scary, but far enough away to not really feel real. Fast forward to January 2020, the fires have been burning since September of 2019 and they’re much too close for comfort. On all of my social media timelines, fire is all I see, and I’m scared. I’m scared, I’m angry and I’m heartbroken and I don’t know what else I can do, but write.
I want to begin by saying that I am in Sydney’s Western Suburbs, not Lithgow, not Cobargo, not Bateman’s Bay. I have been watching the fires from a relatively safe distance, although I am constantly reminded of their presence by the seemingly “new normal” blanket of smoke that has made itself at home in Sydney and the ash which falls on our cars with far greater frequency and quantity than rain. As a child, I watched on during times of crisis like this in abject terror, self-soothing with the very careless mantra of “this won’t happen to me,” it was a small, but effective way of maintaining my sanity. The thing is, now although the fire has not made its way to my doorstep, it is happening to me, it’s happening to the kids that we teach, it is going to have a very real and serious impact on the future of Australia. As I approach my mid-twenties I started to think about the possibility of children of my own (albeit, a few years in the future) and now, I’m not so sure that’s something that I want. Right now, the future feels far too scary a place.
I don’t have the knowledge to understand what the long term impact of these bushfires will be, nor can I genuinely appreciate what they are going to mean for those who have lost everything in the inferno. What I do know however, is this, these fires will be a defining moment in Australia’s history, and when I return to school at the end of the month, there will be very little else the adults will be able to talk about and, from the kids, there will probably be some hairy questions too. How am I going to deal with this? I do not know. Will I have the answers before I finish writing this post? Almost certainly not.
The other day, I picked up a copy of TIME’s ‘Person of the Year’ issue and read about Greta Thunberg. Although Thunberg is a figure who has been incredibly divisive, there is no denying her impact. I admire the gutsiness it takes for this small 16-year-old girl to get up and yell “How dare you?” in the faces of adults, I also understand that, to her, it is not a matter of being brave, it is a matter of doing what she thinks is right. And to the chagrin of many adults around the world, Thunberg has done something incredible: she has mobilised children all around the world, and they are angry. Tens of thousands of people turned up for the Sydney Climate Strike on the 20th of September 2019 carrying posters which said things like “I am the Lorax and I speak for the trees and the trees say STOP ADANI” and “No jobs on a dead planet.” Prime Minister Scott Morrison responded that “[he didn’t] want our children to have anxieties about these issues.” To which I would just like to respond that I have been stressed about them forever and I feel a hell of a lot worse about them now.
The ABC released the article ‘See how global warming has changed the world since your childhood‘ on December 6th 2019. Reading it now, it occurs to me that the children I teach have only lived through one ‘average’ year; I have only lived through two myself. I don’t dare to look at the projected warming because I don’t know if I could cope with it. The heat in the last two weeks has been unbearable, yesterday the temperature reached a staggering 48.9 degrees Celsius (120 Fahrenheit for those who understand it) in Penrith just after 3pm. It was the hottest place in the world. In my un-air-conditioned classroom, I don’t know how many 35+ degree days I can take, much less the kids. At home, I’ve put on the AC three times in the last week – something I never, ever do (call it pig-headedness, I don’t care). I’m starting to forget the smell of petrichor, that delicious, life-giving smell of rain hitting the dust. I’m not being dramatic, I’m in mourning.
At the moment I am doing what I can to help; I’ve made donations to the RFS and am now a registered blood donor, but it still doesn’t feel like enough. I contemplated praying for rain, but there are probably lots of people already looking after that. Mostly, I am trying to figure out how to have conversations about the fires and the loss of human life and wildlife and how not to burst into tears about it all. When I meet kids with the same nihilism as six-year-old me, I feel a sense of responsibility to have rational and reasonable responses, to help them understand what is happening and what we can achieve together without terrifying them into oblivion.
If there is one good thing to emerge from this disaster, it is that Australians have done what they always do in times of emergency. The power of people is an incredible thing. Sikh volunteers travelled to cook free meals for those affected by fires in East Gippsland, these men from Sydney’s Western ‘burbs travelled for hours to put on a barbecue for those in need, Australian comedian Celeste Barber has raised over $20 million in a Facebook Fundraiser for the RFS. In spite of the fact that people are hurting, grieving and are feeling suitably pissed off in the quest for leadership and guidance, communities are demonstrating their own power and leadership.
I don’t have a happier note to end on, I am incredibly sad and I don’t really know what is going to come from all of this. In the meantime, I hope that you are taking the time to talk about this situation with your loved ones, process your feelings, let it out. This is going to be something we will be dealing with for a long time to come.
Until next time, be good,
Ms Tracy.
Things that you can do to help:
- For international readers, Celeste Barber’s fundraiser which is currently live on Facebook
- For NSW Rural Fire Service donations
- CFA donations (Victorian Country Fire Authority)
- WIRES Emergency Fund, supporting Australian Wildlife in the current fire crisis
- The Animal Welfare League of New South Wales are supporting pets and livestock impacted by the bushfires. Vets are on the front line treating pets and livestock in areas like Bega and Cobargo
- You can go HERE to find out if you are eligible to donate blood – the need for blood donations is rising
- Reading this blog post. For every view and share of this blog post until Friday 10th January 2020, I will be making a small contribution to the WIRES emergency fund.
A final note from the author:
I’m not interested in using this post as a platform to debate about climate change, nor for an argument about Australia’s leadership – these arguments are divisive and do very little to help the crisis at hand. All points made in this post are my own opinion (duh) unless stated otherwise. Please, in this time of crisis, be kind to each other, take care of each other and do what you can to make the world a better place.
thoughts from the first year 