Australia is Burning – Now it must change

By Geraldine Brooks

In FT Weekend

10 January 2020

When I fly home to Sydney out of a northern winter, the thing that always strikes me first, the thing I look forward to, is the light. That crisp blue, arc-light brightness. The shimmering air, rinsed by thousands of miles of uninterrupted ocean.

Not this year. In December, I stepped out of the international terminal into the foyer of hell.

Grey smoke swathed my city. A dandruff of fine ash fell on my shoulders, caught in my throat.

That same day, not so far away, a friend took refuge on the beach as a finger of fire raced through the bush towards her home.

That’s OK, she thought, we can fight that. But the narrow rill of flame was just the precursor to the blazing wall that roared up behind it — an inferno 30 metres high. Another friend, evacuated from the mud-brick bush house he’d built side by side with his young sons over many years, waited anxiously for news as the Rural Fire Service volunteers — the fireys, as Aussies call them — battled ember attacks that showered down in a parody of the rain that hasn’t fallen here.

Ember attacks. Finger of fire. Watch and wait. Too late to leave. Pyrocumulonimbus clouds. Dry lightning.

These are the new phrases in our vocabulary. And the people who speak them are different Australians to the familiar ones I’m used to coming home to in summer — the tanned, sanguine mates sharing funny stories as the sausage sizzles.

We’ve never been an anxious, angry people. But this summer, we are fraught, and many of us are furious.

Nervously, we check the Fires Near Me app to see how friends and family are faring. A broadcaster, called back from holiday to do emergency coverage, tells me he takes a bucket into the studio so he won’t have to abandon the microphone if he throws up from the sickening air.

Heckling and abuse greet the prime minister, Scott Morrison, when he finally visits the fire lines after his appalling decision to head off on vacation to Hawaii.

When I was in my early teens, I read John Wyndham’s post-apocalypse novel, The Chrysalids. In it, one of the characters keens for her devastated planet: “What did they do here? What can they have done to create such a frightful place? . . . There was the power of gods in the hands of children, we know: but were they mad children, all of them quite mad?”

That passage has been running through my head as I look at the unbearable images of blackened farms and bushland, the places where horses and sheep met horrible deaths and more than half a billion native animals are said to have perished.

Fireys speak of being haunted by the screams of dying koalas. I think of the less charismatic species — our glossy snakes and the blue tongue lizards, countless insects with their crucial role in the web of life. And the gorgeous birds — our rainbow lorikeets, rosellas, superb parrots — falling dead out of the seared air.

For some of these species, this will be the end. An extinction-level event.

Will this change us? Will this strange, robotic prime minister, most famous before this tragedy for bragging about his cruel policies on refugees and for fondling a lump of coal in Federal Parliament, be able to lead us away from the destructive priorities and profligate habits that have brought us to this place?

It seems unlikely. I am a novelist, so in my mind I create a character like Wyndham’s in the aftermath of the climate apocalypse, looking back at the devastation, trying to fathom the madness that allowed it.

The country was burning, but they gave the go-ahead to the vast Adani coal mine. Their rivers were drying, but they flushed their toilets with drinking water.

They used the fossil fuels that were poisoning their planet to make plastic things that they used just once then threw in the oceans.

And yes, because I too am among this moment’s mad and guilty, they thought it was OK to fly around the planet, willy-nilly, just because they wanted to.

Machiavelli wrote that there “is nothing more difficult nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to conduct than to make oneself a leader in introducing a new order of things. For the man who introduces it has for enemies all who do well out of the old order.”

Morrison, with his beloved coal industry, and Rupert Murdoch, most particularly in his national daily The Australian, a once-fine paper largely reduced to a climate-denial propaganda sheet, have already amplified an alternative scenario. The fires aren’t caused by climate change: they’re caused by greenies who won’t let property owners clear their land or log in national parks.

At a time when we need massive tree planting (our fast-growing native trees being the most efficient carbon-capture device available) they are advocating for more tree felling.

But I choose hope. We’re a rich society and a decent people. Time and chance have made us custodians of a huge land mass and vast oceans.

Our national temperament leans away from the rugged individualism of the US towards a very different core belief: that we are in it together.

The belief that you don’t rise by putting your foot in your neighbour’s face, but by chucking a hand back and hauling her up with you.

And at this moment, that core national ethos might be the only one that can save the planet.

Because when it comes to climate change, we are, all of us, in it together.

So I hope we will get through this crisis and then channel all the pain, the anxiety and the anger into turning our country from climate laggard to climate leader.

We will figure out a just transition from coal to clean energy that brings affected workers and their communities along and doesn’t leave them behind.

We’ll call off the madness of new coal mines.

We’ll fully use our abundant sun and wind resources and become pioneers in new renewables such as hydrogen.

We’ll replant trees at an unprecedented rate and stop logging our old growth forests. We’ll re-embrace old Aussie values such as thrift and frugality instead of waste and extravagance.

An 18th-century rabbi, Nachman of Bratslav, put it best: “If you believe it is possible to destroy, then believe it is possible to repair.”

Geraldine Brooks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and formerly a foreign correspondent who calls from Australia home.