Page 3387 - Week 11 - Thursday, 11 November 2021
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and sweating. We had days, then weeks, trapped in hot smoke under a sky we could not see. That smoke got into two-thirds of Canberra homes and over a third of workplaces. Shopping centres, libraries and swimming pools shut down. I remember getting irrationally angry with a friend interstate who suggested that I get out of the house for a break. Where would I go? “How about the aviary,” she said. The aviary was closed. I think the birds were dropping from the sky.
There is an old cliche in fiction that the post always gets through. It comes from American frontier times and it has been appropriated by apocalyptic fiction. On 2 January, Canberra’s post stopped. They could not deliver the mail—too much smoke. Our media reported that Canberra had the worst air quality in the world.
After the smoke cleared, a storm swept across our city. It walloped us with golf-ball size hail. I was out on my bike. I sheltered in the Canberra Centre and watched ice pour down. That hail caused over a billion dollars of damage. Six hundred flying foxes were killed in Commonwealth Park. They survived the heat and smoke, but the hail got them.
A new fire grew and spread in Namadgi. Canberra was under threat again. We compulsively refreshed the Fires Near Me app. We got used to living in constant anxiety, waiting to see which way the wind would push the fire. It came within five kilometres of our suburban fringe and burnt through a third of the ACT—83 per cent of Namadgi park. Multiple rural properties were lost. Countless animals and plants died.
The collective trauma that Australians experienced in Black Summer and Smokepocalypse rolled straight into COVID. It has been two years of masks and emergency apps. We swap one disaster for the next, and we wait.
I do not know what the long-term effects of this will be, but I do know that Black Summer is a taste of what is to come unless we take immediate action. I was at a climate presentation yesterday with Professor Mark Howden. He showed us some graphs of our global trajectory, and it was not good news. He explained exactly what two degrees, three degrees and five degrees of change look like—flood, fire, drought, rising sea levels, inland seas and vast swathes of uninhabitable land. Our addiction to fossil fuel means we are now living through an experiment that we may not survive.
While COVID has added to our collective societal trauma, it has also shown us what is possible when governments decide to act. I am really proud of the ACT government response to climate change and to COVID. We have seen real leadership locally on both disasters, but we need national leadership as well.
Leaders everywhere are calling this an emergency. The IPCC says it is code red. Prince Charles calls COP26 our last-chance saloon. Greta Thunberg tells us to act as if our house is on fire, because it is. World leaders are using words like crisis, catastrophe and extinction, as if this is a perfectly normal way to talk. Grudgingly, our federal leader has attended Glasgow, but actions speak louder than words. We finally
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