Australia's New Normal — with his country ravaged by scorching heat and the worst bush fires in decades, the prizewinning author Luke Carman takes a surreal and terrifying road trip.
Today is the hottest day of our lives, the hottest Sydney morning in living memory. My plan for surviving this particular instance of a climate gone mad is to escape: my son and I are heading north. We pack half-frozen bottles of water in a bag and I chuck a wet rag around the back of my neck. It looks and feels ridiculous but whatever gets you through the day. I make sure to bring a Ventolin inhaler for my son too. He's not asthmatic, not normally but the smoke in the air from our endless season of fire tends to collect in little lungs and the dust that's raining down clogs children's nostrils with a black, gritty substance that makes it hard for them to clear their airways.
As the media takes a cruel pleasure in reminding us, the air in this city is currently the "worst in the world" — a distinction we have wrested from certain developing-world mega-polluters. They say that walking around in Sydney at present is equivalent to smoking up to 10 cigarettes a day. All that government-mandated anti-smoking advertising is wedged solidly in my subconscious and the thought of my kid sucking through half a pack a day isn't one that brings much joy. Just last week, I paid a visit to some friends to meet their newborn and, over tea and coffee, they tried to laugh about their baby's toxic introduction to life on Earth. You don't want to whinge too much, not when people are losing their lives to the bush fires devouring the state but listening to them speak, thinking of the little baby breathing deep in its cot at night, I wondered how parents will go out of their way to avoid giving birth during the fire seasons to come and how many will avoid becoming parents at all.
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Our home is located in the western suburbs of Sydney and it's always hotter out there than it is in the centre of town. Outside in the wide suburban street, the heat has become so oppressive it feels as though your skin is some sort of sous-vide device for broiling your organs. The grass is brown and it crunches underfoot.
There's no way I'd be out and about if we had an air-conditioner that was still working but, when the temperatures began to break through into the 40s for days at a time, the air-con at our place started leaking water, as though it, too, were perspiring and after the latest heatwave it took to accompanying its heavy leakage with frequent bouts of mechanical hissing and gasping. We tried treating it like an old relative clinging on past their prime or a pet that was on its last legs — we left buckets under it to collect the discharge, gave it a rest when it complained and tried to ignore the weird noises it was making. Finally, in an alarming fit of gurgling and wheezing, it gave up for good. In its place we filled the house with half a dozen fans and had to resort to watching telly with the subtitles on because the constant whirring was like sitting inside a wind tunnel.
My neighbours — Big Rod, Little June and their medium-sized kids — are all heading out too and though it hurts to stand around chatting in this heat they take the time to tell me they've had the same difficulties keeping their house cool and they're going to Bondi on this record-breaking scorcher. Their pale, red-faced kids walk past us carrying beach towels and boogie boards and give a semi-audible, exasperated "hello" as they go. Everyone is wilted and squinting, partly from the sweat streaming down into our eyes, partly from the blinding white, smoky haze in the air.
Big Rod and Little June invite us to join them on the trip to the beach but I can't imagine even the water will be cool enough to bring much relief and the thought of joining a giant pilgrimage of semi-naked, sweating, oily-fleshed tourists heading east just to splash around in the waves while we all slowly burn under a smoke-choked sky isn't doing much for me. I tell Big Rod that I'm taking my son on a road trip, to stay with my mother on the Central Coast, where they say it is 10C cooler. He tells me to take care on the roads, "It's crazy out there with the fires. Watch yourself on the highway," he says, before his kids start yelling at him to hurry up and get the car moving before they die from exposure.
My son and I set off on our journey with the car's air-con up to 11, all the fans up to the max too, blasting cool air at our faces. Even that is only just enough to keep the heat at bay. We both take turns seeing who can press their hands against the searing windscreen longest. The temperature reading on the display panel is racing towards the half-century already and my son asks, in all sincerity, if we'd die in the car if the air-conditioner breaks. I tell him we'd be okay with the windows down - but with the heat in the air it might feel like someone blasting you in the face with a hairdryer.
We're close to the turn on to the highway when my cousin calls and asks if we watched the Golden Globes last night. "They were all talking about the bush fires," he says. There's a hint of excitement in his voice that betrays an old Australian vanity: we have an insatiable thirst for attention from the Yanks and the Poms. At a time like this, when the country is burning and being described in the international papers as a "canary in the global mine", some shameful impulse in us wants to take pride in our new-found importance. Sure people are dying, thousands of homes are destroyed, millions of hectaresof forest are reduced to wasteland and hundreds of millions of helpless animals have been incinerated — but look at all this relevance! Ellen DeGeneres is sending her love for us on the global stage, photographs of scorched towns are trending on Twitter and images of burning maps are circulating on Instagram.
My cousin continues to tell me about the Golden Globes and is delighted to repeat the host Ricky Gervais' line that the Hollywood elite in the audience had "spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg", adding, "Then he told them, 'If you win, don't make a political speech: come up, accept your little award, thank your agent, and f*** off.'" He replaces the word "f***" with "piss" so as not to swear while my son can hear. Another highlight from the night he feels compelled to tell me about is Jennifer Aniston's straight-faced explanation to camera that Russell Crowe couldn't be there because he was "busy keeping his family safe from the fires". The thought of Crowe, bearded and bloated as he's appeared of late, standing in his yard with a hose and a helmet seems surreal but not totally implausible. I tell my cousin that there's probably some truth to it and he admits having read somewhere that Crowe had built a kind of Mad Max-style firefighting wagon on his own property, "in case things got crazy".
Not long after my cousin hangs up, we turn on to the highway and begin to see cars stranded on the side of the road. Ambulance crews are attending some of the breakdowns, the drivers sitting in whatever shade they can find by the highway. We catch a glimpse of an old man in a broken-down Ford being bottle-fed water by a medic. The old man's eyes are closed and his face is flushed a damp red. Under normal circumstances the sight of an old man apparently passed-out in his car might be enough to elicit alarm from passing motorists, to cause rubber-necking and a build-up of delayed traffic on the coast's main highway. But as New South Wales' fire chief announced at his press conference this morning, Australians now live in a "new normal" and, in this new Australia, motorists have become so accustomed to living with the effects of a world on fire that a dehydrated old man on the side of the road is unlikely to raise an eyebrow.
Australians living in the new normal are growing inured to the sight of helicopters swooping down to drain suburban swimming pools for their water-bombing campaigns. Every day, commuters stop their cars by the side of the road to collect stray wombats with burnt faces emerging from the scrub. Koalas with smouldering backsides come down from their trees and drink water from bowls side-by-side with dogs in backyards. Hitchhikers with no bags stand by the roadside carrying signs that read, "My home burnt."
We have all seen the disquieting footage of kangaroos with charred tails leaping by burning towns, emus invading airport lobbies and firetruck crews bursting through bush and scrub moments before being swallowed by racing walls of flame — and, too often, the disbelieving faces of communities of people whose homes are reduced to ash, surveying the loss of all their worldly possessions, walking over the crunching rubble as if trying to recognise some remnant of their lives gone up in smoke. Worse even than this are the flags flying at half-mast on public buildings and the faces on the front pages of the papers memorialising fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters who have been killed. Of more than 30 people to have been killed, many were volunteers — their surviving children being given the medals and honours their sacrifices earned. Beyond these constant images of bewilderment and fear, there is also the sense for many of us on this wide, brown continent that in the smoke and ash of the alien skies above us, we are seeing the face of something dreadfully unnatural.
Even in this new normal there are scenes surreal enough to induce total awe — things no one can become accustomed to: an hour into the trip north, my son and I pass close to a national park being ravaged by a distant fire. Before it comes into sight, the sky turns a deep purple colour, great black pillars of smoke swallow the sides of the road first and then we are suddenly plunged into an eerie darkness. The mountains around us are gone, and all but a few feet of road directly in front of us has disappeared. Adding to this sudden atmosphere of doom are slithers of black debris that drop down on to the windscreen, some still carrying a flickering of orange ember. This goes on for half a kilometre until there's a break in the darkness, and my son points into the opening toward a deep red glow that's covering the distant mountain forest. The sight of the raging bushfire, even at this distance, looks like a vision of a more primal, inchoate planet — one where the volcanic core of magma and molten rock has yet to cool into a habitable form.
On the midpoint of our journey north, my son and I pass a flashing traffic sign warning us that a "truck fire" on the road ahead is causing extensive delays on the highway, so we take an exit through Mount White and stop to visit my stepbrother in Wamberal. His home is high on a hill overlooking the beach but behind his street looms the spectre of national park forest. Living on the outskirts of a burning forest is an uncomfortable position to be in but if there's a fear of the bushfires reaching them here, his family don't show it. However, there are signs of the fire season's strangeness — for one thing they have become blase about the presence of bat-eating pythons living in their yard. The snakes have fled from the fire on the other side of the forest. My stepbrother's small terrier looks up at the snakes slithering along the branches with an odd agitation, licking his whiskered lips, wagging his tail, growling on occasion and stamping his feet.
Like so many conversations lately, the talk between me and my stepbrother naturally falls to the fires and we take turns swapping stories we've heard about those who've been directly swept up in the destruction. He tells me of one man he read about who was blown from his bike by a fireball and landed in a puddle of molten aluminium, burning his legs so badly that he could only crawl to a neighbour's abandoned house, where he survived by drinking water from the lavatory cistern. We talk about the images we've seen of Kangaroo Island, a place we've both been to, now burnt close to barren, a landscape of shrivelled cinders and long stretches of blackened soil. The only news I can offer from Sydney is that the city's hottest new fashion accessory is the respiratory mask — hipster-cool versions available from Bunnings for less than A$10, but upmarket varieties sell for well into the hundreds.
Australians, it occurs to us as we discuss the effects of the fires, are becoming accustomed to new ways of being: the morning routine now begins with checking the news to see which of the 100 or so fires raging out of control have joined forces to become so-called super-blazes and which of these have united to become mega-fires. Time between breakfast and the daily commute is put aside to text friends and relatives closest to the fires currently listed as "catastrophic", or whose last known location is in danger of immolation. Keeping track of the destruction is made easier by an app called "Fires Near Me", that sends an alert to your phone when any significant fire moves into one of your "watch zones". It has become commonplace for social gatherings to end with someone glancing down at their phone and exclaiming, "Well, the fires are coming round my place, I'd better be off."
It is strange, too, that this instinct to hurry home and fight off the fires is so common. Intelligent, rational people, who know full well the inherent futility of their actions, turn to arming themselves with limp garden hoses and standing in their yards against conflagrations so fierce, their destructive energies block out the sky with a rage visible from space.
One of the few examples demonstrating a clear absence of this urge to face off with the elements is the case of our Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, who was adamant that he couldn't cut his Hawaiian holiday short to come home during the crisis. This stance was commemorated by a mural painted on a wall in Sydney's Chippendale district, showing Morrison standing before an eruption of flames, holding a mai tai cocktail, wearing a floral necklace and a Santa Claus hat and cheerily announcing "Merry crisis!" via a speech bubble hanging over his head. Another quick-thinking critic began selling custom-made Hawaiian shirts depicting the PM's face looking out from the centre of several hibiscus flowers — the profits from which all went to fire relief. In a radio interview, Morrison defended his holiday on the grounds that he didn't lead from the front anyway, explaining, with a bold assertion of his own superfluousness, that he didn't "hold a hose, mate". The nation's collective response to this remark was perhaps best articulated by a volunteer firefighter from the small town of Nelligen, who, hanging halfway out of a firetruck door as he drove past a local news crew, asked them to deliver the following message: "Tell the Prime Minister to go and get f***ed."
We don't spend long at my stepbrother's home but it's good to see them. For those of us fortunate enough to avoid the flames this season, there is a disconcerting desire to keep everyone in mind at all times, to know where friends and relatives are at any given moment. This is exacerbated by the separations the fires caused over the holiday period: roads were impassable, conditions were too dangerous, uncertainties were too high for travel and many families postponed their Christmas gatherings on account of the fires.
In a strange way, they also brought out the selflessness in people. The catchphrase "it's for a good cause" has become ubiquitous at every social event on the calendar: concerts, parties, dances, trivia nights and barbecues. Every public gathering has become an opportunity to raise funds. Volunteers with donation buckets materialise on every corner, every business in Australia seems determined to give a portion of its proceeds to those affected by the fires and many individuals have become walking charities. Surfers donate their boards, tattooists their ink, painters give away their works. Even writers — typically purveyors of human misery — are auctioning signed copies of their books. Poets are putting on readings and wine nights, restaurants are hosting fire-relief evenings, even Gordon Ramsay has been personally hosting lunches for lucky donors who bid thousands of dollars for tickets.
Perhaps most inspiring of all these acts of charity is the case of an American Instagram model who raised $1 million by selling her nudes for $10 a shot. Reflecting on the money raised, she said: "My IG got deactivated, my family has disowned me and the guy I like won't talk to me all because of that tweet. But f*** it, save the koalas."
When the fires began to rage out of control, false reports of hundreds of arrests for arson began to circulate. There was a claim that almost 200 people had been caught lighting fires and that 75 per cent of the bushfires had been deliberately lit. The talk in some deranged conservative circles was that these arsonists were probably "leftist loonies", lighting fires to perpetuate their climate change cult. An absurd conspiracy theory - based on nothing but disinformation - but not the strangest you'll hear around town regarding the fires.
Soon after we arrive in the small coastal town my mother calls home, I ask Mum if she would mind taking care of my son while I go for a walk out to the lake to clear my head from the drive. Down by the water, a man is fishing while his old stereo broadcasts talkback radio over the waters. The lake is still and I can hear the spin of his line whirring out, the plop of the sinker breaking the surface. On the radio, the subject is fire and the only callers who make it through are farmers and "firies" who have rung in to report from the front lines.
Most of these callers complain that it's the "greenies" and the "do-gooders" who ought to be blamed for the crisis. One man calls in from a town where every second house has been destroyed and says: "Last week, I was knee-deep in undergrowth. We should have been able to clear the land but these so-and-sos have tied our hands out here, have done for years." When a caller asks the host if he buys into all the "climate change rubbish", the host is judicious enough to reply: "Let's get one thing straight, we all know global temperatures are rising but you simply can't isolate one particular period of catastrophic weather and talk about it in terms of 'climate'. That's not how these things work and anyone who tries to be slippery with the cause and effect of this tragedy has an agenda to sell."
It's so much cooler in this town but the sky looks even more surreal out here, its purpling darkness giving the lake an eerie discolouration. It occurs to me that despite all the heat, you can't really say the sun is "out". For weeks now, the sun has been replaced by an ominous imposter taking the form of a blood-red circle, like the eye of Sauron from The Lord of the Rings, that drifts over the landscape from behind an unshakable screen of smoke. The sky itself has been blotted out by this blanketing haze since the fires began in September. When conditions are "good" and the fires are far enough away, you might get a hint of blue from behind the smoke but mostly the sky looks like what you'd expect to see on a bad day in Beijing. When the conditions here are "bad" and the fires are close, black clouds of thick smoke and ash cover the heavens. The effect of this suddenly descending darkness is otherworldly, it confounds the instincts. Some reflex in the body braces for rain and storms but they don't come, except in slowly dropping sheets of ash and dust.
While I'm looking up at the sky, tuning out the discussion on the radio, the fisherman stops his casting and comes over. First thing he says is: "It doesn't look right, does it?" It doesn't. "It doesn't feel right either, does it?" The two of us stand by the lake watching the dark oscillations of an alien sky moving over the waters. For a moment, I get a sense of mutual dread moving between us, then he turns to me and says: "You know they could have put these fires out months ago. It's all for China. It's all land clearing."
He continues articulating this conspiracy theory, explaining that the fire season here is an "inside job" put on by our corrupt politicians for the sake of their Chinese overlords. It's an interesting, if insane, conception and I listen for a while, thinking it's important to give all points of view a fair hearing — even the mad ones.
Tonight, my son and I will sleep on a blow-up mattress on my mother's living room floor, and while I listen to him wheezing and spluttering in his sleep beside me, I'll look out of the window and notice the absence of stars. It will put me in mind of a verse from Auden:
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky.
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Looking into the totality of darkness, I will wonder about our role in the changing climate — what's to be done and what life will be left to our children. Then, just as sleep is about to come, for the first time in months, a heavy rain will break all over the state and the sound of the drops smattering down on the rooftops will be the most comforting I've ever heard. In the morning the fires will still be burning but there will be a strange relief in the air, a hopeful sense of change to come and people will go about their business, checking their apps and wearing their masks to work, in the new normal of Australian life.
Written by: Luke Carman
© The Times of London