I departed Australia three years ago, cutting my sabbatical short as Covid-19 spread and lockdowns ensued. I had just lived through Black Summer, a climate change-fueled disaster marked by unprecedented heat, withering drought and destructive and deadly bushfires. Though I had come to Australia to research the impacts of climate change on extreme weather events, it instead became my lived experience.
The governing Coalition had left a trail of death and destruction, both figuratively and literally. Thousands of homes were destroyed, dozens of lives lost, 24 million hectares burned, and Australia was shunned from an international climate summit over the then prime minister Scott Morrison’s climate intransigence. Meanwhile, the rightwing Murdoch media machine continued to spew climate disinformation, cynically blaming the devastation on arson and “back-burning”. Things appeared pretty bleak. Yet at the same time, I sensed that something had changed.
