As New Year’s Eve rolled around in 2019, my social media feeds were choked with people demanding the Sydney lord mayor, Clover Moore, cancel the city’s firework display. With smoke thick in the air in Sydney and our screens full of images of people crowding on to beaches as they fled the conflagration in Mallacoota and elsewhere, many saw a celebration of any kind as disrespectful, and one featuring fiery explosives as doubly so.
Because as the fires spread across our continent, consuming millions of hectares of bushland and driving firefighters to the brink of collapse, it became clear we had stepped off some kind of a precipice. Our cities and towns were blanketed in smoke, turning our skies red and suffusing the air with the stink of cinders that clung to our skin and clothes. At schools, our kids were no longer allowed to play outside at lunchtime. At the hospital where one of my oldest friends works, surgery had to be cancelled when smoke got into operating room air-conditioning. In regional and rural communities, people lived on high alert for months, terrified a change in the wind might bring catastrophe. As Christmas and new year arrived, we witnessed previously unimaginable scenes of children on boats in masks, fleeing fire; whole towns on beaches, awaiting rescue.
Five years later that little eruption over Sydney’s New Year’s Eve celebration seems oddly significant. The desire to halt the fireworks was symptomatic of a larger need to register that what was happening was not normal, and that we needed to somehow give shape to the scale of what was taking place.
That need has not gone away: if anything it has increased. In a very real sense, black summer and the rolling series of disasters that washed over us in its aftermath remain unprocessed.
Seen from the vantage point of late 2024, it is clear black summer marks a hinge point not just in our politics, but in our reality. Prior to 2019, it was possible to pretend the climate crisis was not real.
In the five years since, the pace of change has only accelerated, with a cavalcade of disasters overwhelming communities here and overseas. In the Amazon the rainforest is burning. In Africa, South America and across the northern hemisphere forest fires have consumed billions of trees and devastated ecosystems, while floods and storms have left great tracts of Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, Asia and communities in NSW, Queensland and Tasmania in ruins. It seems every day brings news of some fresh disaster.
Combined with the dislocation and disruption wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic, the world we knew is gone.
The effects of these overlapping and intersecting calamities have not been shared evenly. In Australia, regional communities have borne the brunt, with some areas pummelled repeatedly by fires, floods and storms, and firefighters and other emergency responders left battered and traumatised. Many of the worst-affected people come from socioeconomically disadvantaged communities, further accelerating disadvantage. First Nations communities have also been hit especially hard: Indigenous people were more than twice as likely to have been affected by the black summer fires and the 2022 floods on the east coast than non-Indigenous people.
It is not easy to make sense of what is taking place. Writing about that black summer now, I find myself back in the vertigo of those weeks, the omnipresent blood-red skies and stink of smoke, the destruction and sense of dislocation that wiped away entire communities and ecosystems. Grief and trauma elide time, so the past is not past; instead it inhabits us, it can’t be looked at or spoken about without casting us back into the tumult and loss of that moment.
This inability to metabolize the events of 2019 and 2020 has more than a little to do with what came after them. Pinballing from fire to flood to Covid and then back to more flooding has left us exhausted and uncertain of the future. It is more than emotional whiplash. Between the hammer blows, many of us have found ourselves unable to process our grief.
But it is also symptomatic of the failure of our political leaders to respond adequately to the climate crisis. The first duty of governments in times of disaster is to help those in trouble, but they also have a responsibility to find words and actions to help the community make sense of what is happening by expressing grief and loss. As the indelible images of the then prime minister Scott Morrison trying to force shattered bushfire victims to shake his hand and Peter Dutton’s deliberate sabotage of the energy transition make clear, the Coalition has abandoned its responsibilities to future generations.
At first, Anthony Albanese did better. But after taking power on the back of a widespread desire for bold action on climate, his government’s policies still fall well short of what is needed.
Australia remains deeply enmeshed in the fossil fuel economy. Measured in greenhouse gas emissions, we are now the world’s second-largest fossil fuel exporter and government support for fossil fuel projects continues unabated. The Albanese government doggedly resists the introduction of measures such as a climate trigger that would require the impact of fossil fuel projects on the climate to be considered.
The dissonance between this position and the reality of the climate crisis is increasingly difficult to sustain. No less importantly, it makes it impossible for Anthony Albanese or his government to offer the words that might help us make collective sense of what is going on. After all, how can you acknowledge the true scale of the crisis if you are helping to intensify it?
Making sense of the black summer requires us to find ways of speaking about the reality of what is taking place around us. That means words that give shape to our grief and confusion and fear, but also our fury at the politicians and industry leaders who have caused this crisis by choosing to prioritise the profits of fossil fuel companies over the lives of our children.
But neither grief nor anger can be an endpoint. We need to find ways to reach out to one another. Because the black summer wasn’t only defined by pain and terror, it was also defined by the generosity that saw truckies and tradies gather to help devastated towns, and members of the Sikh and Muslim communities delivering food to firefighters and the people displaced by natural disasters. If we are going to make it through the decades to come, we will need that kindness and ability to recognise our shared interest in building a better future.
