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.
