Fire shaped my travels through Australia, and my dreams since
I landed in Australia the day after Halloween with strobe lights still imprinted on my eyelids. The New York I had just left behind was fading into a black-peacoat winter while I stepped onto the diving board of summer. I squinted into the balmy southern hemisphere and 5 weeks on a continent I had wanted to explore for so long.
A twangy Australian accent had peppered my childhood. My Uncle, with whom we spent every thanksgiving, had immigrated to California from Queensland with my American Aunt in the 70s. Now retired, they make the long trip back several times a year to visit his family on the Gold Coast.
I was welcomed with a squeal into my Queensland Aunt’s tanned arms and tidy apartment. It was the day of the Melbourne open, the most famous horse race in the country. All in a day, she fed Thai shrimp pancakes, whisked me around Brisbane’s bubblegum-poppy vintage shops, and packed me into a camper van. We wound down the coast to Coolangata, the ocean breeze whistling through the windows. Australia was savory, sweet, and salty.
It was also hot, and dry. Along the shockingly blue shoreline, I found sand so fine that it squeaked when my feet landed. The air is so parched that I lathered “pawpaw,” a papaya-based jelly, to keep the corners of my lips from cracking. The sun burns so strong during the days that from above, sidewalk is a sea of bucket hats. In Australia, you learn to coexist with this heat. But it wasn’t even summertime yet.
From our first day on the coast, my Aunt insisted we keep the windows closed because the smoke bothered her. I wasn’t aware of the fires; there were no signs of them. But within a few days, I woke up with a dull, fried headache, a dry scratch in the pulp of my throat, the taste of something black on my tongue. Even if we couldn’t see it, Queensland was on fire.
But that was normal, I was assured — bushfires occur every year in Australia. There’s even a season dedicated to them. Albeit… this year they seemed to be starting much earlier, and were unusually widespread.
Despite the dry mouth, the threat of fires felt far away, and I was distracted enough getting to know the land and my family. We visited fruit farms, distilleries and tea plantations, driving into the hills to take in the diverse range of edible plants, spotting giant avocado trees and sticky black pudding fruits. In the evenings we ate fried fish and chips and spent time indoors avoiding the smoke, watching a marathon of Australian films. On the way to the airport, I visited my uncle’s parents in their nursing home, where they sang me Australian folk songs.
Sydney spellbound me. A hilly, ritzy, seaside megacity that is the epitome of Australian cosmpolitan. As I took the ferry from the city to stay with old friends in a beach town called Manley, the big, blue sky was stretching from the opera house to the sandy shore. Within a few days I was surfing, plant-walking, and museum-hopping in the city’s free galleries. Then the opera house started disappearing into the haze.
I thought I was leaving the fires behind, but turns out they were traveling too. Winds picked up and changed directions, igniting New South Wales. As we waded in a murky sea at world-famous Bondi beach, blue skies were singed gray and the smell of smoke burned our nostrils. Children played in the shadow of a daytime darkness as adults looked at each other with troubled glances. We looked through cell phone screens at the sky, trying to locate the sun behind the battlescene of smog.
But still — no one seemed too concerned — at least on the ground. The next morning was clear and quiet as I packed my things. I was to take the train a few hours out of Sydney to volunteer at a farm for a week. Then my parents called from Canada, their voices urgent: Catastrophic fire warning. I realized the increasingly destructive fires were taking the international stage.
The active fire count on MyFireWatch, a resource used by locals, showed hundreds of fires choking the NSW area. Many of the fires were spreading through the Blue Mountains, which is a world heritage site renowned for its diverse vegetation. The Wollemi pines, prehistoric trees that are more than 200 million years old, exist only here. It is home to about a third of the world’s eucalypt species, a plant of medicinal and spiritual significance to native peoples of Australia and the main diet staple of Koalas.
It was a difficult choice to leave the Blue Mountains undiscovered. I pivoted and flew to Tasmania (Palawa), the island state south of Australia’s mainland, famous for the cleanest air on earth. During this time, however, the smoke from the mainland was visible as far as New Zealand. But at least I was safe; the fires were across an ocean.
From hairy legged palm trees to oyster-shaped seed pods, the plantlife in Tasmania was the most mystical l I’ve ever experienced. I spent 3 days hiking along in the forests outside of Hobart, summiting Mount Wellington, discovering a truly wild, ancient landscape. A deadly copperhead snake, porcupine-spiked echidnas, and furry wallabies criss-crossed my trails.
Exploring the enchanting flora and fauna of this land, I embodied the explorer’s mindset that shaped the its history and was documented with a thick paper trail. Darwin ascended this mountain and identified 6 species of lizard while doing so, recording his enchantment:
In many parts the Eucalypti grew to a great size, and composed a noble forest. In some of the dampest ravines, tree-ferns flourished in an extraordinary manner… The fronds forming the most elegant parasols… — Darwin
But 10 days wandering in a wonderland of abundance only made reality back on the mainland more appalling. The landscape I was meant to be discovering was being ravaged by flames.
When I reached Melbourne, it felt like home. A little bit like Bangkok and a little bit like Toronto, the city was urban and refreshingly multicultural. I went to work with chopsticks at countless hole in the walls, scoured flea markets for sequined patches, and stayed out far too late at clubs in Fitzroy. Fire threats remained a state away. I let down my guard.
My last week in Oz, I boarded a bus through dry yellow fields to “the bush,” a catch-all term for the land beyond the cities where a brittle nature reigns. Strawberry Fields is a festival built around sustainable principles (100% solar-or-biodiesel powered, carbon-neutral transportation, and compost-toileted) and underwritten by respect for tribal lands. Compared to the events we have in America, it was a marked change to empower participants to work within their earth and landscape, not conquer it.
On Yorta Yorta country we set up camps, cooled in the rivers, climbed trees, and blessed the land and native culture in traditional ceremony. Guitars and synthesizers were like gravity pulling us together, and I stargazed into the creativity around me. The fires, their scope yet to be understood, were far from our collective consciousness. An oasis of ignorant bliss.
Days later, as I watched Australia slowly fade from my window seat, every nerve tingled bittersweet. I was leaving with new friends, family, and experiences I would never forget. What I didn’t yet realize was that the fires were gearing up to mark a natural disaster that the world would never forget. 46 million acres of Australia have burned in the 2019–2020 fire season. And they are still burning.
I will never see the forests of The Blue Mountains, because the national area has since been 80% decimated by fire. Through this undefinable loss, we humans are the ones privileged to survive. We have shelters and cars and can understand when there’s no turning back, unlike the estimated one billion animals that have perished. More than anything my heart bleeds for those forests as old as time where not one living fern or frog remains, no morsel of green to keep survivors alive.
A few weeks ago, I snapped awake in the middle of the night, visions of koalas burning in my mind’s eye. I’ve always wondered if I would experience a visceral sensation during a mass genocide. As creatures of the earth, it seems like our senses would raise or our energies would shift. The weight of life being lost so rapidly causing our orbit to tilt, activating a primal sensory reaction, an instinct to save our cohabitants. I may have been struck with a panic that lasted into the morning, but the world went on as normal while a billion animals burned. Now I have my answer: out of sight, out of mind.
When I look back on my time in this amazing country, I think of the global circumstances that threaten the livelihood of all Australians. People down under are no different than you or I. Their dreams are no different than yours or mine. They just live on a continent that is naturally dryer and hotter; a few degrees ahead of the rest of the world. Australians are experiencing climate hell first, a new normal fueled by climate change and the world’s refusal to address it.
It’s the “end of Australia as we know it.” And while you can blame the spineless prime minister for mismanaging the crisis, continuing to deny climate change, and refusing to shift away the country’s mining, the circumstances that shaped the fires are replicable everywhere. The world opened its eyes because of the implications of this global tragedy — on all of us. A model of what global warming could spawn across the world and to national prides like California (the state I was born) and Texas (the one that one that I type this from).
We need to remember that our climate is a global entity, not something portioned to countries individually. If it were, countries like Haiti, Kiribati, and Yemen would certainly not be facing some of the most severe consequences of a warming planet. By the way, when referring to country-by-country emissions, Australia accounts for just 1% of global emissions, while the USA accounts for 16%. Does that mean our country warrants climate change 16x more severe?
The blatant, yet unprecedented, evidence sizzles in the flames. 2019 was the hottest year on record in Australia. The last decade has been the warmest on record. We are one foot out the door of our air-conditioned reality and one foot in the no-longer-deniable, torched entryway to a warmer, dryer, more fire-prone world. Climate change has shifted from theoretical to certain, and fighting for our world must shift from future-tense to immediate with an exclamation point.
Drastic (to the point of unimaginable) policy change is the only way forward, and voting for the greenest candidates and bills is the most important thing we can do as individuals. Our decisions as a (mostly uninformed) people will determine if our children will live lives anywhere near normal, or if there will be a home for the billions of creatures and plants that built this planet. Americans must set a precedent for this kind of action. 2020 is the year; it’s the only one that matters. There is no planet B.
I think this is a wake-up call not only for Australia but for the rest of the world. You cannot just destroy the land. You cannot destroy what keeps you alive.
— Noel Butler, Aborigial educator whose home and school was destroyed
I have no solutions, just a dispatch from the terror to come. I have memories of a landscape that will never be the same, a broken heart, a platform on which to wring it out, and a vote to cast.
Please join me in donating to the world wildlife foundation, registering to vote and checking on candidates’ positions on climate policy.
