Silhouettes of lifeless blue gums,
Painted against a tired sky.
They were homes and air and food,
But now they stood
bare and brittle and barren and betrayed.
These are the burnt-out days
And the sleepless nights.
This is the time for change they beg.
Or this is the future –
Ours and theirs.
It was Christmas eve, but if you weren’t from here, you wouldn’t know. An orange haze blanketed the sky so you couldn’t tell what time of the day it was. Fire didn’t care for time like we did. The town was as stagnant as the air, trapped in a state of limbo. We went to do the last of our Christmas shopping, but all the shops were closed. Everyone had conceited defeat and was playing the waiting game. Normalcy was now these smoked out days and the whirs of helicopters above. We needed rain. Inside, we would watch the fire map nervously – vibrant orange and red dots dancing across the once green valley.
I grew up in Blackheath in the Blue Mountains, Australia. One of the most bushfire prone areas in the world, with around one million hectares of national park land filled with Eucalyptus trees and Wollemi pines. On October 26, 2019, after a series of unusually warm days, a wind grew and lightning made contact with the ground igniting a fire that would go on to burn for 79 days and become Australia’s first ‘megafire’.
Rebecca Solnit speaks of climate despair as a luxury, writing that ‘those facing flood and fire can’t afford to lose hope. Neither should we’. Our solution cannot be to just wait for everyone to act only after an extreme event, because then it will all be too late. We need to be proactive for change, at both an individual and structural level. Throughout my semester abroad I aim to draw from what I have learnt through my own lived experience, embodying a sense of proactiveness through study, activism and individual action. Through my Gender Studies major, I have been able to consider the societal inequities that are exacerbated by climate change. These studies have led me to reflect on the intersectional implications caused by climate change and fuelled my interest in further developing my awareness of these issues, hence my subject selection of ‘Capitalism, Growth, and Ecological Crisis’ at Sussex. In line with Sussex’s ‘Sustainability Strategy’ and the UN’s goals, I aim to practice sustainable travel while at university through utilising cycle paths, as well as volunteer in community driven initiatives like ‘Surfers Against Sewage’ and continue to spread climatic awareness to those around me.
From ash we rose again,
Green buds of light in a tunnel of black.
They rose up with us,
Mourned with us
And regrew with us.
In the streets they marched,
Old and young –
They came together in a way they hadn’t before.
A sea of voices
That sang for change –
And change came.
