SUMMER FROM HELL
Every day arrived with a red dawn. A sepia shadow hung over the whole country. We’d taste smoke before we opened our eyes, navigate a haze to work or school. The air itself was a fine foul ash. It dusted everything and smothered everyone. Some days just going outside was to inhale the equivalent of 32 cigarettes.
Yet my family and I rode like four horsemen into the Apocalypse this summer. Like so many Australians who fell over the finish line on the promise of a holiday after a hard year, we packed the family wagon with Eskys, surfboards, kites, fishing rods, a fortnight’s food and the dog to hack 200km south of Sydney to our happy place: sleepy Cunjurong Point and a beach named Manyana. Tomorrow.
The best laid plans. Three days later, I was dozing when it all went dark. High noon yet the sky was slate. Out back, the birdbath was full as a bar on Anzac Day. Wattlebirds, mynahs, magpies, cockatoos, all wing-to-wing slaking their thirst. Weird to see them together like that. I walked to the road, looked up, froze.
At the end of our block a skyscraper of smoke was pummelling into the heavens. It was like a god rising up, moving at speed, roiling with energy, a fierce orange light throbbing at its heart. Forty degrees in the shade that day but I shivered.
Bedlam was bleeding onto the street. Men were on roofs shovelling dead leaves out of gutters with their hands. Mothers with babies on hips were scurrying between cars and homes, watched by confused toddlers. Older kids frantically cycled past, trying to keep their faces from falling. Even teens looked less smug, leers of insolence set in a rictus of apprehension as they watched old people fill buckets and bins with water and set sprinklers on lawns like razor wire.
A woman
