The Best Australian Essays 2016

‘The essay creates a place for slow thought on hectic subjects, and that is what the best of this year’s crop manage to do.’ —Geordie Williamson

In The Best Australian Essays 2016, Geordie Williamson curates the year’s best non-fiction writing from Australia’s finest writers. The result is a collection that reads as a wake-up call: from Jo Chandler on the devastating bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef and Richard Flanagan on the Syrian exodus to Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani’s inside account of life on Manus Island. There is also space for Bowie, TV box-sets and Aussie rules. Spanning politics, music, literature, art, ecology, linguistics and more, this anthology showcases the nation’s most eloquent and insightful writing.

Contributors include Maggie Mackellar, Ashley Hay, Rebecca Giggs, Anwen Crawford, Melinda Harvey, Mireille Juchau, Fiona Wright, Vicki Hastrich, Helen Garner, Tegan Bennett Daylight, Jennifer Mills, Fiona McGregor, Michelle de Kretser, Jo Chandler, Anna Spargo-Ryan, Peter Goldsworthy, Gregory Day, J.M. Coetzee, James Bradley, Galarrwuy Yunupingu, Richard Flanagan, Adam Rivett, Michael Winkler, Behrouz Boochani, Martin McKenzie-Murray, Guy Rundle, Clive James, Julian Burnside and Kim Scott.

Geordie Williamson is the publisher of Pan Macmillan’s Picador imprint. He is the former chief literary critic of the Australian newspaper and his essays and reviews have been appearing in newspapers and magazines here and in the UK for over a decade. In 2011, he won the Pascall Prize for criticism, Australia’s only major national prize awarded for critical writing. He published The Burning Library, a collection of essays on neglected Australian writers, in 2012. He lives in the Blue Mountains with his family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Nov 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781925435344

Book preview

Williamson

In Sympathy: A Fugue

Maggie MacKellar

‘No sooner has s(he) departed than the world deafens me with its continuance.’

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

Once – a year or so ago – a Willie Wagtail (Rhipidura leacophrys) dropped by.

It was unusual. They are not seen in these parts. He called me from the stone wall outside the kitchen window.

That morning I had made a pie. It was egg and bacon. I made the pastry, cooked the bacon, snipped the herbs from my garden and mixed in the egg. It took a long time. I left it to cool and stuck my head out the window, the better to see my visitor.

A long way from here, in the country of my heart, Wiradjuri country, the Willie Wagtail is everywhere, gossiping, busy, cross and curious. ‘Jitta Jitta’ the Aboriginal people call him. He’s a traveller from the other world, sometimes welcomed, sometimes sent away. He often visits to deliver messages from the Great Spirit.

Puzzled by his presence on the garden wall I thumbed through my Pizzey and Knight’s Field Guide to Birds of Australia, searching for his description.

Black-and-White Fantail. Common. Well-loved.

Widespread.

White underparts sharply cut off by black upper-breast.

Erectile white eyebrow,

buffish when immature.

The morning inched on. Beneath the washing line I shook a shirt, a pair of heavy denim jeans, then pegged them so the late spring wind would not fling them to the lawn. In the corner garden, deep in the Cecile Brunner rose, whose buds are no larger than a thimble, the Willie sang:

Rikka-tikka-tikka-tic

sweet-pretty-creature

‘Please accept my sympathy …’

‘He was a fine man

… such warm memories.’

‘Malcolm and I were greatly saddened …’

‘Pete and I were sad we were unable to join you,

… our very deepest sympathy at this sad time.’

‘May I offer you our sympathy …’

‘Lee and I are thinking of you …’

I made bread. It’s not as hard as you might think. I took some flour, added some yeast, a little salt, mixed gently with a fork, poured some warm water through it and mixed some more. Melded. It’s a nice word. Really, I touched the things together then covered the bowl with a damp tea towel, put it by the fire and left.

Watches; from low branches,

fence posts,

stumps,

rocks,

the backs of farm animals.

‘He was interested in everyone and everything,

I saw him last at the cricket with your brother.’

‘You are much in my thoughts my dear M–––’

Takes insects in twisting flight,

in foliage,

on ground or floating vegetation,

seemingly disturbing them

by jerky sweeps of tail,

sudden wing flaring.

‘A fine tennis player …

An excellent batsman …

We enjoyed our golf …

A reliable catch.’

Large butterflies

transferred to feet

for carriage

to ‘de-winging’ stations.

‘He did not deserve sacking,

he left a remarkable legacy.’

‘Your devotion to M––– as he was dying …’

‘I remember when I first met him at Balliol

he said, let’s get lost together …

he was a good man and a good friend.’

The bird was now in the wisteria vine. Switching its tail back and forth. I vacuumed. It was on my list. Besides there was dog hair everywhere, and dirt, trailed in from all the feet, also dust from the fire. After that I mopped. For a moment, maybe twenty minutes, maybe half an hour, the house was quiet and that part was clean. As for the rest – the attics, the staircases, the halls, the dining room, the sitting room, the second kitchen … our bedroom – those remained gritty, thick with dust.

The cleaner I don’t have. The housewife I am not.

Calls day and night in breeding season.

Sweet-pretty-creature

Rikka-tikka-tikka-tik

Rattling.

‘Your parents were special and I miss them …’

‘So sad to hear M––– has passed away …’

‘We were shocked to hear about your Dad …’

‘No one told me

I was away

Ill for a long time            the finality

I still can’t believe it.’

The washing was dry, I took it down piece by piece, smelt a promise of summer, a hint of salt from the sea. Folded neatly in the basket. From the wall he flares white eyebrows (buffish when immature), flips his tail, pouts.

Nests;

fallen branches,

orchards,

garden trees,

clothes hoists,

rafters,

street lamps,

buildings,

boats.

‘Your father was someone we loved and admired …

politics can take a heavy toll on family life.’

‘We want,

you to know you are in our thoughts.’

‘We send,

our love and deepest condolences.’

‘Thank you for letting me know …’

Voice;

spirited,

sweet,

but varies much.

‘Your father was a …’

‘After        we didn’t

see enough of each other.’

‘After        died,

our lives changed.’

‘Such a difficult time for you …

farewelled so respectfully.’

I carried the clothes basket inside, placed it on the table and sorted the folded clothes. Turned from the harder task ______________.

Singles,

pairs,

family parties.

Bold,

Perky.

‘Strong …’

‘Courageous

none like him anymore.’

‘Moral

our New Australians.’

There is that.

Guests were to arrive in a few hours. I picked flowers: armloads of gum tips and catmint, fistfuls of roses. Trailed them through the house. Shook out sheets. Made beds. Pulled back curtains. In the almost warm air, dust motes danced.

Erectile white eyebrow changes

with bird’s sex/status/emotional condition

from near invisible

to flaring/conspicuous,

also slim white whisker mark.

I opened the heavy screen door and looked up into the ancient mulberry. Its bark was wizened woman old. The bird flitted from branch to branch. I folded my arms. There are other words you’re leaving out.

‘Absent’ | ‘Coward’ | ‘Dallier | ‘Pleaser’ | ‘Flirt’ | ‘Wolf’

Breeds;

August to January.

Shallow grey cup of fine grass,

bark-shreds,

rootlets,

felted with spiders’ web;

lined with hair,

wool,

feathers,

plant-down.

‘My dear, here you are again receiving letters of condolence.’ ‘I am sure other losses – too many for one so young.’

The dough had risen, an act of flour, water, yeast, a pinch of salt. I carried the bowl to the butcher’s block and punched it down. I kneaded, pulled and shaped, set it by the fire to act again.

Eggs: 2–4;

creamy buff/yellowish white;

spotted,

marked light red-brown,

wood brown,

olive,

grey.

‘after the last gruelling and difficult months devastating my heart.’

I walked out of the house to feed the two old horses and the young one. The dogs ran ahead. Insects hummed around the fruit trees. The bird stayed to feed but rattled to me as we crossed the paddock.

‘Father to –––

Grandfather of –––

Partner to –––

Stepfather of –––’

The horses galloped, made the ground shake, and the oats fell in a golden shower.

Skirmishes with larger birds,

especially other black and white species

eg: Australian Magpie, Australian Mudlark.

‘I write to you as former president of

      the Beauty Point Branch, Liberal Party, Mosman …’

        ‘the Clifton Gardens branch’

             ‘the Seaforth branch’

                 ‘the Dee Why branch’

‘He stood for justice and compassion.’

When I came back the bird was sitting in the lilac tree next to the woodpile.

I remembered. It’s true then.

Similar species:

Satin,

Restless Flycatchers,

easily confused.

‘I hope you know he was very proud of you

He was so proud of you and C–––

He was so proud of you and his grandchildren

Hewassoproudofyouhewassoproudofyouhewassoproudofyou

I hope you know how proud he was of you

I want you to know how proud he was of you.’

Most habitats,

except dense forests.

In Pizzey and Knight’s Field Guide to Australian Birds, there are maps showing where each bird species is found. Some birds are so rare they have tiny blue dots in just one place. Not so Willie. His map is blue all over. He roams Australia and beyond.

Except, except – for one white spot on the very edge of the east coast of Tasmania – the place I now call home (though the word still trips); here the Willie is never seen.

Mainland Australia,

n. Tasmania, and islands,

including Flinders Is.,

King Is.,

and Kangaroo Is., (SA),

Also Solomon Is.,

Bismark Archipelago,

Papua New Guinea and E. Indonesia.

In the lingering light of a nearly summer evening I stood on the lawn and thanked the bird for visiting. Then I keened: please stay, and my voice had the stretch of a cat’s raped mewl.

Island

The Bus Stop

Ashley Hay

After the millennium turned past Y2K and the world didn’t end, my friend Steve decided to leave Sydney and move to India for a while. He went to Dharamsala – to learn Tibetan, mainly, though he did other things there, too, including waging war with local monkeys that stole his underpants and watching a cow sled past his house – at speed, and quite surprised – during a mudslide. He also befriended a Kashmiri man called Altaf, who ran a nearby gift shop. Altaf’s family operated houseboats on Dal Lake in Kashmir’s largest city, Srinagar.

As the summer of 2001 ended, Steve travelled with Altaf for a holiday in Kashmir. They went by Jeep over winding Himalayan passes, skirting snow-peaked mountains, rows of apricots drying in warm valleys, and freshly harvested fields of saffron. India and Pakistan had been at war over Muslim-majority Kashmir two years previously, with ongoing deployments and troop build-ups in the time since. This meant navigating countless army convoys and checkpoints manned by Indian soldiers. Altaf, like many Kashmiri merchants, had contacts in the rug trade, and on his recommendation, Steve shopped for locally hand-knotted rugs in Srinagar. There were hundreds to choose from, scattered like jewels across the factory’s dusty showroom floor. He chose wool – more influenced by its Australian origin, he claimed, than by a cheaper price tag. And wool was hardy. If these rugs ever needed cleaning, Altaf explained, they could be taken outside, squirted with baby shampoo, and hosed down. Steve bought a traditional oriental paisley for himself and a pale blue rug with a beautiful tree-of-life pattern for me. Even without an apocalypse, there are days when the world’s narrative takes a sharp turn. Steve bought the rugs on 10 September 2001, and they were rolled together, sewn into calico, and posted to Australia. The next day, of course, everything changed. There were more Indian soldiers and machine guns, and fewer Kashmiris, on Srinagar’s streets; no one would meet Steve’s eye. Only back in Dharamsala did he hear what had happened halfway around the world. The carpets arrived in Australia, and I fell in love with mine. Its blues were warm like perfect-day sky. Its reds merged from pinks to deep maroons, and it had pools of inky darkness like indigo tending to black. I disappeared into its patterns – flowers and leaves, twists and curls – imagining whole worlds beyond. It was like a pond sunk into the floor of a grand home, scattered with bouquets and life. The archetypal magic carpet, I believed: one day, it would fly. I have early photos of my son – just weeks old, his arms stretched like a bird’s wings – lying against the soft pile of its wool. There’s an idea in Kashmir that a rug is the soul that draws every home into a perfect and unified whole. When we moved to Brisbane, I placed the rug in the entryway to our house, where it settled: a palette of welcome.

*

My son is seven years old now and at school. Some days, he stays late, and I walk up to retrieve him around five, when the outside games are finishing. But one Thursday, in November 2014, I headed up a little early, just after four. It was nearly the end of the Australian school year, and the kids were getting ratty. Setting off, I left the house flung open – windows, doors – with only a grill-gate across the front door’s entrance where the rug lay. The days had been hot and heavy, and I was hoping that any passing coolness might cut the weight of the air in our rooms. In Brisbane, in summer, you pray for an electrical storm to delineate the day’s end, to knock down the temperature and the humidity.

There’s a park at the back of our place, and I was partway along its avenue of Moreton Bay fig trees when my phone beeped, and I stopped, clicking through to read its message. It was a weather warning – severe thunderstorms, heavy rain and damaging winds. There was a risk of flash flooding; there was a risk of hail damage – all this ‘in the warning area’, which included Brisbane, ‘over the next several hours’.

Above me, the sky was clear and blue. I looked back to my house, its orifices gaping. I looked south towards my son’s school. I looked at the Bureau of Meteorology’s radar site on my phone, that clever portal of so much available information, and saw a storm – well south of the city and moving quite slowly, it seemed. There was a mile between home and school; we’d be back, I thought, before any water came.

But as I crested the school’s hill, maybe a quarter-hour later, it was as if someone had put a lid on the world. The sky began to burnish and bruise, roiling through a strange palette of blacks, purples, greens. I passed the deputy principal, and we nodded at the sky.

‘It’s coming fast,’ she said, and only later did I realise she was moving faster than usual, too.

I found my boy, his hat, his water bottle, his bag – the daily restitution of objects – and we headed for the street. A bus covers that mile between here and there, but it only comes every half hour. We were exactly between services. I looked at the sky; I looked at the radar. I said we’d walk. And we did, setting off fast, with the sky pulsing behind us.

We were halfway home when the world stopped. Suddenly, there was no sound, no movement, and the weight and shape of the air changed completely. So we stopped, too, stopped completely on the path. A friend’s place sat back a hundred yards or so, but there was a bus stop a little closer, like a little soccer goal: three partial sides, a tin roof. It was on the other side of the road, the right side for the bus to pick us up. ‘Sweetheart,’ I said, ‘I don’t think we’ll beat the rain. So we’ll cross the road and wait for the bus while it’s wet.’

He put on his raincoat. He held my hand to cross. And we settled in a shelter that faced southeast – the direction from which the storm was coming. These afternoon storms, they’re like taps, I told myself: on, then off. Either way, there we were, safe and dry.

*

The weather was an integral player in the story of my family home. In the late 1960s, before I was born, my parents built a house on the coast south of Sydney. The week before they were due to move in, a thirty-mile wall of blaze ripped along the escarpment. Their new home was directly in its path.

My father and his mother-in-law held back the flames and saved the building – damping spot fires, watering the roof, scaling walls higher than themselves to extinguish embers. The foundation story of my family home is this fiery tale, rich with impossible physical feats and miracles. In photos of the aftermath, the house sits, pure and white, against a surreal landscape of charred and blackened trees. More than fifty homes had been destroyed, and one man suffered a heart attack. Our cat fell into an ash pit and took days to lick herself clean. In the wake of that inferno, Sydney’s state of New South Wales got its first Commissioner of Fire & Rescue, its first state bushfire control centre, and its first locally appointed, full-time and professional fire control officers.

I grew up anticipating such disasters. It was an adjunct to every hot, dry summer and the fun of a bushy backyard, straddling suburbia and reserve. Several times, blazes threatened, and we had our plans down pat: pack a bag that could be evacuated and place precious items (papers, jewellery, a teddy bear) in the refrigerator for safekeeping. In the solipsistic way of childhood, I thought this was part of everyone’s summer, but I now see it was a thought experiment; I never had to take the last step of experiencing fire itself. It was training for transience – practising the idea that your house and all its things might exist one day, but not the next. And it was training for the idea that out of the blue, weather could spring something of potentially monstrous proportions.

Then, after many years of living in various fiery landscapes, I moved comprehensively north – to Queensland, to its subtropical capital, Brisbane, where the weather has an altogether different shape.

In Brisbane, in wet years, you can almost set your watch by the short, sharp afternoon downpours. In February, the humidity is so high it feels possible to wring jugs of water from the sky. By late April, mornings are crisp enough for appropriately autumnal jumpers and socks, but give way to glorious summer-frock days. It may not rain – at all – between autumn and spring.

In Brisbane, the danger is not fire, but flood. We were barely a year in our new place when the river submerged its long-forgotten floodplains, turning houses into islands – some knee-deep like ladies with their skirts up; others diminished to a triangle of roof. We knew our house sat on a floodplain; like many houses in our neighbourhood, it sat high on stilts. Perhaps we’d expected the water to remain as hypothetical as the fire. But the rain kept falling, and our city’s story changed. There was our house, teetering above a calm brown lake some eight feet deep, its floor balanced inches clear of disaster. The experience only served to reinforce my certainty that weather was bigger than I was and that it could pull apart my world.

Being married to a biologist, I’ve had a lot of conversations about our planet and its systems, about adaptation and change. I’ve kept a weather eye (so to speak) on opinion polls that pit so-called ‘warmists’ against so-called ‘sceptics’, registering shifts in the numbers of people who are concerned about climate change or who refuse to acknowledge a changing climate at all. What turning point, I’ve wondered, would make it impossible for anyone to dismiss or to deny? Would it be a report or a research finding? Would it be a species’ extinction or a problem with our food supply? Would it be something to do with the weather – a disaster? Or a storm?

When would we all – no matter who we were, or where we lived – turn and say, Things really are different around here?

*

I’m also drawn to literary weather.

Early times spent with Winnie-the-Pooh fording floods in upturned umbrellas to rescue Piglet gave way to impenetrable Narnian winters. The factual fury of Sebastian Junger’s Perfect Storm gave way to the fiction of Richard Powers’ polar vortex (Generosity) and James Bradley’s deluge of almost biblical proportions (Clade) – both of which now seem to have foreshadowed the real world. These days, too, textual weather not only drives narratives, stranding characters or directing their actions; it also often indicates that, as readers, we’re in a setting where the story has altered. We’re reading of a ‘here’ that’s not quite ‘now’.

I was thinking about this, of all things, as I sat stranded in a bus stop by a storm of ninety-mile-per-hour winds and hailstones, some the size of baseballs. This storm wasn’t a literary device or a report from the past. This storm had come early. It was my here and now.

It was complete. It was vast. It was saturating. It was loud and fierce and unspeakably brutal. I got my boy on my lap, his head buried in my chest, and my back to the worst of the weather. The rain came at us sideways, so hard and fast that it stung. And the hail hit with poundings and pummels, thrown down from the sky and bouncing up from the ground. I looked, and the road had flooded. I looked, and lightning struck nearby. I looked, and trees were bent to the pavement. I looked, and branches flew by as easily as tissue.

It came on and on, and my boy held on to me and shouted over and over: when would it end and when would someone come.

‘It will end,’ I kept saying. ‘It will end. I know it’s awful. But it will end.’

The vortex of untaken alternatives: if we had run back to my friend’s house, if we had stayed at school, if I had turned back to shut up my own house – probably drowned now and shattering – and been somewhere on my own, trying to push through to my son.

My husband has dinner-party shorthand for explaining extreme weather in the context of a changing climate. Higher amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere mean that more heat energy is trapped, he says – and the planet has always balanced itself by releasing heat. If there’s more energy in a system, he says, there’ll be more extremes in the ways that energy behaves.

Weather ‘events’ may not happen more often, but when they do, they’ll happen to greater extremes. Hotter hots, colder colds, drier dries, wetter wets.

We once saw photographs of Earth’s storms taken from the International Space Station – charges of lightning flaring around the globe.

‘It’s the planet equalising itself,’ my husband said, pointing to those bursts of static. Until I was sitting in this storm, I’d never thought about what that equalising might feel like. Of course, the world’s weather has always been busy with cataclysms – floods, fires, cyclones, blizzards. But it’s something to be in the middle of one; it tips your sense of safety on its head. This weather was no backdrop to a story; this weather was calling the shots. It was against us, and it hurt.

My boy wedged his fingers in his ears and yelled, as if being louder than the storm might somehow quell its tempest.

‘Why don’t you ring someone?’ he cried at last – and my phone did ring then. It was my husband’s nephew, up the road, ringing to see if we were all right but unable to do anything – probably unable even to hear when I shouted, no, we weren’t all right at all.

The sound was like bucketloads of stones hitting a tin roof, mixed with the unearthly roar of high wind. The rain was so thick any landscape – any line of sight – disappeared. The hail stung. The air sliced cold. I’ve never felt myself in such danger.

Worse, I’d brought my son to this unprotected place, too. I couldn’t see where we could go next – what with the powerlines, the gales, and the lightning. I couldn’t see how to get to any place of any greater safety. The wind roared. The rain drove. The hail bashed our bodies. And I thought, We are in trouble.

*

Here’s what was happening on the afternoon of 27 November 2014. A cooler south-south-easterly wind came up the coast and pushed into warm, moist nor’easters coming in from the ocean. There was a trough of low pressure further inland. There was an unstable atmosphere above, and, nearly four miles up, there were colder-than-usual temperatures of around 10 °C – very favourable conditions, apparently, for the formation of large hail. There were also lovely sunny skies, which had heated the ground nicely. Combine the horizontal and vertical complexity of all this, and you had a storm that would speed up and veer left, carving a path into the heart of my city. It was, according to Ken Kato, a forecaster with the Early Warning Network (the organisation that had sent that message to my phone), a case of ‘multiple factors lining up perfectly’.

Winds gusted with the ferocity of Category-2 tropical cyclones; windows smashed; roads flooded; roofs were destroyed; cars were trashed – damages totalling a billion dollars in half an hour. ‘It looked like a classic severe thunderstorm scenario,’ says Kato, ‘and it was one of those things that can happen really quickly. One minute, a storm’s a normal, garden-variety thunderstorm; the next minute, it explodes.’

To be honest, I couldn’t have said if it took five minutes, half an hour, or more – but the storm did ease. And in the first moments of the wind dropping, the hail stopping, the rain thinning out, a bus – as if by magic – did appear. The driver opened the door, his face so pale that his beard looked like pure darkness. He hunched over the huge circle of his steering wheel, his grip tight.

‘Get on,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about the fare.’ And he told us about the four trees that had hit his bus on the road by the river alone and the mayhem he’d passed beyond that. ‘I just kept driving,’ he said, ‘because I thought someone might be at a bus stop.’

And we were.

We got out at our stop, that scant mile on, as a friend drove by. He picked us up and took us to our house, past the avenue of uprooted Moreton Bay figs. We looked at our pockmarked roof, at our smashed windows – bedroom and kitchen – and at the inch of water that had gone through the open front door to make a pond in the living room. The rug, a wet deadweight, had blown across the room and was huddled, bunched up and covered in garden debris, against the bookshelves.

And so we kept going, to a neighbour’s house where there was glass in almost all the windows and dry carpet on the floors.

Later, we heard stories from elsewhere in that sturm und drang. About the woman who stopped her car in the middle of a street and sat there, screaming one long, continuous scream, while the car was coldcocked by hail. About the woman who saw a man knocked unconscious by the hail and dragged him to shelter, shielding him with her body. About the friend who managed to limp home on her bike to find herself covered with bruises from the hail.

‘You should put some ice on those,’ her housemate said, deadpan.

In the next day’s papers, the state’s premier called the storm ‘catastrophic’ and ‘ferocious’ – the worst in thirty years – and mobilised the army. One of our federal Greens senators commented that ‘extreme weather events will become more frequent and damaging as climate change worsens.’

Passing the failed refuge of our bus stop a day or so later, we saw on its outside wall the ad behind which we’d been sheltering.

‘Are you prepared for bushfire season?’ the poster read.

*

Beneath the maelstrom of conversations about climate change – the social and political conversations, rather than the scientific ones – is the urgency of making what’s happening around here feel like everybody’s business, particularly if it heralds a future that one of Australia’s leading philosophers describes (paraphrasing Hobbes) as potentially ‘nasty, brutish, and hot’. In 2010, in the wake of England’s catastrophic floods, researchers surveyed 1822 people ‘to examine the links between direct flooding experience, perceptions of climate change, and preparedness to reduce energy use.’ The respondents who had experienced flooding expressed ‘more concern over climate change’, saw it as ‘less uncertain’ and felt ‘more confident that their actions will have an effect on climate change.’ The survey results suggested that ‘highlighting links between local weather events and climate change is therefore likely to be a useful strategy for increasing concern and action.’ In 2012 came publication of an American study exploring intersections between personal experience and perceptions of global warming. Did people learn from experiencing the impacts of a changing climate? And, if so, were those lessons coloured by whatever the respondents had believed about climate change in the first place? The study found not only that both these things were true but also that ‘experiential learning occurs primarily among people who are less engaged in the issue’. In other words, people who paid less attention to climate change tended to learn more from their experiences with its effects – a ‘particularly important’ finding, the study commented, given that ‘approximately 75 per cent of American adults currently have low levels of engagement’.

Just recently, Australia’s Climate Council – a citizen-funded initiative established when the federal government disbanded its Climate Commission – released ‘Five Photos That Show You What Climate Change Looks Like Around the World’. Most striking was an image of a Kiribati boy swimming through his flooded village: he was swimming among the tops of trees. There was no way to avoid his story. The boy was swimming where his people used to walk, and live, and be.

*

The wild weather keeps on coming. Almost six months after the November event that our family still calls the bus-stop-of-doom storm, Brisbane endured another round of heavy rain and 55-mile-per-hour winds. By Friday evening of that week, 6800 homes were without power, roads were closed, and children were stranded at schools. Five people were dead.

According to the forecast, that torrential rain should have still been falling the next day, but the dawn was so dazzlingly bright it was hard to believe it had ever been otherwise, despite the clean-up underway.

Connecting the dots between single weather events and climatic change is a complicated business. Still, details of such cause-and-effect are starting to be teased out. A Swiss study published in 2015 showed that even if the planet’s rising temperatures are kept within a 2 °C limit, any location on Earth will endure, on average, 60 per cent more extreme rain events and twenty-seven extremely hot days in a thousand. Currently, it’s four or five days. A 3 °C rise, and those numbers climb even higher – to sixty-two extremely hot days. Nor is this increase linear: ‘the probability of hot extremes at 2 °C, for example, is double that at 1.5 °C global warming.’

More recently, a special supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society specifically examined ‘Extreme Events of 2014 from a Climate Perspective’. While it contained several studies indicating that ‘human-caused climate change greatly increased the likelihood and intensity for extreme heat waves in 2014 over various regions’, in the context of ‘other types of extreme events, such as droughts, heavy rains, and winter storms, a climate change influence was found in some instances and not in others’.

As I watched that blue sky shine, the air thick with birdsong, what I wanted, I knew, was for one event – one storm, one something – to change the way everyone saw what was outside their windows. In a novel, it would be the climax, the sharp turn in the narrative arc after which everything changes. I wanted that one thing, but the science isn’t about one thing – it’s innumerable events all over the globe, every day. It’s an accretion of thousands of things in thousands of places over thousands of moments, and they all point to the same conclusion.

My husband sipped his tea. ‘You can say these events are consistent with the climate models’ projections,’ he said.

*

When our insurance company’s assessors came to survey the damage caused to our home by the bus-stop-of-doom storm, I’d forgotten Altaf ‘s advice about the baby shampoo and hose. They took my rug away to be laundered.

‘Just bring it back if you can’t clean it,’ I told them. ‘I really can’t replace it.’

Days, weeks, months passed with no mention of when the rug might come home. Then, an email. ‘The rug was disposed of by the restorer due to the glass,’ our insurer said – although it had been in the one south-facing room where no windows were smashed.

‘Transience and impermanence,’ said my friend Steve. Let it go. And, of course, the soul of our home is still intact – it will be wherever we are, as long as my husband, my boy, and I are together, safe and dry.

We’re adapting to the uncovered floorboards inside the front door, and now, months later, we still find the occasional shard of glass in the strangest place, even in parts of the house otherwise untouched by the storm.

The rains teem or the winds swirl or the sun blazes – hot even in the last days of autumn. We sit behind the sureness of our strong new windows, looking out at the weather of our world.

I check the forecast every time I leave home.

Creative Nonfiction

Whale Fall

Rebecca Giggs

A few years ago I helped push a beached humpback whale back out into the sea, only to witness it return and expire under its own weight on the sand. For the three days that it died the whale was a public attraction. People brought their children down to see it. They would stand in the surf and wave babies in pastel rompers over the whale, as if to catch the drift of an evaporating myth. The whale was black like piano wood and because it was still young, it was pink in the joints under its fins. Every few minutes it exhaled loudly and slammed its fluke against the sand – a tantrum, or leverage. Its soft chest turned slack, concertinaed, when it rolled.

At first the mood was festive. People cheered every time the whale wrestled in the breakers. Efforts made to free it from a sandbar in the morning had been aided by the tide. That the whale had re-stranded, this time higher up the beach, did not portend well for its survival, but so astonished were the crowd and such a marvel was the animal that immoderate hope proved difficult to quash. What the whale inspired was wonderment, a dilation of the ordinary. Everyone was talking about it, on the buses and in the delis. There were dogs on the beach held back by their owners, sweeping flat quarter-circles in the sand with their tails. How they imagined the whale – predator, prey or distant relation – was anyone’s guess, but the dogs seemed keen to get a closer look. At sunset, armfuls of grease-blotted butcher’s paper, chips and battered hake were passed around. The local lifesavers distributed zip-up hoodies. Wildlife officers, who had been stand-offish with the gathering crowd, relaxed and taught some lessons on whale physiology.

‘Whales are mammals,’ they began, ‘as we are too.’ This surprised those who were accustomed to thinking of all marine animals as species of fish. They raised their eyebrows and nodded along. Cetacean – from the ancient Greek kētos, made Latinate as cetus: an order of mammals that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises. ‘Under its skin the whale is wrapped in a subcutaneous envelope of fat called blubber.’ Trying to imagine the properties of blubber I could only conjure those agar desserts sold in Asian supermarkets: opaque, calorie-rich and more rigid than their wobble suggests. While in the ocean its blubber fat insulates the whale and allows the animal to maintain a constant inner temperature. Out of the ocean, the blubber smothers it.

‘That whale has the opposite problem to hypothermia,’ the wildlife officers explained. Though we were now shivering, the whale – only metres away – was boiling alive in the kettle of itself.

A group of us slept lightly in the dunes, arrayed like question marks and commas on the white sand. Our