Environment and climate

We are traumatised yet again, and yet again our voices are extinguished by not only flames and ash, but by narratives of settler suffering of this ‘hard’ and ‘extreme’ Country that settlers are still yet to actual settle into. The narrative of fear once again dominates: of black fullas, black voices, black solutions, blackened trees, blackened houses, blackened businesses, and black streets.

The birds fell silent this summer. For three days we didn’t hear or see them. Every morning and evening we stepped into the heat and smoke haze to place containers of water wherever shade could be found. The closest fire is 15 kilometres away and out of control. We are not in immediate threat from the fires here, but the smoke is thick. I am worried about the wildlife and our elderly neighbours.

Fires, although not ones that flared into storms due to climate change and land mismanagement, have burned through this area before. The story of fire and country, of loss and regrowth is not, at all, my own.

By juxtaposing the accounts of settlers – who believed that the appropriation, and later purchase, of land was legitimate – with the effects of their occupation on Māori, Hawken highlights the greater struggles of Māori within the European narrative of settlement.

I need to go back to that daylight encounter in Homer Street and walk up to that fox, and look it in the eye. I need to have a better conversation with that fox, a more honest one.

What I remember is my grandmother teaching me how to draw the wind.

Fungi are integral to the functioning of ecosystems; we ignore them (and it seems that in our environmental legislation we do ignore them) at our peril. But this ignoring, sometimes bordering on outright hostility, is being slowly, partially corrected by a literature on fungi and a culture of fungal regard emerging (shiitake-style) from the woodwork (a woodwork they will perhaps go on to devour, if they’ve learnt anything from the wood-rotting fungi that Pouliot proudly claims have sunk more ships than all the naval battles since 1600).

Every time I see a bird or bee these days,’ a friend says when we are talking on the phone, ‘I find myself wondering if it’s the last.

Do the fish really still care about us as human or post-human? As the oceans fall to our pollution, as the rivers dry up contaminated, will they answer our plea for knowledge? A sun shower evokes a shared moment of renewal, it offers communion and connects us to water as bathed in light, on skin…. Indigenous culture and knowledge is a key to sensing our part in the interrelational cosmology, the multiverse, the inner and outer worlds of perception and action.

I’ve been lugging a childhood from dad’s shed to Sydney in the boot of my car and it’s getting restless. The little gumnuts are creeping from the pages to play patty-cake with the yuri men on my back seat, tucking themselves under discarded jackets and licking droplets from the blackorg-branded waterbottles collecting under my seat. They want me to write about them – or maybe they don’t, and they just want to be left where and when they are – but in any case, they’re enjoying the ride. With their little faces pressed to the window they watch tree turn to town, and hiss and shudder as we pass the earthmovers stacked at the post-Maccas merge. I don’t take new ways to go to places I’ve known already, and I’m not likely to ever turn early from the M4, but there’s something about those green signed end destinations that reminds me of everywhere else I’m supposed to be.