3: Remember the bushfires to remember the virus
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Politics, Coronavirus, Australia, Climate Change, Covid-19

The floods had immense cost, for years subsequently — I note the 35 lives lost at the time, and $30 billion-plus of damage in more detail in articles about the concreting over of Brisbane — but they can leave no trace of the act of forgetting, which was almost a shocking as the flood itself.

So, as with the floods, there is every chance that these largest bushfires in the continent’s contemporary collective memory will not divert Australia from the path that created them. There is the same possibility with this virus, despite its much larger apparent impact. So now is the time to observe, to be fully in the moment, and to start thinking about, and projecting, what comes next.

It seems political leaders have little idea what next with an Australia not predicated on unsustainable growth, whether coal, metals, agriculture, aviation, tourism, property development — all of which, in the Australian mode at least, tend to be hugely carbon intensive and degenerative of natural systems. There is no coherent image of Australia put forward otherwise. The prime minister Scott Morrison is, after all, the man who held a lump of coal in his hand in parliament and said it was nothing to be afraid of. Was the almost unanimous rejection of Morrison’s hand, when offered as solace to bushfire victims, an implicit connection of his politics with those outcomes?

“By consistently choosing short-term economic growth, successive governments ignored climate science, prepared inadequately and left Australia’s natural environment and its people at the mercy of worsening climate events. They allowed a localised, often-manageable seasonal weather event to become a continuous catastrophe, limited neither by season nor by geography.” — Imogen Champagne, The Correspondent (2019)

A lump of destructive carbon, and some coal.

The Australian prime minister’s woeful response during the bushfires is reminiscent of Queen Elizabeth II’s to the Aberfan coal tip disaster, which many will have encountered for the first time in The Crown, recently — another carbon-related disaster, of course. This kind of deep lack of care for people and place is negating perhaps the most fundamental element of the raison d’être for government itself. It’s a clear abnegation of duty regarding the climate crisis, as the successful peoples’ suit in the Netherlands indicates. It’s not hard to imagine that Australian governments could be found similarly liable — this is a country ranked the worst of 57 countries on climate crisis policy, after all, and which actively blocked the climate negotiations in Madrid — and not ‘simply’ ethically, as current and future generations will surely find them, but also legally.

A passage in Ben Lerner’s novel ‘The Topeka School’ made me think of Morrison and his ilk recently. A character points out that Wile E. Coyote, chasing his nemesis the Road Runner, frequently ends up running off a high cliff. He remains suspended, however, impossibly suspended in mid-air. It’s only when Wile E. Coyote looks down, admitting his predicament, that he begins to slowly, but meaningfully, fall.

Australian politicians refuse to look down, as the country burns around them. They have nowhere else to go but down, but think they can somehow remain aloft, if they don’t look, if they don’t admit they are suspended in disbelief as well as mid-air, with no firm ground beneath their feet.

You can see Morrison, and his men, doing everything to avoid admitting their culpability. For decades it’s been clear. I was fresh off the plane in 2007 and it was immediately clear. The Australian governing elite, from Morrison to Murdoch, has no idea what form a new ground looks like, of another green world for the country, if it is different to the Australia of the past. There is no sense of a future, only a continued glorious past leading to the sunlit uplands of the present. Yet that present is on fire, under water, locked in its house or wearing a mask, due to air pollution—or now, the coronavirus. These fires, these floods, these viruses, they should all be whacking great punctuation points in that story from the past. Yet still they will not look down, hoping behind hope that they can remain suspended by their oblivion.

But these fires, the floods, and the viruses, have caught up with them. That scorched earth is rushing up to meet them and increasingly, it is likely that most Australians will begin to see that their leaders have not been defying gravity all along.

We will see the same scenario with Trump, and others like him, lobbying to restart the engines on the economy as soon as possible. They have no other ideas, after all. All Morrison has up his sleeve is pointedly going to the cricket during a bushfire, or to the rugby during a pandemic. These are attempts to brush near-existential crises under the carpet, clinging onto what he considers normalcy — really, stasis — rather than facing the systemic challenges affecting country and city, and learning how to rebuild a resilient Australia. They’re wearing blinkers, as well as masks.

We must write these moments to memory, and repeatedly return to them, before looking forward to something else.

Despite both being somewhat temporary, perhaps there is a difference in emotional response to bushfires and floods versus invisible viruses. I grew up on the edge of Sheffield, a short drive from the plague village of Eyam in Derbyshire. The memory of being tramped around it as a sullen teenager has never dimmed, due to the stories latent within the dark peak granite the village is constructed from. The village quarantined itself during the Black Death of 1665, preventing the spread of the plague from London to the north of England. It was an extraordinary act of self-sacrifice. At least a quarter of the village’s population died, yet they saved many thousands more in the surrounding towns. Walled grave plots still exist on the edge of the village, spaced apart to prevent contamination during funerals, as do the boundary stones in the woods around, hollowed out with holes for coins, which would be washed in water or vinegar, and exchanged for food and medicine. In the Riley graves, named after the farmer who owned the field, Elizabeth Hancock buried her husband and six children, all of whom died over the course of eight days. An early form of social distancing was practiced, with church services carried out in the woods, so people could stand apart from each other. As the plague arrived in infected fleas in a box of linen from London, it traced a path along trade routes, just as with COVID-19.