Finding The Happy

For those in my community who live and breathe outside of Australia, I thought I’d let you know how we’re holding up as news of our bushfires light up media outlets around the world.

We’re fine for now. My little fambam lives in Canberra and although the nearest out-of-control bushfire is 86km away from our house and presently 27% of Singapore in size, current modelling indicates we’re not in danger. We’re in a State of Alert, however. Canberra sits in a narrow corridor where our neighbours to the southeast and west of us have been told to evacuate, and many have naturally landed in Canberra. These evacuees — tens of thousands from rural and coastal regions so devastatingly driven off their own homes by catastrophic fires — are the ones the Canberra community try to feed, shelter, and comfort at present.

Canberra has held the dubious honour of the worst air quality among the world’s capital cities for a week now. We feel churlish to complain about the smoke here when our close neighbours have lost their homes, watched the beauty of their hometowns melt or explode before their eyes while they huddled on beaches, and faced utter blackness in what should have been broad daylight. But the fact is I woke up this morning to an orange sky. And for weeks now, we face an eerie red sun at dusk while smoke sneaks into our homes. That in itself is heartbreaking if you know how fresh and clean Canberra’s air usually is. We’re elevated 600m above sea level, and our air comes straight from the mountain ridges surrounding us. Our air is so pure, we get unbelievable sunsets I’ve long taken for granted after living here for over 16 years. The prettiest purples and pinks melting to amber and blue. Well, I don’t take them for granted anymore.

Some of you have already started posting news articles about these fires, which is honestly a relief. It’s comforting for many of us in Australia to know that the rest of the world is paying attention and dismayed, and that there is solidarity after all. There was, for a terrible moment there, a kind of bewilderment that these fires — so ferocious, so unprecedented in their magnitude and decimation — hardly seemed to rate much in international media. But then, many of us rather suspect that our politicians might have burnt bridges with their doubling down on their commitment to fossil fuel. I’ve already personally encountered comments on Kiwi news site asking their government to prioritise Australian climate refugees below pacific islanders. Because karma is a bitch, even for those of us who think differently about our economic, social and moral imperative to do better by the environment, plan ahead, and to curb our profligacy. The fact is, our conservative government remains defensive, reactive, and reactionary.

Still. It’s sobering to watch more than a billion getting pledged to the rebuilding of a beautiful but largely uninhabited building than to mitigate the loss of half a billion animals and 6 million hectares of bush, not to mention the myriad small towns and coastal communities who have lost their livelihoods and the homes they love. There’s pretty sobering accounts from survivors huddled on beaches in the hundreds and thousands, watching their town on fire and listening as gas bottles explode homes in the distance.

A State of Alert basically means we’re not in a state of emergency yet, but to gird our loins in case things turn bad. The fact remains that so many of these horrifying fires are maliciously started, and so we can model the heck out of wind direction and current bushfire trajectories, but there’s always the possibility that some cruel arsewipe out there will decide to be funny and start a fire to feel, perhaps, significant and consequential for once in their bored, selfish lives.

It’s quite confronting to start packing for a possible evacuation. There’s an infographic that takes you through it and it feels at once overwhelming and thin on detail. First, the choice of whether you stay to defend your property or flee with the clothes on your back is entirely yours. There’s already anecdotes about communities leaving their recycling bin out in the driveway so firefighters know to check into those properties to evacuate homeowners opting to protect their property, should it all go tits up. There’s advice about stuffing your socks with sand to clog your drainpipes so you can fill your roof gutters with water. (Thank goodness for Atticus’s sandpit!) There’s things about getting the flammables out of your home. But where do you put them otherwise? I have no idea.

Meanwhile, there’s a map to tell you if your home is bushfire prone. Our house technically isn’t… but every other street to the northeast of us is, so that’s cold comfort. I’m half planning for both an evacuation and the possibility of sitting tight in a home that’s still upright amidst a fire-affected city. I’m trying to figure out what to feed my family assuming that we lose power. (Tuna. And cold sandwiches. Two things my son loathes.) I’m trying to remember to withdraw enough cash because I heard about all the ATMs going down in one place and affected people, in a largely cashless society, basically stripping a supermarket bare out of desperation and running out because they can’t pay. I need to get a radio that runs on batteries, assuming we lose telecommunications and we need to know what the hell is going on. I’m stocking up on torches and batteries. I’m charging our power banks every night. I’m seriously thinking about buying a small power generator.

And if we were to evacuate, what do we leave behind? We don’t have a trailer, just a wagon. So it’s the important documents, and then jewellery and photos. The kids’ favourite toys. Clothes. Toiletries and feminine products. Dry shampoo in case you can’t drink or use the water. Food. Lots of water. Wool blankets because they’re fire retardant, unlike cotton. Sunscreen. Favourite pillows, if you can squeeze them in.

I keep wondering if I’m panicking, paranoid, or just preparing like a pragmatist.

I have been hoarding so many things of my cousin’s and mother’s since their deaths, but nothing quite distills what the truly sentimental things are when you’re faced with a wipe-out and a car boot that can only hold so much.

That’s pretty much us, at the moment. It’s hardly as nerve-wracking as my friend who runs a wildlife sanctuary in the path of looming infernos. It’s hardly as tricky as a young family in an evacuation centre with a newborn. It’s hardly as harrowing as watching your town flattened and the factory you work in or own, literally going up in smoke. To return and shoot the livestock you own and love that are half-burnt and in agony.

But it still preys on the mind. Even if we were to live in a bubble, there’s a myriad of pinpricks to remind us of this sword of Damocles. Two electrical substations went down in NSW, and now we’re being cautioned in Canberra to watch our energy use. We hit record-high temperatures yesterday in Sydney (48.9°C) and Canberra (44°C); Arddun and I, along with our friends, were in the mall yesterday to watch a movie and hide from the heat when all the screens went down at the same time from a suspected power outage or brown-out. Escalators in malls are turned off, many shops are closed. The postal service hasn’t been delivering mail for a few days now, so there goes everyone’s online order for face masks because the shops are continually out of stock from people panic-buying.

It’s the long school holidays in our territory, but our children’s vacation care provider just notified us today that they’re cancelling care all this week because of the smoke and the State of Alert. Two of the four universities here are closed for two weeks. They just cancelled flights to and from Canberra, because our bushfires are so insane, they’ve started creating their own weather. So now there’s pyrocumulus clouds, also known as “fire clouds”, which form fast and move quickly, creating gusty winds and thunderstorms. After a Qantas flight experienced poo-in-pants-inducing turbulence, they started cancelling flights today.

Meanwhile, we’re mostly staying indoors because face masks apparently aren’t recommended for children under 14. And the blame game has long started, so my social media is inundated with tales of heroism and blame-shifting in equal measure. There is solidarity, but there is also a lot of anger and defensiveness. I battle with frustration and a tinge of despair every day.

Pray, if you believe in it. Be specific and ask for rain, good bushfire quenching rain. We really, really need the rain. We’re in horrible drought, and certain places couldn’t even be saved because they ran out of water. As if that isn’t hard enough, the water reservoir burst in a town called Cooma yesterday and so their town got flooded. Cooma is right in the middle of that narrow corridor in the Leave zones. They needed that water in the event of a bushfire and now it’s gone. The heat is relentless, nothing like I’ve ever experienced in Singapore. Pray for rain.

And then donate. There’s so much to rebuild. I cannot imagine the havoc of rebuilding and insurance claims after this. I read on in disbelief when individuals on Twitter dismiss what’s going on in Australia, citing how huge our land is and how low the death count has been. The death count is low because we have processes in place to evacuate people. But then there was also a horrible period when the window of time to leave got abruptly cut short with changing weather and towns were stranded. I’ve read about people, unable to escape in their rural properties, who basically had to seek shelter and wait for the fires to pass over them. Imagine that kind of horror. I can’t.