It’s hard to find the words to express how I feel right now – beleaguered, despairing, so damn weary. We survived the drought of 2019, although many of our much loved animals didn’t. We watched in horror as a river that had never dried before, did, and remaining pools dropped by inches in evaporation as the heat scalded on. Then came the bushfires – terrifying months as fire swirled around us, every breath a thick pall of smoke. We almost walked off the land at the end of 2019. We were brittle, embittered, bitter, broken. But we pledged ourselves a year to heal and see. Lockdown gave us precious time to reconnect with this ancient oasis we are privileged to call home, to watch platypus diving and paddling peacefully, to see the land start its long journey of recovery.
It was when we finally got away for a beach holiday in early December and rain lashed every moment that the tsunami of grief in me at what we had been through finally forced me to my knees. I mourned every lost beast, faces I would never see again, foreheads I would never rub.
And the rain kept coming this year, flood after flood. Yesterday the Ellenborough River burst its banks, flooding the flats in front of our house for the first time in living memory. We had a frantic hour as water rose over 3 metres, saving animals, tiny house, trailers, tractor. We have lost a bridge that bisects our property and affords us access to the world, the flying fox heavily damaged by the uprooted trees floating like toothpicks past our house in the raging torrent. We won’t know about the concrete bridge at the entrance to our property for weeks, when the river has finally receded. Acres of riverbank are gone, our telephone pole and connection to the world too.
It’s a lot. I don’t know how we can recover from this. We still haven’t finished replacing all the fences we lost in the fires. It’s not Mother Nature’s fury that makes me depressed. It’s Australia’s belligerent inaction on the Climate Crisis that every other nation on earth understands is a clear and present danger to our children and theirs. It’s the smug superiority of these career politicians with their lack of empathy and humanity, propping up the coal mines with public money while they sacrifice the future of the planet on the altar of their own greed for power.
First there was drought, then fires, then plague (Covid, mice, locusts), now floods. How is it possible that these bible thumpers can’t heed the message? Or do they truly believe that the end is coming, only they will be saved, and to hell with the rest of us?
Mad though their rank stupidity makes me, it is the ignorance of those who vote for them that makes me despair for our country, for our planet, for our food security, for our future.
We’ve been fully off grid on our farm since 2007, we provide our own power for all our needs. Solar is the obvious choice for Australia’s future. We need to start blue sky mining, not building new coal mines. We have a global opportunity for clean air and sky tourism, to be world leaders in the renewable revolution. But we are governed by luddites and city centric public servants with no idea what is going on, or needed, in rural and regional areas. Right now we need the Army to come in and rebuild bridges and roads, and we need a plan for ever more dire climate related emergencies. There’s no hope of that. Which is why I feel hopeless.