On an island you’re never far from the sea – that is unless the island is huge, like Australia. In tiny Tasmania, perched like an afterthought at the foot of Australia, even the mountains in the centre are not far from the ocean raging around them – just as in the distant homeland from which those who settled it came. On the main island, though, everywhere is a long way from everywhere else. Two islands, very different in size, in many ways with both similar and different histories. Both on fire. But this not just about the fires – it’s about what happened in front of the fire, the life lived in a time of warming and burning, even if it sometimes felt like a rehearsal for the end of the world.
The year before the new decade started, the last year of the old decade, began with fires in the centre of his island home, Tasmania, where he had grown up. It was burning in the very spot where he spent his earliest years. That year he had decided it was time to travel back. It didn’t start well. The year started off dry and hot and ended even drier and hotter. Luckily global warming didn’t exist or who knows how bad it could have been. Luckily the Earth was flat, because that would stop all the water needed to fight the fires running down the sloping edges of the world and falling off.
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| Ferry leaving Melbourne for Tasmania |
It was a year book-ended by bushfires. A year that began with fires and ended with fires – a warning of a future to come.
