The Big Squeeze

This is an introduction to Crossing the Threshold a book that will most likely never be written

Threads of smoke are only distinguishable from cirrus clouds by their lower altitude. Inside, I can feel a throbbing hangover wrestling with the shambles of a McDonalds breakfast. Outside, the wide scrubby dirt plain relents at the Great Dividing Range that hovers at the horizon. This is summer on the Hume Highway and we have a long journey to Sydney. Two years of drought have turned the grass to straw and the wind picks up dust, tossing it from eddies before showering it back down.

I am with Giulia and our dog Chutney in Giulia’s black Mercedes. Chutney is an imperious Brussels Griffon - the breed that George Lucas modelled Star Wars’ Ewoks on. Giulia’s Mercedes historically has been a reliable car despite individual functions packing it in. The fuel gauge, for example, doesn’t work and you have to refill when the odometer reads 400 kilometres and then make sure to reset it afterwards. Today though the car is in a particularly difficult mood. Lights on the dashboard signaling low oil or a radiator leak have taken to flashing yellow then, after a few kilometres, switching off again.
“Hey Joolie – can you see where the next service station is?” I ask as the oil light flashes on again.
Without responding, Giulia reaches for her phone.

Of course, we have been watching the news – and understand from where that wispy smoke is coming. A few weeks ago, I had watched with gathering dread, the Currowan fire on the NSW’s South Coast. The latest data was represented by a red polygon overlaid on a map. With each refresh the polygon grew indicating the spreading inferno. The evening news added live footage - a conflagration that consumed bushland, wildlife and homes leaving nothing but char and ash, the twisted wreckage of cars, the husks of homes and the smoking carcasses of livestock.

In this news coverage, Bawley Point was frequently chosen for special mention. I had been going to this small surf village my whole life, had spent summer holidays at Bawley Point beach so that today whenever I smell the sea or mozzie coils I am transported back there, to the porch of my grandmother’s fishing shack, to the sound of surging waves.

As the fire progressed, separate red polygons coalesced and together they pushed against the edge of Bawley Point pinning it to the sea. The two dimensional tiles reduced complicated terrain to flatness. I knew what was there, had played in the gullies, climbed the sandstone cliffs and walked those beaches. Yet none of these features were recognized by a fire that seemed to move without regard to topography.

Beside my grandmother’s house, spotted gums cling to a hillside that slopes steeply to a long sprawling beach. This beach is bisected by a river and like any beach, it is a wide-open space with unlimited access to water. As the fire spread, I felt secure in my conviction that it could never vault such openness without some kindling to carry it over. Then on one refresh - it did. From the forest at one edge it leapt over the river and wide sandy beach to the gums on the opposite side. My security in false consolations was what we had begun to call in the climate movement - a failure of imagination.

These events will be collectively called Black Summer, which extends over October - May of 2019 - 2020. During this period news has become a precious commodity. Precious not just because of the scale and fluidity of the firefront but also because this is the first pass at capturing an historically important moment. The fury of climate change, its raw power is, after so much talk, on display.

International headlines mistake the event for cosmic justice in which Australia is both perpetrator and victim. Reality is more complex than a cartoon villain waltzing Matilda then receiving comeuppance. Homes burn whether the owner believes in climate change or not.

But domestically, even commercial news coverage that for decades has failed to connect the weather (“better slip slop slap for another heatwave”) with the facts offered by the growing ranks of scientists, is finally forced to acknowledge that something is uniquely awry.

Around the country, other convictions are upended. Perhaps the most common is the belief in inertia: the present state is too entrenched to be genuinely challenged by any calamity. The fire will end this too.

I am taken by surprise. Despite years of chasing the climate story and being utterly convinced of its truth and urgency, my own convictions are experiencing a reckoning. For one, that my nephews and nieces will enjoy a childhood in Bawley Point spent with the same carefree innocence as have the last three generations. This assumption had, in the space of a single webpage refresh, been overturned. Another conviction: that I can trust my instincts in the natural world - how fire moves, how it can be contained - has been undone.

Despite the appalling cost in lives and property and wildlife, my hope is that this moment is necessary. The planet is entering a narrow window in which the future is undeniably coming into view while we still have influence over the outcome.

This is not the collective epiphany I had hoped it would be. On another browser tab to the map and the polygon I scan social media, monitoring the sentiment of those directly in harm’s way. A solid portion are convinced of the link between the fires and climate change. But just as strong is a cluster that had adopted a counter-narrative. The Bawley Point and Kioloa Facebook group that had once been about lost dogs and minor acts of vandalism, is now a venue for rage directed against the environmental movement, with comments like “I’m going to get the biggest burned stump and drop it on the local green members [sic] doorstep.”

Again the dashboard light for low oil flicks on. The petrol station is still fifty kilometres away. My nerves are on edge. Again it flicks off. By day I am a project manager in a startup. We provide data visualisations for the health systems of Pacific island countries - or so my dinner party spiel goes. These countries like many in the tropics suffer from diseases like Dengue fever or Typhoid. The earlier and more accurately you can respond to an outbreak the lower infection rates you will get. That’s how data is related to disease response.

To this end, I have travelled throughout the Pacific, sitting in small hospital offices shielded from the tropical sun, setting up servers and connecting to databases. These work trips have opened my eyes to life in the Pacific. In this, I have discovered what exposure to climate change really means.

On one such trip, I visited the nation of Kiribati (pronounced Ki-ri-bus). This country is a series of atoll archipelagos that cover an area the size of the United States. The population is just over a hundred thousand. Administratively, they are so small they use Australian currency. If you’ve heard of Kiribati it is probably for being the first country low and vulnerable enough to be wiped from the map thanks to rising sea levels.

Kantabu, a young programmer I had worked with, had taken his whole weekend off to show me around Tarawa the capital. Well, we hadn’t made it beyond the first pub, a tranquil place by a stream that he was proud to show off. As we drank the extra strong Red Horse beer, he showed me a picture of his daughter. I had read that morning how former President Anote Tong said, he had lost hope for Kiribati and that it would all be underwater soon. After 3 beers I eventually worked up the courage to ask him if, with his daughter, he was worried about climate change. “The old people are much sadder than the young people, we know we have to leave.”

After that trip, back in Australia, I was struck with a strong sense of unease. Back then Australia was ramping up for the “climate election”. In the end the people had just voted and the climate lost. For me, this amounted to a personal crisis: I had felt sure we the Australian people had collectively pushed Kiribati, a four-millennia old civilisation, closer to extinction. It seemed to me there were no consequences for this. That Australia, with one of the highest per capita levels of emissions in the world, to drown our neighbour who had no fossil fuel industry of their own. My sense of justice had been upturned. Of course this was simply another conviction about how the world worked.

And then the wind changed.

About twenty kilometres out from the turnoff to the service station at Goulburn, a strong southerly picks up. It pulls a curtain of smoke across the sky and the far off whisps are replaced by a grey blanket that smothers the sun to a glowing red disc. Anyone that has experienced this will understand the effect is curiously aquatic. Ash suspended in the air drifts across the landscape like sediment in a current.

I snap out of my daze when a Hilux with raised suspension barrels past, veers into our lane almost clipping us, before tearing on. I am shaken, like we have entered a place where the ordinary rules are loosened and the order of things is more primal.

Again, the orange radiator light flashes back on. This moment feels important like the decisions made now are of vital consequence to the future. Giulia’s phone vibrates.
“Mum says the road is closed at Moss Vale,” Giulia says as she clicks out a response. This changes everything. It is time to stop and plan the next move. The service station is just up the road.

As we climb the exit ramp to Goulburn that joins an overpass, I look out the side window. The divided freeway vanishes into a dull orange gloom with loose chains of brake lights leading off to the horizon. I feel stupid. Fires raging through Australia’s most populous states, impacting millions, but until the wind had changed, I too had resorted to banal assumptions. Mine are that the news only happens to other people.

I especially have little excuse for such a belief. For four years I have co-presented the weekly Beyond Zero Emissions Radio show on 3CR Melbourne. This has been long enough for, “something terrible will happen” to eventuate into “something terrible is happening”. In the last year alone, massive methane deposits had been released by melting ice and the Amazon and Siberia has burned. That Northern summer, record heatwaves in Europe has killed hundreds while increasingly massive portions of the Greenland ice sheet has routinely broken off and tumbled into the ocean.

In that time, outright denial that the climate was changing has mostly been quashed. Even Donald Trump with his wildly contradictory statements cut a haggard path that is obstructionist but rarely denies the science. Unfortunately, it soon becomes clear that this represents less than a decisive victory. Instead, it is a false summit that has `obscured a far more treacherous climb. Beyond it, once climate science is no longer in question, it is the minute details of what this new reality means that is squabbled over. Are humans causing climate change? Is two degrees of warming really the correct target? When will the worst happen? What about nuclear energy? Are renewables really able to supply our energy needs? What had been a single debate - is climate change real - fragments in multiple digressions. As a tactic by those interested in maintaining the status quo, this tactical retreat is brilliant both in substance and timing. It occurs at the very moment when neither a splintered media sphere nor the average attention span, ravaged by social media, can easily reconstitute the diverging arms of the debate and arrive at the simple conclusion the moment demands: that now what we need is not more discussion but broad and decisive action.

At this time, a worrying trend, discernible only later, begins to overtake the radio show. Instead of just interviewing scientists, we seek out psychologists. This can only mean that the battle to save the climate is moving from out there, in the objective world, to inside our own minds. There is a sound and depressing reasoning for this - there is no correlation between the general acceptance that climate change is real and the beginning of any action to halt it. Even the most optimistic begins to falter.

Australia, as it always does, has its own story. So much hope and political capital invested in the “climate election” that failure did not seem like an option. The press and the pollsters reinforced one another to the extent that one article opined the LNP had ruined the economy deliberately to undermine an incoming Labor Government. Even the leader of the opposition, Bill Shorten after years on the sidelines, seemed for a moment like a winner.

Perhaps I was biased. I had met Bill Shorten once, in 2018, when he spoke at the twentieth anniversary of the Esso Longford gas explosion, an industrial disaster in which two workers had died. The timing was apt. For two years a well-established picket line had been held, complete with repurposed shipping containers and banners demanding Esso tear up contracts that would see their wages decreased by up to forty percent.

Shorten arrived in a two-car motorcade and after shaking hands and saying a few quick hellos, spoke in front of a crowd of oil and gas workers about the need for justice for the two who had died in the explosion and the need for safer working conditions for all workers. I was impressed by his command of the crowd and his easy confidence. Yet most of all I felt that in his Chinos, impeccably polished dark tan RM Williams boots and starched white collar, his struggle was the same as these gas workers in their grimy fluro orange jumpsuits and hardhats. In one brief afternoon I decided that this man could be a unifier in a country that was increasingly divided.

Yet it wasn’t to be. As impressive as his performance was, in front of exhaust towers belching jets of flame into the sky - he failed to scale, marginalised by a hostile media. The rest is carved into the intractable history of Australian climate inaction: Labor’s bungling throughout North Queensland and the Green’s Climate Convoy meant that against all predictions, Scott Morrison had his miracle victory. In the zero-sum game that Australian Federal politics the climate had lost.

Of course the election was just the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg. After following the dynamics of power relating to carbon emissions, I formed the opinion that even the federal government were not the true architects of our present intractability. I worked on a radio series entitled ‘Follow the Money’ The aim was simple: determine why the government were so averse to climate action, which over the long-term was surely in everyone’s interests. This was not new territory and so I defer now as I did then, to renegade investigative journalist Michael West and reformed spin doctor Guy Pearse, both had reached similar conclusions - a diabolical conspiracy between a megalithic media organisation, powerful lobby groups and well-funded PR firms is where true power lies. Former and future politicians and their advisors move seamlessly between this conglomeration of vested interests and into close orbit with both major parties. The grubby result was to manufacture public support of policies custom built to support gas and coal mining industries, policies that ran in stark contrast to the expressed will of the Australian people.

The service station is on the outskirts of Goulburn, opposite a McDonalds. I pull in and stop beside a pump. The light from the roof bathes the station in an icy beam but outside the landscape is a swirling apricot murk. Any luminescence cast by the McDonalds sign fails to make even the short distance across the road - leaving the famous twin arches as a mucky silhouette.

“Let’s stay in the car as much as possible. We need to be here for a little while, let the radiator cool down before we check the water, ” I say.

“Good call. I’ll go in and get some water,” says Giulia. Chutney in the back seat is awake, alert now that we had stopped. He gazes out without comprehension.

Outside the wind is warm and heavy. Gusts from the southerly is again making the trees’ branches whip around but fail to clear the thick smoke diffusing the orange light. The sun has vanished completely. Through the window I can see Giulia inside the starkly lit shop. I open the petrol flap, unscrew the cap and watch the numbers climb.

At another pump, a man in thongs and stubbies is chewing something. He pumps diesel into a black lifted Land Cruiser. The vehicle is well kitted out with lamps and antenna attached to an angry looking bullbar. It seems far more capable of handling this moment than the black Merc. I look on enviously. Beside him, a man with glasses just steps out of a silver Prius, while two children squabble in the back before being silenced when the door shuts. He looks around him, blinking and confused.

Giulia returns with a bottle of mineral water in her hand.

“I’m just going to walk Chutney real quick,” she says opening the back door and picking him up.

“Be quick. I’m not sure how great it is for him or you out here,” I reply.

Slowly, I begin to notice a weight gathering inside my chest. Having smoked for fifteen years it is familiar. I pop the bonnet. Inside the engine is hissing but there is no steam or drops of oil. I grab a sheet of rough paper towel and tear it off. I fetch the dipstick, careful to avoid the fizzing metal. I wipe it, dip again and retrieve it. A black droplet clings to the end, reaching to just below the “min” etched line.

In the service station shop I catch the end of a joke with the driver of Land Cruiser talking to the attendant -

“At least I’m going to save money on ciggies!” says the driver. A closing statement on his way out.
“Yeah I’ll have to charge ya just for standin’ round next time!”
Her smile fades as she looks at me. I place the bottle of oil on the counter.
“Interesting times huh? I’m headed to Sydney.” checking if the good humour offered to the last customer will extends to me. Perhaps we are all stuck in this together.
“You can say that again. Freeway is closed up ahead. You can cut through to the coast but it’s a small road - might be bumper-to-bumper.”

Back outside, the oil cap refuses to move. I get a rag to insulate my hand from the heat, and even with all my weight I can’t get it to budge. The angle is awkward and I push again until sweat breaks out on my forehead. I feel a pain shoot through my lateral muscle and stop. As the pain recedes, I have a wild thought that I was at the center of a conspiracy intent on breaking me. It is paranoid, narcissistic and stupid, one I had as a teenager, that all life minor trials were an insidious campaign designed to cause me grief.

I take a deep breath but feel the weight of heavy air that tastes acrid. Sweat dribbles into my eyes. I am surprised at how quickly the environment has become hostile. I blink and look through the stark lighting of the service station and into the swirling murk. The silhouetted trees thrashing around. It is afternoon and dark as dusk.

Eventually, I pry open the cap and pour in the golden liquid. I begin to feel better. Responsible and capable even. We now have water and fuel. I start the car. The dash light flicks on when the key turns then vanishes. Thankfully, we still have reception. Giulia is speaking with her whole family on a group chat. Through this we find that the Southern Highlands are ablaze, multiple fires at Green Wattle Creek and Wildes Meadow have all joined into a firestorm that now burns beyond any control. There is little more they can do than to stop it spreading and watch. Just as the attendant said, the Highway is closed but looking at Google Maps for the moment there is still a way to Sydney via a detour along the coast.

Back on the freeway, it is not long past Bowral before the traffic begins to thicken into a cluster of brake lights. Ahead as we shuffle forward, a thin corona of orange light grows from the horizon, an ominous incandescence that casts the trees as silhouettes and deepens the sky from ochre to paprika red. We were travelling slowly now, about forty kilometres per hour. We come to a long train of semi-trailers parked on the shoulder. The detour involves a descent into a valley through a series of hairpin turns, too tight for these trucks. They are now marooned roadside either until the road reopens or they are forced to return. Up until this moment, commerce and the free movement of goods has been a law of nature. Now it has stopped dead and with it another conviction has been overturned.

We slow to crawl. In the far lane witches’ hats and roadside signs flash lights to announce this lane is closed. As we snail along I look into the other cars. In most, the occupants look ahead with expressions a mix of fatigue and concern. In one a child that looks like my nephew waves to the passing cars.

In single file we continue past the train of semis on the shoulder. Soon more signs announce that the road is completely closed. Ahead, traffic snakes off the freeway and up an overpass. It crosses over either to continue onto the coastal detour or to return back along the Hume. Two large plastic barricades mark the cut of the main road between Australia’s two largest cities. Beyond them, humanoid shapes in white and orange hi viz jumpsuits, faceless with fire hats and gasmasks wander the empty highway. And further on, the freeway disappears into the horizon. No flames are visible yet but the orange sky flickers. The smell of smoke and ash is thick and, although we have closed the intake vents, the weight on my chest pushes harder.

Along the detour the traffic quickly thins out. In the smog we are soon alone on a road that follows a ridgeline parallel to the blazing horizon. On each side, fields slope downward. In front of the fire, a windbreak of poplars flail in the wind. Looking more closely, I begin to make out moving shapes. I realise that the field is full of animals.

There is the unmistakable profile of scores of bouncing kangaroos but also some graceful four-legged animals that I can not discern. I slow down careful of the newly introduced variable. Some are heading towards us. A few kangaroos bound across but then one of the four legged animals emerges. It is a deer. As it comes closer, I slow to a crawl. In an instant the deer bounds across the road, galloping right through my headlights. In a moment I see into her illuminated face and eye, right into the wild terror that had brought this docile and shy creature into close proximity. Once crossed, her shape fades into the gloom on the other side of the road. More kangaroos leap across. They have been driven from the raging inferno just beyond the treeline. Seeing them flee makes the fire real, and I feel my gut tighten. These are the first wave of climate refugees.

We will soon to catch a second. As night falls, we leave the fire. The smell of burning never recedes nor does the smoke but the glow eventually dims, replacing an inky night. Giulia and I become locked in a debate about whether we should stop at a hotel or continue to Sydney. Correlating Google Maps with the fire maps show many fires continuing to rage around Sydney. While there is still a way into the city, the situation is fluid enough so it is conceivable that it may soon be shut off. Yet by now we are exhausted so in the small town of Robertson we pull into a roadside motel.

As far as motels go Robertson Country Motel is practical. Single story rooms look onto a gravel parking lot which is almost full.
“I’ll have a quick look at reception, ” I say to Giulia.
“Cool, I will check to see if there is anything else in the area” she says looking back at her phone.
The backlit hotel sign casts a smoky beam. Out front of one of the rooms, a lady in a pink dressing gown sits in a plastic chair smoking a cigarette. Her door is open and from it comes the sound of a television with the yapping of the news. I can see the screen flash behind the curtains. She squints as I approach and, when I ask if there is a reception, she shakes her head.
“Nah you can only book these rooms over the internet.”
“Looks pretty full up anyway.”
“Well, there’s a lot of people getting out.”
“Are you one of them?”
“Yeah I’m from Bowral. They asked us to evacuate and we had no choice but to come here.”
“Hope everything turns out.”
“Cheers love.” she looks up at me and then stares out into the churning night.
I look down the row of identical doors. Lights are on in all. Televisions tuned to different news channels yapping the same news from each. From one comes a dry hacking cough.

Weaving through the parked cars on my way back I can see the suspension of many of the parked vehicles pushing down low. Peering through the back windows the seats are a dark jumble of household items: blankets, pillows, colouring books, DVDs, clothes. I wonder what I would take with me if leaving my home with the real chance that what I left behind would be incinerated.

Back in the car Giulia’s search for free rooms in this hotel has yielded nothing under $300 for the night - these high class hotels are less likely to accommodate a dog. Our only option is to continue on. We are lucky. We have a place to go. Through the chain of similar towns to the coast, each hotel we pass has a blazing No Vacancy sign that shines out through the smoke that never lets up to Sydney.

In the end somehow, even the house at Bawley Point is saved. The volunteer firefighter service had battled through the night and kept the block of my grandmother’s house from being incinerated. Other houses had not been so lucky. Bawley Point was just one of many surf towns. A theme emerged - some houses remained untouched while others were reduced to smoking rubble. In the end the Currowan fire burned for a total of 74 days, claiming 500,000 hectares and destroying 312 homes.

When I visit, I will see how the swampland surrounding Bawley Point has been ravaged: the groundwater black ink, the forest a necropolis of charred stumps - completely still. No sign as to what has happened to the wildlife that I heard rustling through the leaves as I hiked through as a child. Yet even then green chutes will begin to grow from those trunks still intact.

It is 18 months later and I have been driving through the night. This time alone and in a rental car in South Australia’s Upper Spencer Gulf. Approaching the outskirts of Port Augusta just as morning is breaking is to watch renewables sprouting from the red desert earth. Under construction are solar arrays and wind turbines. I pass a towering crane the bright colours of a children’s toy raising a blade to a windmill. There is even a heliostat - a tower on which hectares of parabolic mirrors focus the sun’s gathering heat to generate steam and desalinate the seawater coming in from the Gulf. It is heating up, glowing in the dawn like a beacon.

In the time since Black Summer the prospects for climate action are also getting brighter. The new American President Joe Biden has committed $2 trillion USD to post-COVID recovery. This was really a trojan horse to fund a renewable revolution and it is working. Quickly much of the world fell into step committing to zero emissions targets. Even China in the midst of escalating trade conflicts with the US and a surging economy agreed to net zero emissions by 2060. All the preconditions are in place for a renewable revolution. Countries compete to transform their economies as quickly as possible, the danger of missing the opportunity is simple: trading partners demanding zero emissions exports will turn to other sources for their goods leaving them economically isolated.

Again Australia has its unique story. On a federal level little seems to have changed. Scott Morrison’s government is looking increasingly marginal on the world stage and has offered a “gas lead recovery” which is a desperate attempt to piggyback fossil fuels in the surge for renewable adoption.

Yet under the surface things are different. In a book published on the eve of the COVID outbreak Ross Garnaut’s Superpower mapped out a blueprint for Australia to use its massive renewable and mineral resources to become a renewable energy superpower in the green new world order. The book is hugely influential amongst politicians. One-by-one the Australian states commit to zero emissions targets, even those with Liberal governments, showing that the economic opportunity can transcend the culture wars. Some like NSW’s Liberal Matt Kean begin to explicitly adopt the language in Garnaut’s plan.

This vision, updated in a second book post-COVID called Reset, is as follows. During the 2008 mining boom Australia skirted the GFC by exporting ore and coal. If Australia were to build renewables that could exploit the huge resources of sun and wind, we could process the minerals that we mine and export metals instead of raw ore overseas. This would create far more jobs and make Australia a critical part of the new global economy, guaranteeing economic prosperity into the future. The first step though was to build the renewables.

Outside through the main drag of Port Augusta, morning traffic slows to a crawl. It consists mostly of white Hiluxes and utes with construction company logos on their cabin doors with the odd camper from a grey nomad sprinkled through. These utes are trying to reach construction sites. Again I will find it very difficult to get a hotel room although this time for different reasons. International investment is flowing here from around the developed world.

As I drive out of Port August I pass Lincoln Gap where another windfarm is under construction - phase 2 which will provide a significant portion of the state’s energy. An hour later I am in Whyalla where the sprawling rusted steelworks sends plumes of steam into the sky. There are plans to convert this aging relic so its begins producing green steel. The owner Sanjeev Gupta is hoping to resolve his financial troubles to continue the project. But if he does this will be the first and most concrete example of Garnaut’s dream - to create steel from Australian Iron Ore and Australian renewables. The town of Whyalla, that has depended on the steelworks for employment for over half a century, called Gupta their saviour after he swept in and purchased the steelworks and its associated mines saving them on the brink of insolvency. Round here renewables means jobs and a future not a threat.

Australia is in a unique position amongst all nations. The economic opportunities offered by the world’s energy transformation are profound. Again we are a lucky country: many other developed nations have to work ten times as hard, spend ten times as much to achieve similar outcomes. Yet the driest inhabited continent is also the most vulnerable of all developed nations to climate change. The threat of fire, drought and fatal heatwaves are well catalogued in the literature and have begun to cause deaths and the destruction of livelihoods and businesses. This is the big squeeze - a moment in our national history when we are pressed between competing forces, from which we look back on as a singularly decisive period.

What follows here is an exploration of the communities and key individuals that are positioned at this unique location at this unique time. The intent is to tell their stories and describe how they are directly impacted by the big squeeze. It will also capture the motives of those agents of change and to record those communities, landscapes and individuals exposed to the threats and opportunities of climate change.