Unimaginable. Unprecedented. Apocalyptic.

I’ve been asked to set the scene for you as someone who grew up on these lands, experienced the changes on country and how it is connected to culture, art and global forces. In three minutes or less. 

So, in my family the story of my arrival – the first grandchild - is inseparable from the feeling that the world was ending. 

Within a month of my birth, my grandmother was shielding me from an immense, choking, dust storm that cloaked Melbourne and turned the sky red. 

A week later she was keeping me cool and hydrated while the Ash Wednesday fires burned through the Otways.

She knew my uncle was sheltering in a house in Lorne, but she won’t comprehend the scale of the danger until later. He was incredibly lucky. Roaring flames leapt the house and spared a neighbour as well while leaving the surrounding area a smoking moonscape.

Nana was the storyteller. She said that time was Unimaginable. Unprecedented. Apocalyptic.

The previous most dangerous bushfire was black Black Friday. 44 years earlier. Nana was five when it happened. She had no memories.

But she did have plenty to say about World War Two. And being locked down and homeschooled during Polio. 

She’d reassure me: “you don’t have to worry about that luvvy. We have vaccines, and firefighting is much more sophisticated these days. And no one ever wants a war like that ever again… we learned our lesson.” 

She became an ancestor in 2017.

I grew up in Eltham, surrounded by eucalypts and CFA Volunteers. Everyone had a bushfire story. Saving houses, close calls, and always at a pivotal moment an exploding tree. Stories to make sense of the landscape, pass on knowledge, bond, and mend inner wounds with laughter. 

Fire was part of nature, necessary for new growth. It brought cleansing and renewal, but also the necessary loss and pain of change. To live amongst the trees was to dance along that line. You got to know them while balancing a healthy fear and respect.

When I was a student at VCA I realised something was off kilter with the fires. Chook at the Willin Centre showed me some unfamiliar birds on campus. She told me it meant there was a fire out bush. The birds had flown far from country to escape the flames.

Later I flipped on the TV and saw she was dead right. But I’d never seen anything that size and ferocity in December. It was far, far too early. That fire burned for two months. It felt… ominous.

A few years later I was working an outdoor bump out of a music festival. It was 10am and well over 30 degrees already. The riggers working at heights were having symptoms of heat stroke including dizziness, nose bleeds and vomiting. The site was shut down until evening when it would be safe to work again. 

The rest of the week was the same. Struggling to sleep in the heat of the day and working through the cool of the night. And the following Saturday… history. Black Saturday was the new all-time worst bushfire disaster.

Unimaginable. Unprecedented. Apocalyptic.

Everyone has a story. But none with laughter. It was a terrible, terrible time. 

I had just turned 26.

Black Friday, Ash Wednesday, Black Saturday and then Black Summer.

I don’t need to tell you about the summer before the pandemic. We all were there. It was only ten years after Black Saturday. The time between major fire disasters has halved each incident, over the course of my life time.

And the ferocity has far more than doubled.

But have you noticed that we don’t talk about it much? Something of a scale that global… and I never hear anyone’s stories. 

My theory is that it wasn’t just an overwhelming mega disaster, it was in a sequence of cascading disasters.

COVID happened so soon after, we never got the chance to articulate and understand our experience of those fires. We were on to the next life threatening emergency too soon. Were there any inquests? What happened to the money raised? Even the wikipedia entry of it is half abandoned at January 14 2020. 10 days before the virus was confirmed to be in the country.

I believe the challenges facing us have now outpaced our ability to comprehend, process and act.

Collaborating with artists and arts workers interrogating and enduring every facet of this climate disaster has led me to understand the weather is the symptom. Underneath lies a complex web of problems with a very long history.

It’s not just nature. It’s not just emissions. It’s economic, political, social, and cultural. The future is trans-disciplinary. We need to break though siloes and bring all hands on deck. 

Updating policies, practices and reallocating resources will (maybe) keep the wolf from the door for a little bit.

But to tackle this complexity we need to go deeper. We need creatives working with each other and other disciplines, to re-imagine unimaginable futures, to preempt the unprecedented, to help us articulate and make sense of our experiences. To draw together our collective intelligence and write a new story. 

Because the gold we are digging for here is transformation. 

Which is really, just a series of smaller apocalypses we’re chosen. 

And that’s my story.