Sydney chokes as Australia burns

Taste the ash, see our pink 

sun: Sydney's dead future is 

here

SMH,

10 December, 2019

I can’t breathe. They say something like 100 bush and grass fires are raging across the state. The city I live in feels like a scene from Blade Runner 2049 come to life in 2019. There is no other way to see it: our dead future is here.

The mornings are smoky and grey. The afternoons distinctly eerie with the sun a shrunken disc that is by turns eggishly sick, bright pink, or burning orange in the seemingly permanent haze.

My eyes water. My breathing is shallow. My throat trickles with foreign matter. On my back verandah, the washing machine and wooden shelves are covered in a gritty film of ash. I see what I am breathing in. Like tea leaves left in a cup predicting bad things.

Last week, I struggled so badly for air I had to leave work early and drive back home 10 minutes away. Yes, I am mildly asthmatic. Yes, I am vulnerable to air pollution. But this was different to anything I’ve experienced before.

I felt frightened for what was happening as I gripped the wheel. The struggle to get oxygen into my body. The growing tightness. I recognised my system was constricting and closing down. It came to me that I was being buried alive. And that I am not the only one. All of us slowly smothered.

When I got inside I lay on my bed in the cool dark. All the doors and windows shut. I began to feel better. But it took me most of the afternoon to recover. And something else occupied me. A kind of anxiety and dread. A profound feeling of futility and depression.

Through my window, I watched the outlines of a tree like some undersea creature swimming in the silver wind. Its clumps of leaves and branches move this way and that, communicating a message to me that speaks of something gone deeply wrong with the world.

This week temperatures are soaring again. Friends say the fires will burn for weeks, maybe months. It’s likely there will be no rain till the end of January. On social media, everybody keeps taking pictures of the sky and the sun. Someone writes a note: “How long before the birds start dropping from the sky?”

Pollution levels are rising to 22 times the accepted safety levels. Driving over the Bridge, the great cloud that occupies my city reminds me of past visits to Tehran and Beijing. I associate the pollution with something totalitarian I can’t put my finger on, a form of oppression manifest in nature.

It is as if the smoke and ash is going so deep into our lungs it is entering our bloodstream and our consciousness. In the final week of our national parliament there was no word about climate change, little sense of much that is urgent, just platitudes and worries and scandal.

My experience of the city and its skies feels like an omen. I fret for my children getting home from school and the world that is coming for them. Towards the back of my head, right at the base where my neck joins it, a dull cloud sits in my mind and I struggle to think straight in this atmosphere that has become a part of me. I’m tight and tense, and I register that I am becoming desperate and have no voice that matters. I can barely call out for help as I suffocate spiritually as well as physically. A state of emergency has settled in around us all. I can taste the ash. I can see the pink sun.

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