Dear Marley,
When you were two, your Mum and I went on what is possibly the least romantic anniversary date of all time. I can’t remember how we wrangled a babysitter to watch over you and your baby brother but we did, and I grabbed the opportunity to take Mum out for lunch and a movie in downtown Toowoomba. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the lunch that was unromantic – the food (Turkish!) was delicious and the company, unbeatable – it was the movie.
We could have chosen to see a rom-com, or at least something with a skerrick of romance, but instead we opted for a documentary. And not just any documentary, but the scare-the-living-crap-out-of-you doco An Inconvenient Truth, the subtitle of which Mum and I conveniently overlooked: A Global Warning.
Dull, and even a little macabre for a date movie, right? Let me explain why we chose it and what happened afterwards.
It was 2006, and though we knew climate change was a thing, it wasn’t at the top of our agenda. While we understood the basic science underpinning the Greenhouse Effect and we could accept that human activity, especially the burning of fossil fuels, was the cause, for the most part we were newbies. So, I guess we went to see An Inconvenient Truth to educate ourselves.
Okay, spare me the eye rolls, I know education and romance aren’t the sexiest combination. But get this: the movie had such a profound impact on me, that near the end, with the credits petering out to the copyright notices and disclaimers, I suddenly burst into tears.
These weren’t quiet, roll-down-your-cheek kind of tears. They were full blown sobs that convulsed out of me as blasts of compressed emotion. You and I have cried together at movies (remember when we watched Coda?), but you’ve never seen me cry like this. I just couldn’t hold it in.
With Mum’s arms wrapped around me I managed to get myself together enough to leave the cinema. When we stood up, I noticed a woman further along our row, sitting alone. She’d seen my reaction to the film. At first I felt embarrassed that I’d made such a spectacle of myself, but when we made eye contact her lips turned upward slightly at the sides and her cheekbones lifted, bending her eyes into a gaze of pure compassion. Without words she said “I understand. I feel it too and I sympathise.” I smiled back, then holding Mum’s hand, we exited the cinema and entered the popcorn-infused foyer as slightly changed people.
After watching the film I dedicated myself to advocacy. I tried to raise awareness of climate change whenever I could, slipping the topic into public gardening talks and writing articles imploring people to live simply in order to reduce emissions (you’ve heard me bang on about Thoreau and his ideas about simple living). I argued with deniers like a zealot and sought to put my preaching into practice by growing food, buying a more efficient car, and paying a premium for renewable energy. I did all of this because of a fierce belief that climate change was a problem with viable solutions. I was certain that humanity could choose a sustainable path. I was overflowing with hope.
More than anything, I was driven by my love for you and your brothers. I was desperate for you to inhabit a world in which you could experience the wonders I got to experience when I was young. Things like rainforests, oceans, wildlife…places like the Great Barrier Reef. I’ve tried to give you sense of astonishment about the world, but now it’s up to you.
Marlz, I know it’s difficult deciding on a career pathway when the future feels so uncertain, but know this: you’re one of the most creative people I know. Whether you use that creativity to forge a career is mostly beside the point. Imagination, paid or otherwise, will be essential in the years ahead. Creatives like you will be the new prophetesses. How else will we avoid dangerous climate change other than imagining what a liveable future might look like? Show us the way!
Love, Dad.
*
Dear Monty,
You were four, a stocky, playful, smiley little tacker and you probably only remember snippets about the floods.
It was 2011, a La Nina summer. Rain of many descriptions had been falling for months – cloudburst showers that would sweep in from the coast, massive thunderheads that regularly bombed the Great Dividing Range, and from the northwest, lazy rains that would hang around for days until they’d make everything damp and overstay their welcome.
By early January, the ground had become squelchy and the house felt like it was under siege from nature. Black mould began to crawl across our 10 foot high ceilings. Gutters started overflowing into the roof cavity and our ancient tin roof began to leak. During one storm, we’d squashed towels into leaking window channels and placed buckets around the house to catch the drips.
On January 11, I learned that there is such a thing as too much rain. The weather forecast the night before had predicted another day of downpours, so when I sat at my desk to start work for the day, I opened the Bureau of Meteorology rain radar on my computer. When the image loaded I made an audible “whoa”. A huge dark green and yellow blob, packed to the gills with moisture, was intensifying in the north-east. This was an uncommon direction for heavy rain to develop, but it was already clear that this storm wasn’t interested in playing by the rules. Instead of crossing the Great Diving Range, as storms usually do on the eastern Darling Downs, this beast was tracking along its mountainous spine, dumping huge volumes of rain the whole way.
Our home in Hampton was directly in the storm’s firing line and I had only thirty minutes to prepare. I snapped my laptop shut, grabbed a raincoat from the laundry and raced out the back door, barefooted. Using some garden tools I shaped little banks and dug trenches to strategically direct the flow of surface water away from sensitive infrastructure. The septic tank was the focus of my efforts. Trust me, Mont, you never want to experience a flooded septic tank.
When the storm hit, it was as if Huey had flicked a switch to “ON”. Fat droplets instantly pelted onto my raincoat, and within seconds, I realised that something extraordinary was happening at my feet. The ground had liquified. Soil so saturated by earlier rain could hold nothing more and it took just minutes to find myself standing in ankle deep floodwater.
A voice came from the front yard. “Justin, come and have a look at this!” It was your Nanna (my Mum), calling me to the front yard. I sloshed my way down the driveway and was dumbfounded by the scene at the front gate. The cattle grid was under water and just outside the gate, your Pa was standing in knee deep water. A few metres beyond him thundered a furious torrent in place of our road. Despite living on a western slope, the water flowing down the road was over a metre deep. Pa shook his head in disbelief.
Nanna, with her plastic covered Akubra pulled down tight, frowned with concern. “Come back inside the gate David!” she shouted to Pa. Then, in an attempt to convince him, “If you get washed away I’m not jumping in after you!”
Sadly, people did get washed away in that storm. A couple drowned in their house at nearby Spring Bluff and a so called “inland tsunami” blitzed the Locker Valley, killing 23 people. Maybe you can remember watching the news that night, seeing people airlifted from their house roofs, or the images of actual houses floating downstream after being swept from their footings?
Our family was lucky. We only experienced a small amount of damage – a flooded septic tank, sure enough. What changed after that event was my view around climate change. It was no longer an abstract concept. I now understood it as cold floodwater pooling around my ankles, the stench of mould inhabiting your bedroom ceiling, the rotted garden plants that months after the flood, drew sweat from my body as I cut them down and carried their skeletal branches to the rubbish pile.
Global warming and its impacts became visceral. It became obvious that climate change was merciless, capable of stealing homes, livelihoods, and in an increasing number of cases, actual lives. Before the floods I’d never feared the future, but I understood that one big climate event – a flood or a fire or even a slow burning drought – could put my family in mortal danger.
See, Mont, a dad’s instinct is to protect his children. It’s kind of rule number one. In the weeks after the floods, I thought I could provide this protection by hatching an escape plan, figuring that if we could sell our home in Queensland and move somewhere colder, like Tasmania or even New Zealand, I could shield you from the worst.
I was wrong. Climate change can’t be outrun. Its tentacles stretch to all corners of the map, which means that until we’re forced to flee, we have to stay put and do our best to adapt. You’re becoming an incredibly resilient person – I’ve seen it in the way you play football, in the way you handle adversity in life. Hear me when I say you will need to call deeply on that resilience in the years ahead. The future won’t be easy. But no matter what, I’ll be here to help. Together we can deal with whatever comes our way.
Love, Dad.
*
Dear Fergus,
Who cares if you’re the youngest. The truth is, you’ve always been the observant one. When I misplaced something, you could usually find it. When Mum’s directions got us lost and I needed a backup navigator, you’d come to the rescue. Even as a toddler, you noticed stuff that your brother and sister missed. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then, that your senses went into overdrive the day the bushfire erupted.
I have a photo of you on my phone, timestamped 13 November 2019, 3.19pm. You’re walking down the hill toward our house, dressed in an orange singlet and blue shorts. The lawn beneath your bare feet has turned the colour of weathered bone and in the background, a plume of mushroom coloured smoke rises above the tree line into a hazy blue sky.
As I look at the photo, it’s not the smoke that shocks me. It’s the look on your face. When I zoom in, I see a look of dread and sadness and it breaks my heart.
The fire started earlier that day in one of the pine plantations to the north of Hampton. It was less than eight kilometres away from our home by the afternoon, and with a wind change possible, I’d taken you up the hill to get a better look. I thought it might offer some reassurance to let you see that the fire was still well away, and that with the camper trailer packed we could make a quick escape if we decided to evacuate. Instead of calming you down, I got the sense that seeing the fire put you into a state of high alert.
It didn’t help that for the next three weeks, the fire continued to lurk not far from home. Helicopters flew overhead every day, accompanied by water bombing planes with blaring sirens, an unwelcome reminder of emergency. The only time the aircraft didn’t fly was at night, but that was when the smoke drifted in. An inversion layer in the atmosphere would cause it to settle earthward, and with no air-conditioner in the house, we’d breathe acrid air through open windows and wake each morning to a mist that smelled of scorched forest.
On Boxing Day, a few weeks after the fire finally petered out, we headed south, toward Tasmania on a month long road trip. Fires stalked us the whole way. From one of our camps, at Dalgety on the Snowy River, fires forced us to reroute back to Canberra and northward around the Alps. You’d remember stopping the car near Cooma to take photos of a sunny morning turning to apocalyptic night beneath a blackout curtain of smoke. A new fire had started in hills to the east. In the orange twilight, you asked if we were going to be okay and I said that yes, we would. I was guessing. When we got back in the car, it took all my willpower not to totally gun the thing to safety.
By the time we arrived back in Queensland a month later, rain had fallen. The lawn was sporting patches of green and the garden looked surprisingly good. It was too late though, for a local icon. An ancient Sydney blue gum, a landmark in the middle of the village that had kept watch for centuries, had begun to wither. At first it was one massive branch, then another, then a canopy that thinned like a rapidly balding head. Within weeks the tree was dead. The probable cause: a climate much less favourable than when the tree sprouted half a millennium ago.
I’m not going to lie to you, Fergus. At this point, the climate outlook seems grim. The science on global warming is struggling to keep pace with changes happening on the ground and carbon emissions are soaring. New fossil fuel projects are still being approved. The human population grows and consumes more than ever.
But please, don’t turn away in despair. I want you to understand that the world is still a wondrous place. Life is still beautiful. If you keep paying attention, you’ll notice its wonders, and I want this beauty to flow into your life like cool, fresh springwater seeps into a stream.
Love, Dad.
Belated Happy 50th birthday, Justin.
Justin, thank you for sharing these beautiful letters to your children. You are so generous to share them with us. Creation care is such an important agenda and well worthy of our commitment. Go well!