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One of the challenges posed by social distancing is how to reconcile personal presence with distance. Presence is tactile and up close. Measuring out the prescribed separation as people walk around the park in the early morning tends to turn familiars into strangers and greetings into distancings.
Anchored in the treachery of sand, wearing waves until the snip of a certain comber shreds them landward. They call this weed. There are people here too busy in their pleasure. They stare further out across the stolid hungers of tankers queued to feed national necessity, rapacity.
I still mainly look back. The bushfire legacy lives on. It acts as a benchmark for assessing tragedy and hope. I cannot get the searing images out of my head of red, angry skies, of flames raging frighteningly, embers flying, and firefighters miraculously persevering against the odds.
From just up here, on the lip of mountain mileage, that pooling river mouth below, half salt but also hill-fresh, could seem a lagoon. On its low point, surmounting asphalt and breaking waters, sits the verandaed pub, a focus once of holiday shorescape.
This communal outpouring during the bushfires has an opportunity to perpetuate itself indefinitely, even though the embers have been extinguished and those not directly affected by the fires have gotten on with their workaday lives. For even as the fires burned, Tourism Australia was mounting a campaign to encourage Australians to holiday locally instead of taking their patronage abroad, and to persuade international tourists to visit, too.
Beyond sunlit planes of sea and sand/Like the shade on my front lawn/Nightshadow creeps over continents/Cities light up in glowing clusters/While the deserts hide their campfires.
The group had come together by the chance enquiry from one churchgoer who asked another if they could dedicate time to this — to us. So, we clambered into a mini van with our meagre possessions, and the myths and half-truths we knew about Australia followed suit.
The Palestinians, and Arabs more generally, have gotten used to this sham of semantics and pretences of peace, watching on as America continues to fund and support Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its projection of military power in the region with impunity.
With blazes nearby, TV news bars well on fire, we human animals are panicked, feel the shudder of rotors above our roofs. Very soon thirsty helitankers will thunder down to drink from our neighbourhood lake. May we remember tomorrow, nothing will be more worried than pelicans in broken reeds, the night heron in its naked tree.
Turning off the main road, we burrowed now into a verdant tunnel; at the end of it stood one of Australia's flagship properties, Southern Ocean Lodge. Entering its vaulted, glass encased great room, I turned my head from the rolling waves on one side to the rolling bush on the other. Each was an ocean unto itself.
For our society to function responsively to what is now a dynamically changing context, we urgently need differently oriented governance. This will, no doubt, be unpalatable for some — both in government and in the general public. But without re-setting how we are governed, our land and our society will suffer further destruction.
There are so many details about these unprecedented bushfires that I have no idea how to process. But nothing — including the ever-present shroud of acrid smoke that has blanketed my city since November — has brought home the scale of this tragedy quite like the estimation that one billion native animals have been killed.