Summers are no longer carefree. We are constantly on edge, constantly watching weather reports, constantly ready to to go.
Northern Tasmania
We moved to our verdant valley in the northern Tasmania mountainscape 12 years ago. It felt good not to have to worry about the increasing threat of more severe cyclonic activity and rising sea level surges in Australia’s tropical north anymore. Respite for us lasted about 5 years. The gentle summers with frequent soft rains began to stretch out into longer, hotter, drier seasons, and our always verdant valley started showing it first signs of our now common blonde landscapes.
At around 8 years of having lived in our precious Tassie home, we were evacuated for 8 days as a raging regional fire threatened our access. Summers are no longer carefree. We are constantly on edge, constantly watching weather reports, constantly ready to to go. But these are not the only changes for us. Winds have picked, rains have got heavier and snow falls much less.
It is heart breaking watching a pristine environment decline, and it’s heart breaking losing a carefree way of being.
Yet here in Tassie we are still poisoning our waterways with chemicals from conventional farming, mining and forestry, and we are still logging the old growth forests we so urgently need to store carbon and maintain habitat for our unique biodiversity. We are deep in climate emergency, yet there is no state government focus on regenerative practice or localisation.
Like the children of the Torres Strait, our children are also threatened species. Though we are overjoyed by the fresh energy in federal government, 43% carbon reduction by 2030 is simply not enough. We need a federal focus that truly acknowledges the emergency we are in.
Hundreds of people from across the country are sharing their stories to send a clear message to the Australian government - it's time for real action on climate change.
Every story appears as a point on this map. Click around to read how climate change is affecting our communities, and add your own story to the map.
We have spent a summer trapped in our home with heatwave after heatwave hitting our city in the longest and hottest summer of my lifetime (and indeed the city’s lifetime). I have had to stop my three year old son playing outside day after day and we have all had to stay in the same room as it is the only air conditioned one. Summer used to be a time of fun, of outdoor barbecues for dinner, of freedom. Now it has a feeling of containment and dread. My job requires me to confront climate issues and victims of bushfire and other disasters and their experiences and the flood of climate information leave me feeling deep grief, distress and helplessness. My little son loves animals passionately and i dread the day I will have to tell him about climate change and about how so many of the creatures that inspire him are threatened by mankind’s very existence. I fear he will grow into an adult in a time of increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters, in a country weakened economically and fragmented socially by these disasters. That by the time he grows up the Great Barrier Reef we describe to him will be dead and gone. Having him despite my fear for his future was an act of hope and defiance, but that hope is hard to maintain when our governments will seemingly not act to end the use of fossil fuels and replace them with renewables with the speed that will give my beautiful child the bright future he deserves. I hope and pray that this case changes the situation. And I thank these elders for bringing this action.
Read my storyPeople all across Australia are being harmed by climate change. These are some of their stories.
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