As soon as summer hit I knew we were in trouble. The bedroom gets the sun all afternoon. It was like an oven - we have fans running all the time just to try and keep air circulating.
Potts Point, NSW
I moved to Australia last year. My partner is Australian and she’d had a really stressful time during the Black Summer fires. The fires got really close to her childhood home and she thousands of miles away glued to the ABC trying to find out what was happening.
We’re lucky enough to live in the eastern bit of Sydney, and we normally get a decent breeze through, even on hot days. But our apartment is west facing and we don’t have air conditioning.
As soon as summer hit I knew we were in trouble. The bedroom gets the sun all afternoon. It was like an oven – we have fans running all the time just to try and keep air circulating. My partner and I weren’t getting any sleep and were starting to snap at each other.
It wasn’t even that hot this year. I don’t know how we’d cope in a heatwave. And I don’t know how we’d cope if it keeps getting hotter. It really makes me question how long we could live here for.
I know I’m really lucky, because whenever I drive a bit further west or north, out into the suburbs, the temperature rises about 5 degrees. We’ve got a few trees on our street for shade, but I really feel for families moving out there, where there’s no shade on the streets or in gardens.
I’ll never understand why Australia isn’t at the front of the queue demanding climate action. There’s so much at stake – and so much opportunity if we get the transition right.
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I had never seen an Australian forest die due to drought. In the summer of 2019, I thought the fires had already been through our land, but it was the brown of acres of dead eucalypts. Then the creeks and the dams dried up and the platypus and the birds disappeared. We have had some good rain since then, but it’s sporadic, from drought to flood to drought, and the platypus didn’t return, and neither did so many of the birds that used to breed here. In the first flush of rain in 2020, there was too much rain, then too much regrowth in the bush. The creeks and dams were filled with toxic algal blooms and the last signs of life on the waterways were gone. Now, we are waiting for the inevitable fires to follow. Every month, we are fire-free, and it feels like we won the lottery. Our fire season has been extended, too, so it is very hard to feel relaxed. We are on constant alert. The increase in temperature has obviously stressed the insects, too. When I was a child and even as a young adult, our cars would be covered in bugs if we drove at night. Now, having a bug on the car is rare, and we haven’t seen a bogong moth for years. We have also noticed so many more snakes in this extended hot weather, and they are not entering their brumation (hibernation period) at normal times. This year, we have had them out and visible for at least six weeks longer than usual. This will be upsetting so many systems in nature here. Apparently, snake catchers around Australia are working very hard right now. Snakes have never bothered us, but now many of them are coming around our house. I wonder if they are running out of their normal food in the bush. How can the birds and the rest of the food chain survive? It is obvious to anyone watching that there are multiple systems collapsing so fast.
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