86 Time February 3, 2020
“Smell ThaT?” my huSband gave me a look aS we
waited by Sydney Airport’s luggage carousel. It was smoke,
not unpleasant, like a distant neighbor’s wood fire, but persis-
tent and odd in a place that’s usually redolent of coffee, duty-
free perfume and burning jet fuel. He had insisted we stock up
on face masks before we left the U.S., over my objections that
he was overreacting, and now raised his eyebrows knowingly.
Having grown up pretty much next to the Australian bush,
I had watched the news of infernos in my homeland with skepti-
cism. Bushfires were to my childhood like blizzards were to my
adult life in America’s Northeast: an inevitable feature of the
landscape for which you had to be prepared. As young journal-
ists, we used to joke each summer about who would be the first
to write the phrase the whole state is a tinderbox.
My family home had endured two close calls. During the scar-
ier of these, my dad’s shirt briefly caught fire as he tried to save
the chickens. Both the poultry and the parent survived. Foxes—
or something—took the chickens in later years. My father’s life
was now being threatened by less exotic hazards with fancier
names: pericarditis and an evolving occipital infarction—a bad
heart and a stroke. Hence the trip.
As I watched the national evening news, alerts flashed across
the screen that people who lived on specific streets in West-
ern Australia needed “to act immediately to survive,” and oth-
ers were instructed it was “too late to leave; seek shelter.” But
these dramatic bulletins got less attention than the gasping ten-
nis players at the Australian Open. This is true to form; Austra-
lians spend a lot of time not thinking about their bushland. We
all assume it will continue to behave as it ever has, cleaning the
air and surviving on what little water humans aren’t using. But
Australia, particularly in the east where the worst fires are, has
just endured the driest three-year period on record, part of a
pattern of changes in its already extreme climate.
I got many anxious inquiries about my family from kind
American friends, but while the fires were devastating and
deadly in a way even Australians are unused to—at least 29 peo-
ple have died in a three-month period—very few of my relatives
were under immediate threat. More than eight times as much
land has burned in Australia as in the California fires in 2018,
but Australia has lost fewer than one-seventh as many homes.
The long, less telegenic drought has been far more ruinous to
farms and livelihoods.
It’s hard to explaIn to citizens of more populous countries
how vast and empty and inhospitable is the bush, as Australians
universally refer to the national parks and scrubby wilderness
that make up most of their country. Locals will defend to the
death its beauty, but in the same way people defend a difficult
uncle. They love him; they don’t actually want to hang with him.
As a child I rarely explored the 8 sq. mi. of national park just
behind my house, because the chances of seeing a cute marsu-
pial or pretty flower were tiny and the chances of getting bitten
or stung or scratched by ornery insects or vicious plants were
almost 100%. (A recent British guest of my parents was fool-
ish enough to break a twig off a plant and became temporarily
blinded by poisonous sap that squirted into his eye.)
The Australian wilderness is just not very come-hither. It
never changes. The leaves never redden or fall. The trees grow
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