All posts tagged: climate change

COVID-19 got me, then a catastrophic flood: valid excuses for not blogging?

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Hi everyone, long time no see. Sorry I’ve been ‘missing in WordPress action’, it’s been a terrible 6 weeks here in Australia. On a personal level, I finally caught Covid, despite being super cautious for 2 years! It was bound to happen: my darling son Nearly22 brought it unknowingly into the home, despite 3 negative RATs & a negative PCR… *sigh I hoped I may be fine (we were only together for a few hours, but one of them was in the car), plus returned 2 negative RATs & a negative PCR, then on Day 6 since my exposure, I was hit by a sledgehammer of chills/aches/red eyes/nausea/fatigue/dizziness/brain fog. It was horrible. I was one of the last people I know to get it, so luckily I had regular soothing phone calls about what to expect, what to take, & what may happen next. I literally spent 10 days in my pyjamas, dragging myself from bed to kitchen to couch to bed. Dosing myself every 1-2 hours, as well as eucalyptus steam baths, became almost …

From fires to flooding, what the hell? Welcome to Australia

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It’s raining as I type: drops smashing on my tin roof, loud enough to drown the radio. Two weeks ago we were sweltering under a drought, with bushfire smoke lingering, giving Melbourne the worst quality air in the world for a couple of days. But then the rains came. So yesterday I went for a 3-hour bush hike, prepared to get soaked for the sheer relief of feeling moisture in the air again. All around me, trees sucked up precious water, as the creek thundered. The frogs and bugs were so vocal it made conversation difficult, and even the odd leech helped me feel like I was in a tropical rainforest once more. Our beloved bush has been SO dry, SO brittle, SO stressed; in some places it sadly still is. But we’ve been blessed by rain… and now we have too much! We’re flooding: cars being swept off causeways, shops inundated, roads closed, homes damaged, and people’s lives wrecked once more. We have a cyclone in Western Australia, and flash flooding all down the …

“We need kilometres of fencing”- repairs after an Australian bushfire Part 2

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The texts had reassured us all, anxiously listening for news of our friends’ latest bushfire threat. They dealt with one in February (the height of Summer fire season here in Australia), but this danger so early in Spring was scary… As I began to tell in Part One, I’m just back from helping with a tiny part of the massive clean-up: they battled all night to save their home, while thousands of acres burnt around them. Like, literally up to the verandah. I took this photo standing on their front deck: As you saw in Part One, destroyed sheds and landscape made for eerie surroundings. Plus the silence. Until the loud revving of a loaded truck, as an unknown farmer, his wife, and three kids from half an hour away arrived with a load of donated hay. His wife had even baked a chocolate cake. Just writing that down makes me cry; we were all fighting back tears as the team gathered to unload the hay and roll it into the [miraculously-saved] shed. This tough …

Surviving a bushfire in Australia takes courage & preparation #resilience

“Don’t send clothes”- The aftermath of an Australian bushfire Part 1

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Can you imagine seeing a wall of flames heading towards you as you stand on your front porch or driveway, or perhaps the entryway to your apartment block? What if it was coming from the left hand side? Or the rear? What would you do? This exact scenario has happened to my dear friends TWICE this year already, on their 300-acre beef cattle property, about 2.5 hours from where I live [comfortably] on the coast. I don’t know how they do it. In the 2002 bushfires, a fireball landed on the place, and they lost everything. Everything. Animals, sheds, machinery, trucks and tractors, fencing, and their home. Completely vanished in an inferno they could do nothing to stop, as they weren’t there. 17 years later, they were at home, and fought the blaze. ‘Fought’ is the correct term too. All night long, they doused with water, directed hoses, ran pumps (only solar and generator electricity available), and finished up emptying buckets by hand as the power failed. They’re living legends as far as I’m concerned. …

World Wednesday: Oprah is trending because we need her to

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So you must have seen her Golden Globes speech? If not, go Google it now, and we’ll wait for ya… ‘H’ and I watched it with tears in our eyes- both usually a bit cynical about all that ‘celebrity stuff’, yet absolutely moved by her sincerity, power, and integrity. Now I’m totally on the #Oprah2020 and #oprahforpresident movement! The world needs a drastic change of direction: environmentally, economically, even emotionally. I’ve spent years watching Oprah consistently expanding and exploring both heart and mind; she taught me so much about marginalised communities, and most importantly, about all the positive, grassroots campaigns quietly going on in neighbourhoods to counteract huge problems. Sure, sometimes she waffled on about the Top Ten fashion mistakes, but then she’d meet with the Dalai Lama and meditate for world peace, so she’s still got my loyalty. In my opinion (and of course this is my blog, so you’re getting it), Donald Trump represents the last, atrocious, dying breath of the ‘Old Way’- the exploitative, corporate, consumerist-based, Patriarchally-focussed, ego-driven, narcissistic, sexist, racist, homophobic …