In case you’ve not read it, or haven’t picked up a Peter Carey novel since high school, his first novel Bliss has a simple and compelling premise. A successful advertising executive named Harry Joy has a heart attack and is resuscitated, but during his recovery, he realises that his life is a horror show.
His wife is having an affair with his business partner, their son is dealing drugs to his addict sister in return for sex and so on. He can’t tell whether he’s just never noticed how grotesque his life has actually been, or whether he’s straight-up died and gone to Hell and everything he’s now seeing is part of an exquisitely perfect torture.
In a particularly galling example of life imitating art, this is what every Australian has been experiencing over the summer: have things abruptly gotten horrifying in 2019-20 and we just didn’t notice it coming, or are we all in the geographically-specific afterlife and this is all a terrifyingly brilliant way to punish us?
Traditionally in Australia, the summer has been the time when the nation clocks off and relaxes. It’s holiday time, when our thoughts turn lightly to cricket and beaches and the Hottest 100 because historically no-one should ever expect an Australian to be seriously on deck between Christmas Eve and the Australia Day long weekend. At least, not without a stonking great hangover.
Meanwhile, we’d been warned that our bushfire seasons were getting gradually worse and that we were heading for a catastrophe. 10 years ago the CSIRO predicted the effects of climate change would be obvious by 2020. And 18 months ago former fire chiefs petitioned Prime Minister Scott Morrison to explain that the combination of drought, climate change, seasonal variation and funding cuts to rural fire services were going to combine to create the worst fire risk the country had ever seen. The PM, and his relevant ministers, never took that meeting.
“2020 has turned our summers from the envy of the world to 24-hour Watch And Act alerts”
This season, it all happened. The fires started in September 2019 and weren’t completely extinguished until March 2020. An unimaginable 18.6 million hectares burned, with 2,779 homes destroyed and over 3,000 other buildings incinerated. 34 people lost their lives, as did over a billion animals. At least two species are now thought extinct. The fire fronts were so huge that they created their own weather systems, including the horrifying “dry lightning” which started new fires with no rain to extinguish them.
I’ll say that again: The fires. Created. Their own. Weather systems. That’s futuristic sci-fi apocalypse stuff, not something happening to craft brewers and boutique owners in small country towns, who fled from Sydney rents only to find themselves fleeing from firenadoes instead.
Next bushfire season – which, let’s be clear, officially starts in a few months – the first smell of woodsmoke is going to take everyone back to the terrible time when the Sydney basin had the planet’s least breathable air for weeks at a time, and half of Victoria was swathed in smoke.
And if that wasn’t destructive enough to our sense of ourselves, it might well have marked the end of summer’s other great escapist pleasure: music festivals.
Laneway Festival gamely struggled on around the capitals, despite air quality playing havoc with the singing – and hell, breathing – of many artists. That might have been the last touring festival we get.
Part of the reason is that festivals have increasingly moved out of the cities and into cool, vibe-filled regional locations since the death of Big Day Out. It seemed like a great idea – until the Falls Festival at Lorne was forced to shut down after one day and evacuate everyone in case a fire front changed direction and ended up trapping thousands of New Year’s revellers in a valley from which they couldn’t escape.
As the Australian summer gets longer and drier, that’s a factor which more and more festivals will have to consider. And that was before the entire arts industry was shut down after the first case of COVID-19 was reported from Golden Plains in Meredith – even despite the attendee not feeling unwell during the festival.
And then the dominoes fell.
Download was canned a week out. So was the Melbourne Grand Prix on the day it was meant to begin, as was its related Robbie Williams headline concert. The Melbourne Comedy Festival was pulled. The final week of the Adelaide Festival became a ghost calendar, and Bluesfest cancelled when it was clear that none of their headliners would be getting on a plane at Easter. The one glimmer of hope was Splendour In The Grass, which optimistically rescheduled for October when it was clear that the traditional July event wasn’t going to happen. Will things be normal by then? Who wants to take a guess at this point?
“That’s futuristic sci-fi apocalypse stuff, not something happening to craft brewers and boutique owners”
So 2020 has turned our summers from the envy of the world to 24-hour Watch And Act alerts, and our season of great public events became poisoned with the certainty that if the flames didn’t destroy us, the virus will.
Meanwhile, our arts and entertainment industries are now wondering how they’d survive a winter of self-isolation from coronavirus before the warmer weather heralds our next bushfire season and this weird dance begins anew.
Will there even still be festivals once we’re allowed to meet in groups greater than two again? If everyone has to avoid public gatherings for the foreseeable future, there’s a question mark over whether we’re even still going to have live venues once things return to… honestly, “normal” doesn’t feel like the right word here.
In Bliss, Harry eventually opted out and headed for the bush. It seems like good advice. We don’t even have that option any more.