How Does a Nation Adapt to Its Own Murder?

BRUNY ISLAND, Australia — The name of the future is Australia.

The Dunns Road Fire crowned a pine forrest in
Near Maragle, New South Wales, on Jan. 10.

These words come from it, and they may be your tomorrow: P2 masks, evacuation orders, climate refugees, ocher skies, warning sirens, ember storms, blood suns, fear, air purifiers and communities reduced to third-world camps.

Billions of dead animals and birds bloating and rotting. Hundreds of Indigenous cultural and spiritual sites damaged or destroyed by bush fires, so many black Notre Dames — the physical expression of Indigenous Australians’ spiritual connection to the land severed, a final violence after centuries of dispossession.

Everywhere there is a brittle grief, and it may be as much for what is coming as for what is gone.

The dairy farmer Farran Terlich, whose properties in the South Coast were razed in a firestorm that killed two of his friends, described the blaze as “a raging ocean.” “These communities are destroyed across the board,” he said, “and most people are running dead.”

Dead, too, is a way of life.

Read the story from The NewYork Times by Richard Flanagan - “How Does a Nation Adapt to Its Own Murder?”