Making sense of Australia’s bushfire crisis means asking hard questions – and listening to the answers

Bushfires plunder lives and landscapes in myriad ways, but they often start the same way. A bright morning suddenly turns to night. Ash flutters down from the sky, propelled ahead of the roaring fire front. An awful red glow slinks over the horizon.

When I awoke in the NSW south coast town of Bermagui on the last day of 2019, I should have twigged straight away. At 8am the sky was a gruesome orange-black, the surrounding bush freakishly quiet. Our mobile phones had no signal. Outside, my car was coated in soot.

We knew fires were burning more than 100km up the coast at Batemans Bay, but Bermagui had seemed a safe distance away. Suddenly, it wasn’t.

Read the story from The Conversation - “Making sense of Australia’s bushfire crisis means asking hard questions – and listening to the answers.” 

Can art put us in touch with our feelings about climate change?

What does climate change look like in Australia? Are we already seeing our landscapes shift before our eyes without even realising it?

James Gleeson’s Delenda est Carthago offers
 a striking visualisation of a collapsing civilisation.

Perhaps thought-provoking art can help us come to terms with our changing world, by finding new ways to engage, inform and hopefully inspire action. For hasn’t art always been the bridge between the head and the heart?

With that aim, the ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE 2017 festival, organised by CLIMARTE, features 30 specially curated exhibitions running from April 19 to May 14 in galleries across Melbourne and regional Victoria, following on from their previous award-winning festival in 2015.

Read the piece on The Conversation - “Can art put us in touch with our feelings about climate change?”