Let's talk about the weather.
In 2004 I worked in a position that had me living in a small country town in NSW and travelling around a lot to a bunch of even smaller country towns to work in their tiny schools. I was eighteen at the time and naive as fuck, and the country was in the grip of the harshest drought in decades.
To a country like this, weather is not just weather.
I have been to towns where you can fill a glass of water from the tap and watch the sediment settle to the bottom, because the town dams are below 5% and sucking up mostly dirt. Where you can't get clean, ever, not really clean, because the shower leaves a layer of grit on your skin and "hard water" actually means "just like H2O only crunchy".
I have met kids - not infants, but four and five year old children, who have never seen it rain. Rain is a TV thing, a book thing, as foreign as magic or the Queen. Something far away.
I have been to towns where there are suicide hotline posters in every store, and the ones who use them are the men aged 45+. The men who have sunk their lives and health and ambitions into land that is now little more than desert, into crops that flat-out won't grow or stock that is starving. And they can't afford to keep the stock, but nobody's buying because everybody's in the same boat and the market is so glutted some places are charging the farmers to take the cattle off their hands.
I have seen these men and women go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt, throw literally every last resource they have, into getting just one more year. One more year that they plough and plant and pray for just one day of rain. Because that one day of rain could make the difference between scraping by for the next year, or losing everything.
And then it doesn't rain.
And then the ground dries out and the nutrients leech away and the top soil sets into a crust and that crust hardens and solidifies over a couple of years. And then it does rain, and the rain runs right the fuck off because the ground has forgotten how to absorb it. And if there's a lot of rain, you get floods. And then the rain stops and the sun come out and the water goes away and you're back where you started, but with flood damage and a moldy smell. And the dams are full or at least have water in them, but they're contaminated with algae or oil.
Fucking weather.
To a country like this, weather is not just weather.
I have been to towns where you can fill a glass of water from the tap and watch the sediment settle to the bottom, because the town dams are below 5% and sucking up mostly dirt. Where you can't get clean, ever, not really clean, because the shower leaves a layer of grit on your skin and "hard water" actually means "just like H2O only crunchy".
I have met kids - not infants, but four and five year old children, who have never seen it rain. Rain is a TV thing, a book thing, as foreign as magic or the Queen. Something far away.
I have been to towns where there are suicide hotline posters in every store, and the ones who use them are the men aged 45+. The men who have sunk their lives and health and ambitions into land that is now little more than desert, into crops that flat-out won't grow or stock that is starving. And they can't afford to keep the stock, but nobody's buying because everybody's in the same boat and the market is so glutted some places are charging the farmers to take the cattle off their hands.
I have seen these men and women go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt, throw literally every last resource they have, into getting just one more year. One more year that they plough and plant and pray for just one day of rain. Because that one day of rain could make the difference between scraping by for the next year, or losing everything.
And then it doesn't rain.
And then the ground dries out and the nutrients leech away and the top soil sets into a crust and that crust hardens and solidifies over a couple of years. And then it does rain, and the rain runs right the fuck off because the ground has forgotten how to absorb it. And if there's a lot of rain, you get floods. And then the rain stops and the sun come out and the water goes away and you're back where you started, but with flood damage and a moldy smell. And the dams are full or at least have water in them, but they're contaminated with algae or oil.
Fucking weather.