The big wet
I don’t live in the tropics, so I don’t have a wet season – or I used not to. While it doesn’t seem as if it’s stopped raining for more than a day this summer, my records tell me I actually had one stretch of four rainless days in January. But the memory’s been washed away.
Living on the side of a mountain, I can’t be flooded out in the way the folk near the big rivers are currently – and recurrently – copping. But as I don my gumboots to slosh across the ‘lawn’ and attempt to divert the water that perpetually runs down the hillside above my house and oozes from any cutting, turning steps into waterfalls and disdaining to be contained by my drains – I can’t say I feel high and dry.
Even on the very mountaintop the ground is so saturated that water is running out of it. The dirt tracks are being eroded, their clay slopes are treacherous, their dips, filled with the washed-down silt, are churned-up mud traps, the pot holes have become small deep lakes. I have become used to slowly sliding my way out in my little 4WD, to the swishing sound of my watery progress that is more like boating than driving.
After every vehicle passage I must walk along my track and try to divert the latest run-off to a less damaging course, with my hoe. I don’t own any machinery for road shaping or fixing, although a bobcat has been my Christmas wish for years. Somehow I keep getting hand cream instead.
In 30 years I’ve never had water constantly coming across the track in so many places, long after the actual rain; I can’t imagine where it is all coming from unless hitherto unknown springs are full, and forcing their way out to the surface. The overflow from my springfed double dam has been running white water over the rocks as it heads downhill – I have seen that before after big storms, but not for so long a period. It is like having a creek on my mountain, which I’d love – except it would be unnatural – and that is what is happening now.
All over the world, the most extreme weather events are daily reported. They are highly unnatural disasters in scale and frequency, caused by global warming from our own actions – once unwitting, now fully conscious. Why isn’t our government joining the dots?
Perhaps we won’t demand real steps to avert a frightful future unless we get more frightened.
How about halving the time allotted to sport on the nightly news and giving us a global warming effects update, worldwide?
The facts of this rapidly escalating reality should scare even politicians into action.
Postscript, 15 years since this Bush Telegraph piece: But it hasn’t! Our governments still keep supporting and increasing our massive coal exports to be burnt elsewhere to fuel global warming, using the drug dealers’ defence that if we don’t do it, someone else will. Australia is shamefully culpable, as the drowning Pacific islands keep telling us.
Meanwhile, seemingly endless rain has been falling now for weeks…