The bushfires currently devastating Australia show no signs of letting up and when we received an email about an “author auction,” we thought it’d be beneficial to share it all with you, along with some other resources on where to donate and what you can do.
But first, I asked Catherine to share a few words. Catherine is one of our wonderful new reviewers and lives in Australia.
Catherine:
Amanda asked me to write something about the bushfires, but I hardly know what to say. I live in Melbourne, Victoria, a large city in one of the coolest and wettest parts of Australia, and right now the air is full of smoke. I can smell it even inside the house – when I go outside, it’s strong enough to make my breath catch and my eyes sting. There are no fires near me – the closest they have ever come was the one in Bundoora last week, which scared the hell out of us because Bundoora is a suburb, and not even in the outskirts. So I don’t know where the smoke is coming from today. It probably isn’t the fires in East Gippsland, around 300 kilometres away – the wind direction is wrong and poor old New Zealand is copping their smoke. It might be the fires in northern Victoria, though. A couple of weeks ago, we were even getting smoke from the bushfires north of Sydney, a full one thousand kilometres away. Or it could be smoke from the fires in Kangaroo Island, 900km to our west. Basically, there are fires in every direction, every state of Australia.
It’s hard to convey the scale of the devastation. Thousands of homes lost. Relatively few human deaths so far, though even one is enough to make this a tragedy. Millions of animals killed, though, and there is talk about species going extinct as a result of the fires.
Koalas are at particular risk, as their numbers were already dangerously low, and some of the earliest fires were in areas with big koala populations. And more than 12 million acres of land have burned – we are told to expect food prices to go up, because a lot of that land is farmland – and the environmental impact is devastating. Rainforests are burning that have never burned before, and they cannot be restored.
And this is just the start of January. In my state, the big bushfires don’t usually get going until February, so the fact that so much has already burned is pretty terrifying. There is a lot of dry weather ahead of us before we hit the rainy months. In New South Wales, the bushfires have been going since September – that’s the first month of spring for us.
It really is beyond imagining. I feel very, very lucky that for me it really is just about the smoke and the air quality, and that I don’t have the kind of health issues that make this more than unpleasant. I do have family living in country Victoria- my brother in law is a volunteer firefighter with the CFA, as so many are- but ‘luckily’ those areas mostly burned in previous seasons, so they are presently safe.
I wish we had a government that cared to do something about this. I wish we hadn’t been trained by the media and the government to view climate change as a political issue rather than a scientific one. So many people have been so generous and I wish there was no need for it.
I fear for the future.
…
If you want to help, Catherine suggests this link of resources and, if you’re a crafter, here’s another way to get involved.
For the author auction, there’s a detailed thread explaining how it’ll all work here:
So, about this book community auction for #AustraliaOnFire. (Thread incoming.) A fortnight ago @NovaWeetman said “Let’s do something” and we decided on a gesture for those who stand between us and the fires day after day and will continue to do so this long, desperate summer. 1/
— Emily Gale (@EmilyGale) January 4, 2020
The auction will be happening on Twitter, so if you don’t have an account, you may not be able to participate. The auction will last for about a week and will start/end on Australian time (AEST).
A website was also created to explain how things work. After browsing the hashtag for the auction there are a variety of items to bid on: books, crochet projects, artwork, video editing services, etc.
Have more suggestions? Link them below!
Thank you for posting.
Thanks, Amanda and Sarah, for doing this. I am ashamed to say that I was so discombobulated yesterday that I forgot to mention the fires to the south of us, in Tasmania… which is where it turns out the smoke was actually coming from this time around…
Also, my sister-in-law, who is a naturalist and science writer and all-round amazing person, created a list of ways people could help, specifically focused on charities that rehabilitate injured wildlife, which may be of interest to some of you. (There are no photos of injured animals at this link, because the goal is to get people to help, not traumatise them.)
I hope my fellow Australians reading this are doing OK.
Something to think about- most of the rural/ regional firefighters in Australia are volunteers. We don’t have the population numbers in those areas to justify funding professional full time fire services. Why does this matter? It means their equipment is not always as up to date as the urban fire recipes (that is a lot of the fundraising) and it means that these groups have lives that are on hold. If they are fighting fires they aren’t working. When they have been fighting for weeks and months, sometimes they no longer have jobs. And extra bonus issue, if they are under 55 and unemployed (which is very possible in regional area) they still have to fulfil job hunting expectations to get their unemployment payments.
This is a significant difference to wildfire fire fighting in the USA, where the pay at least is pretty good for the risk and the equipment used for wildfires at least is designed for those conditions.
Plus, it’s peak holiday season here, and a lot of the places burning are popular vacation spots so there are a lot of people in unfamiliar areas with low awareness of what to do
Thank you so much for this post, it’s so wonderful to see everyone banding together. I’m also pulling together a charity anthology with Australian authors. Submissions close in a week and all details are here:
https://nicolefieldwrites.wordpress.com/2020/01/06/australiaburns-stories-of-australia-and-hope-a-cfa-charity-anthology/
Great thread. Canberra has been choking on smoke for the last month, but I can’t really complain as we still have our house and community.
Long term, no matter where you are, please vote for people and parties who have plans to address the climate emergency. And if you can afford to, please come Down Under to visit!
Absolutely in agreement with all of the above, especially the problems of requiring a volunteer firefighting force to do that work for months on end without pay or proper respite. I have been writing angry blog posts and fierce letters to politicians, and am definitely planning some weekends away in fire-affected regions after the bushfire season is over. Because the next election is a long way away (and I still haven’t recovered from the last one), and since our government refuses to do its job properly, I suspect one of the most useful things I can do is spend money in areas that have been affected and need those tourist dollars.
I have heard, though I don’t have a link, that for $22,000 you can have an hour of training with Thor.
Chris Hemsworth and his wife have already donated $1 million to relief efforts. But you can probably google this particular auction (hopefully it’s still going on).