the drought

In arriving to Australia, we find ourselves disconnected, not only because I’m a foreigner and Geoff hasn’t been home for three years, but because we haven’t shared in the “communitas” of sorts that is born of surviving and coping with the harsh drought and fires in recent months. When we turned up here, the rain started, the cool temperatures followed, and we haven’t known a typical day of the 2007 summer in Oz. I found the words of Michael Leunig (brilliant Australian cartoonist and satirist) below compelling, giving the slightest window of empathy for the weather and the times:

“The drought is such a distinctive and extreme natural experience for the land and its creatures: all powerful, utterly uncompromising and absolutely uncontrollable. Gradually you must submit to the facts, yet paradoxically you enter gradually into a mild hallucination as you go about your days. A type of natural weirdness prevails and you give over to this and become part of it. When living close to the earth, drought induces a kind of trance – a kind of letting-go and a brokennenss. You let go of many things: garden plants, various hopes about life itself, and most of all, your remnant and pathetically human notions of normality or perfection – they wither and die in the heat. Good riddance.”