OPINION
Funny thing, history. Most of the time it’s only hindsight that shows us the juicy bits, that it was this moment or that on which some major sociopolitical shift or other pivoted. But just occasionally it’s in that very moment, as it’s happening, the air feels ripe with it.
Ripe, or smoky.
Recently I was in Sydney for work. From the window of my train carriage, I looked out across that iconic harbour, the view that’s usually so triumphant, and gaped in dismay at the weird and baneful bushfire fog that subsumed it. At the same time, through my smartphone earbuds, a politician guffawed along with a talk-back radio host about the “Orwellian language” of climate emergency.
It felt like the undertow of historic shift to me, though it may have been some asthma.
Parenthood can sometimes feel like history-making in miniature and close-up. We only know we’re blowing or nailing it with hindsight, if ever at all.
Parenthood can sometimes feel like history-making in miniature and close-up. We only know we’re blowing or nailing it with hindsight, if ever at all. But some little eras, some moments and opportunities feel riper than others.
Our daughter is ten, going on seventeen, and had told me she wanted to join me on a climate action demo a week or so earlier.
I like to think it was concern over Australia’s slack response to the gathering crisis plus (maybe) the chance to bond with her old man that was behind it, but it could have been the day off school.
At the State Library meeting point, we ran the petition-and-pamphleteer gauntlet and found a spot on the steps. I shunted my daughter in front of me, making sure she had a view through the mini-throng to the megaphone-wielding uni student who, despite her own diminutive size, made a righteous noise telling us why we were there and taking us through a few call-response chants.
“What do you think of it so far?” I asked our girl with a nudge.
She looked up at me with a mischievous grin.
“Bo-ring,” she replied, but the glint in her hazel eyes told a different story.
Soon we were on the march up Melbourne’s Swanston Street, placards waving, voices young and old rising, and if “One struggle, one fight/ Climate justice, indigenous rights” proved a syllable too far, “Oceans are rising/ No more compromising” quickly gained some traction and a steady rhythm. Suddenly struck by the pregnancy of the moment, I glanced down at my daughter, face etched with earnest intent as she squealed,
“No more compro-MISING!”
I glanced down at my daughter, face etched with earnest intent as she squealed, “No more compro-MISING!”
Walking beside her, I pondered how very long this compromising, this dismal prevarication had been going on. It must have been the mid-eighties when I first heard about the “greenhouse effect” from my year nine geography teacher. It was up to us lot, he said, to make a difference. We never did listen to bug-eyed Mr Meyer in his bristling tweed jacket.
The MCs who were leading the sit-down at the Parliament House on that day of climate action are the same age I was back then, magnificent in their teenage fury (“If not now, WHEN?”), genuinely appalled that their leaders are refusing to draw a link between bushfire and climate change, that they’ve let this tipping point be reached, sold out this generation and those to come, and are allowing them to carry the can for their own denial and inaction.
“Do you fancy doing that one day?” I asked my daughter, with a nod towards the speaker who was waxing irate and inspirational into the microphone.
She shrugged a dunno.
Again, the singularity of this moment in time hit me. Being on the cusp of change. Not just the climate emergency, or the systemic change that might arrest it, but the seismic shift that her adolescence might bring - something we’ll have even less control over, I guess.
On the journey home, she chatted about Greta, extinctions, recycling. I made a silent vow not to force this. If this experience ignited something in her, if she wants to keep up with the climate action, come along to more events like this with me, even talk our son into joining us down the track, that’s great.
If not, that’s fine, too. You can take a child to a demo, but you can’t make her revolt.
The next day I couldn’t resist sending a photo of her holding our protest-placard to my stepfather, her self-styled “Grumpy Grandad”, back in the UK. His attitude to Extinction Rebellion might be summed up with a “meh”.
“How many flights have you taken this year?” he asked me, by way of curt response.
He’s right, of course, the cynical old smartarse. I didn’t travel to Sydney last week by electric car or hang-glider. When a paying gig calls, I’ve been too quick to drop my principles and do whatever it takes.
Looking out over the choking harbour, as I listened to the politician and radio host smugly decrying a movement that is only going to get bigger, and I remembered the look on my daughter’s face as she chanted about the end of compromise, I saw that was something else that might just need to change.
Funny thing, history. Staying on the right side of it can take some concentration and some effort.
