Vikki Campion: Australia was a ‘sunburnt country’ long before we blamed climate change

Dorothea Mackellar missed her “sunburnt country”, her “ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains” – not “naturally airconditioned Australia”, writes Vikki Campion.

It’s not “naturally airconditioned Australia” that Gunnedah’s homesick poet Dorothea Mackellar wrote about in 1904, it was her “sunburnt country”, her “ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains”.

My Country was not a nation where it remained an ideal ambient 24C and delicately rained every seven days to keep the garden green, but “her pitiless blue sky, when sick at heart, around us, we see the cattle die”. In the late 1800s near Gunnedah, three days over 35C wasn’t a climate-change-induced heatwave but life.

It had to get to over 47.7C to even make mention on the front page.

In 1904, there was a heatwave in Gunnedah, where the mercury reached 42.8C on December 29, 46.1C on December 30 and 45C on December 31.

In 1908, when My Country was first published, winter dropped to -3.9C in July, and summer temperatures soared to 42.8C on December 31.

Dust rises in a drought-affected paddock containing a failed wheat crop on the outskirts of the north-western New South Wales town of Gunnedah – once the home of poet Dorothea Mackellar. Australia was a “sunburnt country” before we blamed climate change. Picture: David Gray/Getty Images

To read My Country with Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen’s 2024 eyes would be to read about climate-change-induced heatwaves, droughts and floods.

In our ever-growing dictionary of doublespeak emanating from foreign-owned developers, energy companies and politicians like Mr Bowen who call tonnes of steel, lubricated with oil on deforested mountain tops “farms” and landfills of solar panels “renewable”, now if it is over 35C it’s a blackout-inducing “heatwave”, and of course, “renewables are reliable”.

Dorothea Mackellar.

As early Australians wrote of the weather, you had to have a particular type of hunger for risk to run your business on it, as we intend to run our whole economy on it now.

Tenterfield, about a four-hour drive from Ms Mackellar’s town in northern NSW, in a blackout, could not hear airconditioned politicians crow about the reliability of wind and solar in question time this week.

The 2000-odd people without power couldn’t argue with them or point to the NSW spot price as it leapt to $17,499.89 per MWh, importing power from Queensland and Victoria, as wind and solar struggled to eke out a mere 13 per cent of the power that energy leaders say they have built in NSW.

Shopkeepers and workers sat outside their dark shops on the main street as Mr Bowen claimed there had been the “biggest fall in energy prices in Australian history” and that the emphasis on renewables would drop prices by 13 per cent”.

A family in Broken Hill had to endure electricity blackouts. Picture: Richard Dobson

At least if they are in blackout, like Riverina towns on Thursday and Gulgong, in Central West NSW, surrounded by wind and solar factories, which has suffered three major blackouts, including 18 hours, since October, they don’t have to listen to Mr Bowen in Question Time. These towns, like Broken Hill earlier this year, are the canary in the coal mine for Sydney, which the Minns and Albanese governments are desperate to shield from blackouts.

As soon as someone has to go to the bathroom in a lift thanks to a blackout power system on a wind and solar diet, the subsidy mine will shut down.

Sydneysiders will not accept that.

Ausgrid, which supplies energy to four million people on the east coast, has gone a step further then even Mr Bowen, advertising a $124,842 a year “Community Resilience Liason” to help them “embark on our exciting transformation journey”, whose primary role will be to “plan for and respond to unplanned electricity outages from climate-related and other events” and to “support the development and delivery of blackout planning and preparedness communications”.

If wind and solar factories are so reliable that we should underwrite them, subsidise them to billions of dollars and, in our own homes, switch our cooking, heating and transport to electricity, then why is the largest energy distributor hiring spinners whose sole job is blackout prepping?

One swallow does not make a spring, and a couple of days over 35C is not a heatwave, yet in 2024, authorities smashed a publicity blitz advising all to spray ourselves with water and sit in front of a fan.

The year before Mackellar was born, it was reported as being 47.7C in the shade, and the heat only made the Evening News when cattle died along the river banks trying to get a drink.

Her poem, which appeared in the Sydney Mail under the title Core of my Heart is Australia’s pre-eminent poem not because it described breezy summer afternoons and mild winters, but because it documented our extremes – “the wide brown land for me”.

PARLIAMENT LOSES STAR PERFORMERS WHILE DUDS RISE TO TOP

It’s not talent, drive, or even hard work that crowns the kings, as the better soldiers leave parliament for good.

If it were, it would be a self-described “moderate” Bill Shorten in the Lodge and Labor might stand a chance of a second term of majority government.

If it were, the Liberal Party leadership would have done everything to fight the archers in the Apple Isle to keep the former Warrant Officer Class One – who served two decades in the Royal Australian Corps of Signals – Gavin Pearce, in the western Tasmanian seat of Braddon.

If it were, the National Party leadership would have harnessed the nuclear power of Dr David Gillespie in Lyne instead of burying his intellectual heft.

Gavin Pearce, Bill Shorten and David Gillespie.

Voices come through softer from opposition and backbenches, but that does not mean they are not worth the microphone.

On the battlefield, capacity is determined by how you operate under fire and, under political
fire, some of our best soldiers were never properly recognised for their skill.

If gems in that building were graded on clarity, charisma, kindness and common sense, then Mr Pearce, a patriot of convict heritage, would have the name recognition of Senator Lidia Thorpe for honouring our national flag instead of her fame for degrading it.

Bill Shorten’s ability to express vision and values in a sentence that stirs hundreds of applauding people across the political divide to their feet would be seen as just as powerful a weapon as any of Albo’s “tory-fighting” verbal grenades.

And when Dr Gillespie offered his warning on the path to energy poverty Australia began careening down, the Coalition would not have put its hands over its ears and signed up to an election-defeating Net Zero plan.

Many gems leave politics neither wanting nor given the recognition they deserve, and the question for these three is not if their lives will be worse off no longer making that public service sacrifice, but will ours.

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