‘It’s like the apocalypse out there.’ How many times I heard it said in the summer, in the bushfire season. The exclamatory tone of the early months made way for weariness in January, and desperate humour by early autumn as floods, brown rain, the COVID-19 virus and the great toilet paper crisis of the first weeks of March replaced drought and fire.

Fires are already burning outside Brisbane in early September when I get there for the writers festival. The air is hazy and the temperature is in the low thirties, and I feel a lurch of dislocation. It’s not only that the air seems weird and thick, and that I feel uneasy, but also that local people don’t comment on it until asked. Yeah, they say, it’s fires burning, coastal scrubland, unusual, and, Yeah, it is hot. They’re ‘alert but not alarmed’. On social media there are images of bone-dry, smoke-haze sepia landscapes, but they’re not enough to hold the country’s attention, which shifts to New South Wales, a state that seems to be immolating. There is no end in sight and no control. No-one knows what will happen. Sydney fills with smoke and everyone wants the best air mask. The prime minister is missing, then in New York it is said, helping to expedite a real estate deal or the coming of the rapture, or so people speculate.