Under a black felt hat my sweet-faced niece stood to one side of the climate strike and quietly took in the surging crowd bristling with placards. A little older than the school strikers, at their age Lucy had also missed school because of climate. Her primary school burned to the ground in the Black Saturday fires whose 10^th anniversary we observed last month. She lost her home, neighbours, her dog—everything but one teddybear she called Derrida.

On the cusp of adolescence the underpinning of Lucy’s emotional infrastructure was blasted to smithereens. My little niece has since valiantly navigated the rocky road to adulthood against the blight of PTSD. It is hard to imagine the trauma. Her home filling with insulation fumes as the flames licked the ceiling. Her mother hosing them down, standing on the table she and her little sister cowered under, shrieking above the deafening roar, ‘You Are Not Taking my Children’. The wind change that meant they could get out without incinerating—tested by their Dad’s palm against a windowpane—took out more than 20 people on the ridge above.