Red Dawn

I was wondering on Tuesday night why it’s so long since I’ve written one of these emails.  It occurred to me that maybe I’ve been here too long.  That nothing is really new anymore, that my ability to see it as a foreigner has waned.  There have been other signs that this is the case.  I’m able to watch the news now without guffawing at how perochial it is; I understand the rules of rugby league;  this winter seemed long and cold.  

I went to bed on Tuesday wondering if I’d ever write another letter.  Maybe nothing remarkable would ever happen again.

I’ve mentioned before how most of the ‘lakes’ in Australia are in fact dry.  On Tuesday evening, just as I was thinking about how unremarkable this country has become, gale force winds picked up some dust from the Lake Eyre basin seven hundred miles west of here in northern South Australia.  (There is no state called Central Australia so the country’s dead red heart is made up of northern South Australia, southern Northern Territory and eastern West Australia.  No wonder we, sorry they, call it The Red Centre.)  Anyway, the dust picked up by the wind was then sucked 2 miles into the sky by an intense low-pressure system.  The phenomenom continued over the next 24 hours until millions of tonnes (think about that, millions of tonnes) of dust and dirt had been pulled up into the air.  

Dust storms are fairly frequent in the Red Centre and many of them blow into the country towns of western New South Wales.  In places like Mildura and Broken Hill it’s not that unusual to bring in your laundry dirtier than it went out (and trust me, the laundry doesn’t always go out clean out there).  But even by Australian standards, Tuesday night’s dust storm was a big one, the biggest in seventy years in fact.  At its peak it was picking up 140,000 tonnes of dirt an hour, was 250 miles wide and a thousand miles long.  That’s a big red Great Britain floating towards Sydney.  And me, with the windows just done.

Funnily enough, there was a strange smell in the air when I woke up on Wednesday morning.  More like plaster dust than anything and I wondered if next door were having some work done.  

‘Jesus’ said Oliver, who rarely says anything before 11am.  ‘Look at the sky’.

‘It’s a bushfire’ I said, knowingly and rolled over to wait for the alarm.  But if that was a bushfire it was bloody close so I opened my eyes again.  The sky was corner-to-corner orange.  Not quite the red you may have seen in the papers (every photo I saw had had a red filter applied), more a burnt sienna, a glowering and dangerous colour on a scale I’d not seen before.  

Looking closer, awake and somewhat nervy now, I could see it wasn’t the sky that was red, it was the air.  As if nitrogen were suddenly visible and not quite how you’d imagined it.  The radio calmed me down, 24-hour news already hyperbolic and asking people to ring in with their dust storm stories.  (‘Hi, this is Brenda from the northern rivers.  I was scared.  I turned on the radio.  Now it’s fine.’)  I turned off the lights and wondered around the apartment, looking at what orange light does to the world.  Now it was just dust it was strangely comforting, like being in a cocoon on Mars.

It didn’t last of course.  The orange light came not from the red of the dust but from how it defracted the dawn light (the same reason sunrise is often a little red, just normally on the horizon).  By the time I left for the airport the world was just a little frosted, as if I faintly pink fog had settled.  I was on my way to Perth for work and felt assured my flight would be on time.

Wrong.  

Maybe Surry Hills got off likely, maybe the three inches of dirt on my taxi should have been a sign.  I sat at the airport for six hours reading about what was going on outside.  A normal day in Sydney sees 20 micrograms of air pollution per cubic metre.  A bad bushfire might generate 500 micrograms.  On Wednesday concentration levels reached 15,400 micrograms.  Visibility at the airport was 400 metres and even when flights could leave, they had to wait for the planes and crew which had been turned away for the previous six hours.

I heard some people complaining about it.  Isn’t it awful, how annoying (see, I can hear whingeing now) and I just wanted to say: no, it’s wonderful!  What an incredible, remarkable country.  Where else would I ever have seen that?  It’s great living abroad.