This has been the worst week for Australia with bushfires raging from Adelaide through north east Victoria up into the snowy mountains and south coast of New South Wales.

We were holidaying with at a friend’s house in the south coast on New Years Eve when fires ringed the small towns around Jarvis Bay. The sky filled with smoke and gradually became an eerie yellow. By two o’clock it was grey and by three it was dark as night and all the street lights had come on.

 We watched the news anxiously to see how close the fires were but it created even more anxiety so we got busy filling buckets with water and packing bags ready to evacuate. Then there was nothing to do but wait. We brought out the champagne early, watched movies on TV and ate a subdued dinner. The local fireworks had been cancelled thank goodness but millions of dollars worth of fireworks exploded at midnight in Sydney.

I thought of how we had come to this point. We left our beautiful mudbrick and timber house we built by hand in north east Victoria at the tail end of a ten year drought when the trees were dying and the dams drying up. There had been bushfires in the north east for three consecutive summers which drew closer to our locality each year. It was time to go while we could. We gave away our goats and chickens, sold our house and moved into the township of Mansfield so our daughter could continue her schooling.

I was visiting a friend in Melbourne around that time and she said that the CSIRO had released a climate prediction saying all of Victoria right up to Sydney would burn, that cyclones and floods would be more severe and impact the north of Australia as far south of Brisbane.

That left northern New South Wales. So ten years ago we moved north to the semi tropics a land of big rivers, long ocean beaches and rain in summer.

Then came the flood of 2017 in the aftermath of Cyclone Debbie when my papermaking studio was flooded. We moved all my remaining studio back to our home by the beach and I began to make art about climate change.

Fast forward to this week where we evacuated from a fire zone. Driving through smoke in Nowra with the car lights on, our car covered in sooty ash from the previous two days. With low visibility and a thick smoke haze in many parts of the first days journey, it felt like a journey into the danger zone, not away from it.

Listening to the ABC news as we drove and checking the fires near you app. The severest warnings in place and a state of emergency called. The next day we drove north home through the already fire ravaged landscape around Port Macquarie and Little Italy past road signs that had melted in the extreme fire heat. It was a truly sobering experience.

Now on Saturday night the fires gather ever closer to the north east of Victoria again. I’m so glad we do not have to go through that high alert anxiety. I think of all those places in the mountains, of idyllic hamlets hit by drought and now threatened by fire. It is a scenario that defies all climate change skeptics.

I hope this is the tipping point, that we as a species can change our way of interacting with the planet. It is not only unsustainable but also cruel. So many millions of animals have perished in one week. We are part of a whole infrastructure, a precious body that is the earth and we its children. We must look after it in whatever way we can.