My Word

The Days After

Things will never be the same after losing his mother, but the rhythms of life carry Vin Maskell forward through the days, months, years since.

Mum died 29 years ago. November 1993. I don’t remember – or perhaps I refuse to remember – the exact date. I remember Dad ringing me. That was odd in itself – Mum was the talker of the two. Dad was never one for lengthy phone calls and this call was no different. What more could he say than what had to be said? He had five children to ring, and Mum’s several siblings, and friends and colleagues, and the funeral director, and the church and…

I remember sitting on the couch in the lounge room after the phone call. Not necessarily shocked – Mum had undergone heart surgery two months earlier. Not crying. But shaken, of course. Adrift.

I told my wife Julie, whose father had died only weeks before. We told our children, three-year-old Hannah and 13-month-old Jesse. What would they make of it? What would I make of it?

The funeral was on a hot December day, but it was cooler inside the suburban church. Symbolic, perhaps? There were three priests at the altar (three!). At Dad’s request – more a signal than a spoken directive – I took communion, even though I’d abandoned religion more than 10 years before: now was not the time to worry about my own beliefs. Some of my siblings joined me in the communion queue.

A seeming stranger read the eulogy, turning over the stapled pages of Mum’s life story. Born in the Depression. Seven siblings. One of four daughters of a cranky self-employed engineer. Married to the only child of a horse-trainer. Six children. Another two stillborn. President of the primary school mothers’ club for a year or two. Moved the family with her husband’s work: Melbourne, then Geelong, then back to Melbourne, then Geelong again. An overseas holiday with a sister, cut short by tragedy. A beach house near the Great Ocean Road.

The stranger reading the basic facts of Mum’s 65 years was a long-time friend of my parents, but I couldn’t place him. Neither his face nor his voice were familiar. You can never know your parents as well as they know you. They have lives and friends and history, separate from parenting.

Outside the church, after the service, the heat was sapping and the glare was blinding. The concrete of the church’s forecourt left us exposed. Julie’s eldest sister had taken Jesse for a long walk during the funeral mass. Our blond son was now asleep, and a little sunburned, in his stroller.

There was shade at the cemetery, a graveyard bordered by a local footy ground and my childhood primary school. I remember the large pile of soil – probably heavy clay – near the gravesite, and wishing there were shovels, wishing I could do something physical, something active, something practical rather than standing calmly. Funerals are so restrained, dignified. The passivity is stifling.

Was there afternoon tea at the church hall after the burial? Probably. Of course there would have been. That’s when people start to relax, to tell stories, to laugh a little. But I can’t picture it. Still, I remember not quite wanting to go home. Home was only an hour up the highway, but I wasn’t ready for the drive. I knew we couldn’t return to the lives we led before the day Dad rang.

So we visited our friends Bill and Carol. In the shade of their garden they offered cool drinks, snacks and conversation. The children stretched their little legs and sat on our laps. They no longer had to contend with a forest of adults, and neither did I.

Bill and Carol, always quiet and gentle, provided solace at the end of a day, the end of a week of not just loss and grief but of newness: of the new experience of being motherless.

But, of course, we had to leave. We had to go home. We had to go back. The hot sun was setting but it would rise again. The highway traffic was thinning but life would be busy again. Nappies to change, washing to hang, meals to cook, people to love.

And a father to call from time to time.

Mum died 29 years ago. I don’t remember the exact date.

Vin Maskell is a regular contributor to The Big Issue and the editor of music memoir site stereostories.com and sport site scoreboardpressure.com.

Col McElwaine

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$how Us the Money

A stack of 50 trillion dollar bills would reach into space. It’s an almost inconceivable sum. But in terms of saving the planet, it’s a small price to pay.

by Eve Livingston Eve Livingston is a freelance journalist based in Scotland. She writes and speaks about politics, social affairs and inequalities for a number of publications and broadcasters.

@eve_rebecca

C

an you picture 50 trillion dollars? Fifty trillion dollar bills stacked one on top of each other would easily reach into space. Laid out, they would cover nearly 520,000 square kilometres, almost the

size of France.

Considered in the abstract like this, US$50 trillion is an incomprehensible sum of money. But what if you were told it was also the total price of tackling climate change globally – and saving the planet?

Estimates as to this figure vary, depending on various factors, and the true picture of climate economics is more complex than a single headline figure, because different interventions can lead to positive and negative economic impacts in the medium and longer term. But attempts to put a price on saving the planet can prove useful for climate activists and economists alike – not least because they overwhelmingly demonstrate that the costs of inaction would be far greater.

A source of debate

While various organisations and groups have worked to stamp a price on tackling climate change, they have largely failed to reach consensus for a number of reasons. Not all agree on what is meant in the first place by saving the planet: is it a case of avoiding the worst effects of climate change or of turning around our fortunes completely? And even fewer agree on the specific actions required and how they should be prioritised.

Morgan Stanley, most commonly associated with the $50 trillion figure which came from its 2019 report Decarbonization: The Race to Zero Emissions, identifies specific areas of investment and attaches price tags to each: renewables; electric vehicles; carbon capture; hydrogen production and biofuels. But others include in their analyses the protection of biodiversity, improved infrastructure to protect against extreme weather, the introduction of carbon taxes on business, and any number of other actions. Estimates therefore vary between around $300 billion and $100 trillion, and tend to refer to investment needed over the next two decades rather than a single static figure.

Where scientists agree broadly is on the three pillars of action needed to halt global warming and reach net zero globally: mitigation, referring to actions that will slow the rate of global warming; adaptation, or how to live with the effects of global warming that are irreversible or already baked in to the future; and resilience – the transition to a new, sustainable way of life.

$50 trillion in the global economy

Clearly, these are enormous sums of money – particularly if you happen to be stacking dollar bills on top of each other or laying them out like tiles. But in the context of global government spending, they are a little easier to quantify. Globally, governments are estimated to have spent $12 trillion supporting people through COVID-19, while a recent study suggested that

the US had spent $8 trillion on wars abroad since 9/11. Globally, conflict and violence cost the world around $14 trillion each year when military spending, security and losses are accounted for.

Crucially, world leaders committed to spending to tackle climate change in 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed. “We need to make good now on the handshake that we had in Paris of $100 billion,” UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J Mohammed said last year at the global TED Countdown Summit in Edinburgh. “And that was promised annually. Rich countries, let me say here and now: we’re looking at you for the unfinished business.”

Paying dividends

Central to any discussion of climate spending is the fact that these actions and investments don’t exist as standalone items of expenditure. Rather, they pay for things which can go on to have their own economic benefits by creating jobs or income.

“The findings of [our] research suggest that the traditional assumption that action on climate change is net-costly is false,” says Dr Fergus Green, author of an influential 2015 paper on the economic benefits of tackling climate change. In it, he argues that “the majority of the global emissions reductions needed to decarbonise the global economy can be achieved in ways that are nationally net-beneficial to countries, even leaving aside the ‘climate benefits’.”

At a global level, the UN estimates that doubling renewable energy capacity by 2030 could in fact save the world between $1.2 trillion and $4.2 trillion each year, by reducing pollution. Moreover, the UK National Audit Office has found that every dollar spent on preparing for flooding saves nine in damage avoided.

Analysis by the Global Commission on Economy and Climate has even found that the transition to

Failure to maintain the 2 degree Celsius limit could subtract $10-20 trillion from global GDP by 2100 – with the costs to humanity even higher.

MORGAN STANLEY’S DECARBONIZATION: THE RACE TO ZERO EMISSIONS

low carbon and sustainable development could result in a $26 trillion boost to the economy and 65 million new jobs by 2030, more than paying for the initial costs of putting such actions in place.

The cost of inaction

And while huge, estimates such as the $50 trillion figure still pale in comparison when compared to the costs of not acting to tackle climate change. In August last year, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highlighted the brutal and often irreversible effects of human activity and warned of increasingly extreme temperatures, flooding, wildfires and drought in a report described by UN Secretary-General António Guterres as “a code red for humanity”.

Alongside these catastrophic impacts on humanity itself, the costs associated with the status quo are also difficult to conceive of. Morgan Stanley estimates that in just three years, from 2016 to 2018, the type of climate-related natural disasters that are expected to worsen in the coming years cost the world $650 billion. Analysis by the Swiss Re Institute suggests unfettered climate change could wipe up to 18 per cent of GDP from the global economy by 2050.

Time is running out. Only this month the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change warned that “it’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5°C”. It did so in the face of accelerating climate disasters – such as the loss of an Antarctic ice shelf as large as New York City in March.

While world leaders continue to argue their countries’ responsibilities, targets, actions and contributions, what is not up for debate is the urgency with which climate change needs to be tackled and invested in seriously. Fifty trillion dollars might be a huge sum, but to protect the future of humanity it seems a small price to pay.

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Shelter from the Storm

From fires to floods to the pandemic, climate change is compounding Australia’s housing crisis. And it is those living on the margins who are bearing the brunt.

by Sophie Quick

Sophie Quick is a Melbourne-based writer.

Gary Shallala-Hudson’s home is a classic Queenslander in the heart of Lismore. It’s just a short walk to his office in the CBD, and a stroll through the gardens to the city library. His dining room window has a superb view of the fireworks on New Year’s Eve. Beneath his home he has a workshop. Gary makes rare-wood electric guitars.

He bought the place in 2013 and it suffered severe damage in the Lismore floods of 2017, which breached the town’s levee and flooded the CBD.

Gary was “10 times more prepared” for the 2022 floods, he says. But nobody in Lismore was really prepared for the catastrophic deluge on 28 February which, at 14.4 metres, was two full metres higher than the previous record high, in 1954. It destroyed 2000 homes. And it was impossible in the aftermath for anyone to prepare for the rains that followed in March, which reached 11.4 metres and breached the town’s levee for the second time in a month.

The 2022 floods have seen Gary rescued twice from rising water by neighbours and emergency services. They’ve seen him swimming to safety. And they’ve seen Gary’s home all but destroyed.

“There’s internal walls missing,” he says. “The front stairs washed away. The ceilings are mouldy. In terms of the interior, it looks like a demolition job.”

Over the course of the 2017 and 2022 floods, Gary believes he’s lost tens of thousands of dollars of rare timber in his workshop. He’s also lost valuable workshop tools and equipment that took him years to save for. His house is uninhabitable. He’s now couch surfing.

The stress of housing insecurity is something Gary feels acutely. He’s a community worker and peer consultant, advising and volunteering with local mental health services. He has lived with mental health issues himself, on and off, for long periods of his life. Prior to moving to Lismore for the long haul in 2007, he spent several years homeless: couch surfing and sleeping rough.

“I’ve gone from homeless, sleeping rough, to home owner hardly sleeping,” he says. “I am now in a position where I’m homeless with a mortgage.”

Extreme weather events are increasing in severity and intensity, not just in the Northern Rivers region and not just in Australia. Though it’s not always possible to link specific disasters to global warming, there are clear and conclusive climate trends. In April, climatologist Neil Plummer from the Monash Climate Change Communication

Research Hub told The Guardian, “Climate change is increasing the risks of heatwaves, bushfires and high-intensity rainfall.” A report from the World Meteorological Organisation in 2021 found that the number of weather-related disasters across the world has increased five-fold over the past 50 years.

Gary says many locals have been long convinced that extreme weather events are increasing in severity and that the phenomenon is linked to climate change. He mentions the famous Knitting Nanas activist group, founded in Lismore 10 years ago, who staged protests against coal mines outside their local MP’s office.

“The Knitting Nanas led the march,” he says. “But there are even fourth-generation farmers around here – people who vote conservative – who have been protesting about climate change since before the 2017 floods.”

Insurance companies are clearly convinced of the risks of more extreme weather events too. In 2020, Gary rang his insurance company to ask about cyclone as well as flood coverage. He discovered that monthly premiums had more than tripled since 2017. Plus, he’d have to serve a waiting period.

“I rang them in September, I’ve gone from homeless, before the season of strong winds starts, and they said I’d have to wait sleeping rough, to home owner four months before they’d pay out on any damage.” hardly sleeping. I am now in a

Extreme weather events of position where I’m homeless course present direct threats to people’s lives and homes. But once with a mortgage. the imminent danger is over, and the severity of the crisis has been LISMORE RESIDENT GARY SHALLALA-HUDSON measured and reported in terms of lives and properties lost, the media moves on and people are left to pick up the pieces. It can take years to recover, especially if you lose your home.

The 2019-2020 Australian bushfire season – unprecedented in scale, burning more than 17 million hectares of land and affecting communities in almost every state in Australia – caused the displacement of almost 65,000 people. A report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre found the bushfires destroyed more than 3100 homes, potentially leading to longer-term displacement for around 8100 people. The same report predicted a one-to-four year timeframe for people who lost their homes in the fires to rebuild. Some people were still living in temporary or emergency accommodation six months after they fled their homes. The impact of displacement and potential relocation has snowballing effects on people’s health and their ability to work. In many bushfire-affected communities, people are still feeling the impact on their health and livelihoods, even as the nation’s attention has switched from the fires to the pandemic and then to this year’s floods. In the case of the recent Lismore floods, practically everyone in town has been directly affected. But in the long term, it’s vulnerable people, people on low incomes and people who are homeless, who tend to bear the brunt of weather catastrophes. The floods in the Northern Rivers have compounded a long-term pre-existing housing crisis in the region. “Long-term locals have been priced out of a lot of accommodation and priced out of being insured,” Gary says. House prices in Lismore have almost doubled in five years reports Domain, from a median price of $340,000 in December 2016 to $612,500 in December last year. And while Northern Rivers only represents four per cent of the New South Wales population, the region recorded almost 20 per cent of the state’s rough sleepers in the 2016 Census. Housing stress among private renters is much higher than average, too, and there’s a chronic shortage of social housing supply. Tony Davies, the CEO of Social Futures, a major homelessness service in the region, says the crisis has worsened during the pandemic. “Economic issues are driving homelessness. As a homelessness service we are seeing more and more people who just cannot afford the rent,” he says. “And there’s mass migration out of the cities with the pandemic and the rise of telecommuting – it’s driven up house prices and rents dramatically.” Davies says people living in improvised or marginal housing are especially vulnerable to extreme weather events. “People who are sleeping rough have traditionally camped along the rivers or in the low-lying caravan parks… Homeless people tend to look for places where they won’t be seen and moved on. Many of these places were inundated.” Many have had no choice but to return to their homes after the floods, even though their homes may be dangerous, Davies says. “You get mould and health issues. People’s quality of life can decline quite dramatically.”

Davies believes the events of this year are an opportunity to respond in a considered way to the housing crisis, keeping climate change and the likelihood of more extreme weather events in mind.

“We need to invest seriously in social housing,” he says. “That’s the bedrock of the housing system. We obviously need to look at how buildings can be made more resilient to floods. We need to look at where houses are located and we need systems to respond really rapidly so that people can be rehoused quickly… If we are going to prepare properly for climate changes and natural disasters, we need to have those [crisis] housing supply arrangements in place in advance.”

In the meantime, the costs to individuals and communities are impossible to quantify. Gary came to Lismore to reconnect with friends. He has built a life for himself there, with meaningful work and a strong sense of community. In the weeks since the floods, he’s been working at a community crisis hub, assisting locals to access tools for repairs, and distributing anti-mould supplies. “Lismore is a lovely place,” he says. “I think this kind of event is going to bring a lot of things undone. You can’t count it with money.”

PHOTOS BY PETER WALLACE, MICHAEL LEWIS 30,000 BOOKS DESTROYED

THE FLOOD REACHED THE SECOND STOREY

Right the Book

Lismore local Ruth Morgan is helping to rebuild her community, one book at a time.

Fronting Magellan Street in Lismore’s CBD stands an unremarkable three-level brick building, the home of the library since 2003. Appearances are deceptive, for inside beats a community heart: battered, bruised, but not beaten.

This was my second – then third – big flood. Seeing images of boats travelling familiar streets, rooftops peering above the muddy torrent, and water lapping halfway up the second floor of the library, my heart cracked.

Library books were washed from shelves into puddles of muck. A dirty line halfway up the second level marked the flood height.

We put on wellies, old clothes, gloves and masks, and joined the “mud army” to clean up. We were tired, frustrated and dirty. The stench of the flood rose from my pores, following me in a cloud. The solution to cleaning up the library: open the windows and throw out 30,000 gunk-soaked books.

I’m a lifelong book lover, reader and writer. To see the ever-growing pile broke my heart. What could one person do?

I had an idea. I contacted my favourite Facebook writing group to gauge the reaction to a book drive. The response was overwhelming.

I phoned Lucy Kinsley, the library manager. She contacted the council and requested a bank account specifically for the library. She also supplied details about which parts of the collection had been lost.

Rebuilding the library also helps the local bookshop – The Book Warehouse – which lost its entire stock. People can purchase book vouchers or buy new books for the library from them. There are a number of ways you can help.

A small pebble thrown into a pond – well, flood – has resulted in boxes and boxes of new books, cash deposits, some wonderful used books, and unfortunately some books in poor condition. Some donations are already on library shelves. A Mount Everest remains to be unpacked, catalogued and shelved.

We’re a community with lives, homes and businesses in tatters.

We’re heart weary at the prospect of the work that lies ahead.

Our CBD looks like a war zone. People have lost their homes.

Our Lismore library is so many things to so many that its absence is another hole in our battling community. But we are hopeful. A walk through town shows shops and homes, even St Carthage’s Cathedral, flying banners emblazoned with a big red heart.

When the library reopens, it will offer an escape into the world of books, the imagination, movies and music. A momentary escape perhaps, but precious nonetheless.

It will return to its place in the centre.

We will pick up the pieces of our lives.

We will mend our broken heart.