For the April Sun we never had

You were on holiday in Hawaii when my hometown burned. Smoke blackened the banks of trees and for days the aircon ran continuously. Grey leaves rained from the sky and my mother worried that if the three of us crammed bodies into bathtub, covered ourselves in damp clothes, my aunt, the born-again alcoholic, would shit herself. We watched the news like hawks, debating whether to leave. We never opened the windows.

A photo of you in a polo shirt doing the shakas emerged from a beach in the Atlantic. Sun-tanned, boardy-wearing larrikin. You hadn’t appointed a replacement PM, had kept your holiday a secret. Your island get-away was the promise of a hospital that took twenty years to build. Could it be any more obvious that you didn’t give a shit whether we lived or died?

We were citizens of a burning country, condemned to burn under your guard. For generations we had known that our lives weren’t worth living. We were heatstroke, corn starch, unrefined ethanol, dairy milk. We had hanged ourselves to prove it.

In my aunt’s house we made believe that this could not kill us. The constant whir of cargo planes dumping cabins of water. The mornings of coughing up car exhaust. Brine that marred the coastline like week old coffee. Weather systems, a bad joke at a funeral. A charred polaroid of the sunburnt country. We drank ourselves toward a waiting grave.

Unannounced, you returned to Australia. Cabinet members hurried to the nation’s capital. Politicians shirt-fronted the media with the ferocious arrogance of evangelists. Money and the borrowed sharing of blame. The man from marketing. The country was dying, and you refused foreign aid. Applauding men whom you’d never met, claiming they stood – fearless – at the mouth of cremation. I wonder how you thought their families would survive while you dismissed their calls for reparation. Our deficit, distance: the myopathy of tar dividing the dual hearts of a nation. Our spoils – the spoilt – only worthy of conversation when the fractured city became a sea of smoke. A milky skin labouring over your pristine harbour, your monuments futile telescopes mummified by our aftermath. Your sales pitch, a blur.

While you spoke of asthma, of fire alarms, of air quality, we counted the black shapes of livestock, their limbs stiff as tree trunks, their teeth the stillness of screaming. While you spent your money on air purifiers, we rationed petrol, rationed water. While you cleared gutters on clean cul-de-sacs, we grieved for lands that we no longer recognised.

Perhaps in this vision of smoke, you felt you understood what it was to be us. Perhaps the man from marketing was your enemy as well. But how do we tell you that our greatest fear was also our glimmer of hope? What if the fires overran us? Jumped rivers, stalked highways, hit suburbs and consumed the city? Was there any other way for you to understand how small, how expendable, how unheard we felt?

To calm us, you drove SUVs from town to town – places that, on the news, looked like mine – and were greeted by locals who refused to shake your hand. Others told you rightly to fuck off. You stood around awkwardly, taking photos with vacant bodies. The PM, a wanton pariah in his own country, you smelt of sunblock and aftershave. Your promises of funding were a pay-out for a dead child. Your circuit nothing short of an invasion.

My mother, for all her grace, could not hate you. She asked me, why can’t a man have a holiday with his family? I tried to explain it wasn’t the holiday, that it was the soullessness of a leader who claimed spiritual authority. God had gifted you your Prime Ministership and had left the rest of us to burn. Our only condolences were thoughts and prayers. Your preordained path, your biblical ascension, was a warrant to forget us. While you basked in the crystal field of light, we waited boxed in for the miracle of rain. We had always known that water was thicker than blood. We had always known that when you opened us up there were streams.

Somehow, we had forgotten that inside your veins was dust.

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