The tree is wrong for this place. Dry eucalypts that tower over and crunch under are the natural trees of Canberra, Ngunnawal Country. The rowan with its delicate leaves is native to the cool climate regions of Europe and the Middle East. But we’re grateful for its shade in the stinking hot sun. Also known as witches’ bane, it was planted more than forty years ago by the English couple who owned the house before us as a tree of protection for their family, its orange berries bearing tiny pentagram stars at their base.

‘Do we have to do this now?’ asks Michael rubbing his temples.

I feel sorry for him.

‘There won’t be a better time. The kids have just started watching Harry Potter – it goes for two and a half hours.’

‘How does this work again?’

I’ve researched the method as part of my environmental health studies but feel reckless and want to cut to the core of it.

‘We pick three future disaster scenarios, talk about how we’d handle them and the plans we should make to put ourselves in a better position to survive.’

‘But we don’t even know what’s happening tomorrow …’

Our lives do feel increasingly like an ever-changing physical and psychological obstacle course requiring us to duck, pivot, and run harder and faster each lap. Part of this stems from the busyness of kids but it’s also trying to keep up with the torrent of Australian and international current affairs that flows through our work and lives, our constant grappling with the news of cataclysmic climate change events.

‘Some Ancient Greek writers thought trying to predict the future was a bad idea,’ he continues. ‘We’ll be wrong and it will be useless or, worse, right and miserable.’

‘It’s not predicting the future. It’s thinking about scenarios based on reason.’

My urge to force new year understandings, map the future, and make resolutions is desperate. I don’t want to debate the rigour of what I am suggesting; instead I google and read aloud some definitions:

Disaster (noun): An event that causes significant harm to a community, economy and/or environment that exceeds the ability of those affected to cope without assistance. Types of disasters include events caused by natural hazards, climate change, technological breakdown and social, economic and military conflict.

Scenario (noun): A postulated sequence or development of events; or a setting and plot outline, in particular in a work of art or literature.

‘Fine.’ Michael throws his hands into the air. ‘Let’s do it. You first. Fifteen consecutive days above forty-two degrees, even higher inland, not much relief in overnight temperatures. We’re stuck here at home. Tell me what happens.’

My body flares. I gape at him, caught off-guard even though this is what I’ve asked for.

I take a deep breath and begin to speak.

 

Day one. It starts on a Saturday, so you’re not at work. Of course, people don’t yet know the heatwave will go for fifteen days, baking the earth to a crust and shrivelling life in its way. The forecast predicts a record-breaking spell, but most people assume a week at most. You think it’s going to be pretty bad. Harder than the last heatwave, but not something incomprehensible.

I wake up with the determination to do well. I set in train a steady stream of activities for me and the kids. First, we freeze colourful Lego pieces into blocks of ice, relics of our age to mine later with forks. We whizz up cold mango smoothies, play scrabble and then cards. The day is fun with moments of panic: you search for an hour in the convection heat outside to find the cat; my dad doesn’t answer his mobile but finally rings back, hot and grumpy, but okay.

The next morning is worse. Drawing every curtain in the house sends my mind skittering back as the dim brown light weirds the familiar, reminding me of the dirty yellow shroud that blanketed the city during the 2019-20 summer bushfires. My brain flicks to the towering walls of flame and shooting embers of past television screens. But when I peek outside, I am blinded by sun and blue sky. The fires are elsewhere.

Trying to keep the kids entertained inevitably slows and congeals into hours watching screens. I scroll the news, read about people in broken-down public housing suffering without air-con and donate an insufficient amount to a charity online.

The kids ask for more ice-blocks. There are soon permanent rings of cola and raspberry around their mouths.

On Monday, I wake with swollen eyes and a cracking headache. There’s an email saying we should keep the kids home from school. You still suit up, go to work, and spend the day cajoling shopping centres to extend their hours.

For me, it becomes a repeat with the kids until we all watch the news that night. The screen is filled with previously unseen images of thousands of sheep baked to death in the heat, people in rural towns crying, and hospitals overflowing with patients. The kids get upset and we turn it off.

A day later, the Bureau of Meteorology issues a statement saying there’s no relief in sight and that the higher-than-normal humidity is the killer. It clicks – this time, it’s very different. I begin periodically sneaking into the loungeroom to turn on the news when the kids aren’t looking. There’s now a permanent announcement scrolling at the bottom of the live television channels. Ration electricity use. Turn off appliances. Stop washing clothes. No unnecessary cooking. I fill spare bottles, pots, and buckets with water – I am not really sure why.

It’s still a shock when the electricity goes out. We turn the car on and have to cool it for twenty minutes before we can get in and head into the blasting heat to collect my dad. The only ones out, we’re shaken by the drive around the dead suburbs. 

Back home, you and my dad sit panting, side-by-side with your shirts off, listening to the old radio. We move mattresses for the kids into the bathroom. I read them Narnia with its ice queen presiding over winter until they fall asleep. In the middle of the night, we begin testing the kids’ temperatures every two hours when they wake and start to complain relentlessly about being hot.

The next few endless nights are the worst … No, the mornings when I see how blotchy and pale the kids look are the worst. It’s horrible but we’re managing until we hit the following Saturday and you decide to completely board up the windows to get the sun off them. You head out into the furnace mid-morning, start banging around and come back an hour later vomiting with heat stress. I get the first aid book. We put you in the tub, crowd around to flick cardboard fans over your hot wet skin and wait …

 

‘Why did you have to give me heat stress?’ complains Michael as I trail off.

His tone is upset. A bit shamefaced, I’m relieved when he shakes his head and decides to move on.

‘But that stuff about you trying to entertain the kids seems realistic. You get this cheery weirdness at the outset of disasters before things go downhill. It happened during the summer bushfires, and Covid too.’

He’s right. It’s a defence mechanism to ward off mental drag, that helpless, dazed, and sick feeling like foggy flu that can accompany the lurch into disaster.

‘If this does actually happen, I might need more help with practical things like trying to stay alive. You’ll have to leave the kids to think up their own games.’

I glare and want to rehash familiar arguments about him not doing enough with them. I suppose that’s realistic too – the recurring dramas of marriage and gender roles won’t go away during a disaster.

I push down my defensiveness, pull a pad of paper close and pick up my pen.

‘The point is to analyse the scenario and see what might have made us more prepared.’

‘Buying a bolthole at the beach?’ he quips. ‘Solar powered charging station, a big battery, and maybe a dehumidifier,’ he adds.

I write these things down but can’t help snipping back.

‘Sure, and you shouldn’t have gone outside to try and board up those windows.’

‘I didn’t! This didn’t happen!’

‘Well, it could have,’ I huff. ‘It’s often the things people do to try and improve their situation in a disaster scenario that gets them killed. We need to have the willpower to sit and do nothing unless we’ve fully thought it through.’

‘Did I die?’

‘No, you ended up with a cracking headache but recovered. The army showed up on our street and I asked a medic to check on you. Then the heat broke and it plummeted fifteen degrees in a matter of hours.’

‘Well, at least that’s something.’

I watch the smoke from the mozzie coil curl and drift out from under the tree, dissipating to nothing over the bleached lawn. The sun is finally starting to lose some of its heat.

We write a couple more emergency items down on the list. Instant cold packs. Solar coolers. Both useful but I feel dissatisfied, like the bigger realisations the scenario should prompt are being left unsaid.

‘Maybe we should move to Tasmania after all,’ I fling out.

I’m in dangerous territory. A few years ago, it was Michael who suggested we contemplate setting up there with a ‘shed to retreat to if the worst happens’. I’d dismissed the idea at first, citing the practicalities of school and work, and taking the opportunity to seize the moral high ground and lecture him on fighting climate change, not retreating from it.

I look over at our raised garden bed. Empty, but at least full of new compost ready for planting after the worst of the summer heat. It’s as if Michael can read my mind.

‘How’s our efforts to reduce our carbon footprint and improve our self-sufficiency working out so far?’ he asks, while leaning over to take the pen.

‘Tasmania. Protests,’ he writes, and I can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic.

 

‘I’ll pick the next topic and you can paint the scenario,’ I say. ‘Ready?’

‘As I’ll ever be.’

‘Trump takes the oath of office a second time. Eighteen months later, battle breaks out between the United States and China over world dominance in AI technology. It descends into cyber warfare. One day, we wake to blank screens. Cut off. No internet. Over ninety-six per cent of households, businesses, and government agencies have no access.’

‘Okay, but I’m getting a beer first.’

‘We have to do this properly.’

‘Oh, I will,’ he threatens.

He brings two cans back. The first gulp is refreshingly cold and it loosens my body.

‘Listen to this,’ he says.

 

There are more than one hundred of us waiting in the queue at the bank. All the guys have eyes like bottled snakes, trapped and deadly. Are mine the same? I’m kicking myself for not putting another wad of cash under the mattress. Do you remember we did that a couple of years ago but ended up spending it?

Mutters swell and break to frothy shouting. A guy coming back out smashes his fist into a wall and yells, ‘They’re now saying there’s a fucking limit. $200 per person!’ It’s about to get ugly. I’m sweating and not sure whether to leave. It’s a huge relief when I get the slippery plastic notes in my hand.

Next, I’m greeted by black-uniformed security guards outside Woolies – beefy-looking guys that are not mucking around. I give them a nod to show I’m no threat and try to walk normally.

Inside it’s better. There are still dodgy blokes and the shelves are clearing out but I find good stuff. Things that will last. The rice is gone but there’s plenty of couscous. No fresh fruit but packets of sultanas. Tins of potatoes. For some reason there are heaps of boxes of Maltesers. The trolley holds a weird assortment of groceries, but it would be stupid to be choosy. I chuck in a newspaper on the way out. The headline screams: ‘PM SAYS “DON’T PANIC.”’ ‘Fat chance,’ I say under my breath.

Cyberattacks continue. In some places, the internet spurts back only to be knocked out again. I slog away at work trying to coordinate teams to deal with tidal waves of shit and dysfunction until I’m sent home along with most people with young kids.

Life degrades more quickly than I ever realised it could. Systems break down – communication, banking, fuel, and food. The government is way too slow and the analogue workarounds too few.

One month in and I’m waking to every sound, always on alert for intruders. I line up the pointed javelins I’ve sharpened using our tomato stakes in the hallway. I practice trying to hit tree trunks out the back. I’m turning into a nut-job, scaring you and the kids.

The queues at the bank are now days long. The plastic tents and chairs look from the news choppers like a high tide of human detritus washed up on the beach. There are payments going to all accounts from the government. Emergency supplies are being handed out. In theory it should be enough, but logic doesn’t hold.

Tomorrow I’m going to talk to some of the neighbours. I’m wondering if we might pool resources and create a security roster. There’s news of gangs forming in Sydney to take control of whole suburbs. Nasty guys with guns and knives. It might only be a matter of time until it happens here.

 

‘That is what you chose to imagine?’ I spit. The whole thing is very muscular and sexist. ‘What am I doing the whole time?’

Michael gives me a steady look.

‘Well, I think that is the way it might be,’ he shrugs.

‘Bullshit! Why? We don’t live like that now; we’re supposed to be equal.’

I stretch my body towards him to help my points land and win. Michael annoyingly leans back so I have further distance to cover.

‘You painted yourself as the one looking after the kids with me battening down the hatches in the first scenario,’ he retorts.

It’s a good comeback so I ignore it and roll on. 

‘What’s the lesson? Things might revert? Men in charge and women at risk?’

‘I don’t think people are looking to advance equality in a disaster scenario. Life does go backwards. You’ve read the same apocalypse novels I have!’

‘What about the characters who rise to be their best selves?’

‘Is that what you imagined in your scenario? I didn’t hear us knocking it out of the park. We’ll need to work as a family and with other people. And we’ll need the wad of physical cash. There’s no point taking it out if we spend it when we’re short on money.’

‘You raided that stash too!’

I write down ‘CASH’, but this is turning into an unedifying discussion. We’re tearing each other down. These clumsy jabs back and forth are on the surface; underneath the stress of these scenarios is layering deep in our bodies. There’s also a growing wrongness to the conversation, an undercurrent of ungratefulness in us sitting here sweating in our luck, imagining the worst.

‘Perhaps we’re not going about this the right way,’ I say. ‘There are plenty of real examples of people surviving disasters right now.’

At this, we fall to pensive silence. The air shifts, bringing a sobering breeze.

Somewhere in the world there are people huddling on rooftops in vast rivers of muddy water. Elsewhere, others are crowded into basements and cellars, hunched as the walls shudder. Then there are thousands of people trapped in famine, plastic bags holding everything they own.

Like many Australians, I had grandparents who left homelands fleeing war and persecution. Their memories of horror live in my genetic code. I feel sick when I wonder what they might think of my imagined scenarios. ‘Disaster is not something to play with,’ they might warn. ‘It strikes and all you can do is put one foot in front of the other.’ Or they might seek to remind: ‘When terror and loss threaten to completely deafen and deaden, often it’s the actions of strangers that decide your fate.’

I say all this to Michael and we sit stricken and shocked at where we’ve landed.

‘Some of those same homelands are now issuing booklets to households on how they can prepare for the next disaster or war,’ he says. ‘We plan, and then we’ll run if we must.’

 

It’s like waking from a bad dream when we hear the back door slam and feet quickly padding across the deck. We turn to watch young bodies jump down the stairs onto the grass. My daughter barrels to us first and hops into my lap.

‘They were whizzing on broomsticks, Mum!’

Much of the fear and cynicism pumping through my body bursts into cool mist.

‘I wish I could go to Hogwarts and be like Hermione and save everyone,’ she breathes. And she did indeed dress up to do so last Halloween: Gryffindor robe, crimped hair, and wand at the ready to roam the neighbourhood.

My loping son slaps Michael’s back in greeting and bends down to grab the bright orange hacky sack he got for Christmas. He bounces it up and down on the flat of his hand with a grin.

‘Why are you still out here, Dad?’ he asks, his eyes trained on the ball. ‘It’s getting dark.’

Michael gives him a wide smile. ‘Spending time with your mum,’ he says.

It’s unspoken, our agreement they don’t need to know what we’ve been talking about. The time may come, but it’s not now. We turn to listening and exclaiming at the plot of the movie and then, when enough time has passed, send them back inside to find ice cream.

‘You’re a good Dad,’ I say as we watch them go.

He clears his throat and I realise I’ve made my desperate point. He’s joined me. We are here now, under this tree, talking about the way our fragile world is teetering.

I know it’s wishful, but I don’t care, and suggest that for our final disaster we imagine succeeding against all odds.

‘Like so many of the books we’ve read,’ I say.

‘Why not?’ he sighs.

‘Then let me give it a go.’

 

Fifteen years from now it has all come to pass as many said it would. The crashing of ice sheets, sea-level rises then floods, cracked and broken cities. Then come the human armies and faceless drones of war that kill those trying to escape to the territories held by fortunate others.

Our much older son, now a tall young man, sits beside us listening to the radio for his birthdate, as his grandfather did during the Vietnam War. I’m grey, turned witchy with age, and I try not to think of the date, as if obscuring it in the recesses of my mind will prevent it from being found.

‘July 8.’

It’s like a stun gun freezing me inside a horrible black maw.

There’s no sense of going for duty and love of country. Those things have ceased to exist in a world run by the terrible few.

We shake ourselves out of icy, wordless howling – remember that we’re prepared. Some of our friends have sons whose birthdates have also come up. The plan quickly winds into action. Our daughter brings the rucksacks and we walk at night to the meeting place. There we find our friends; hands are held and bodies hug. Hot drinks and shards of chocolate are handed out.

With water, food, and tents, we walk out of the city. Our legs are trained and strong. The words we say are encouraging and gentle. There are moments of fear when we hold each other to ward away the deadly darting wasps in the sky. But we are clever. We evade capture and drink not only water but memories of childhood to keep madness at bay. We regularly check the eyes of our now grown-up children and find them full of wariness but also purpose. A mirror, they reflect our own.

Moments on the brink of life and death come – our son slides down a ravine, the raiders find us and take what we have, and a searchlight comes from the sky until you slingshot the drone down. But we survive and keep walking to the promise of a place.

The dream appears one day, months later. In the early morning, we stand and cry at the sea of garden beds dotted around the cabins. The tall trunks of woody eucalypts are pale white and sage, towering pillars protecting the people working at their tasks. The sound of laughter brings us back to summers of garden hoses and trampolines.

 

‘Are you sure we followed any sort of method here?’ Michael smiles. ‘We’re a long way from topping up the first aid kit, buying a battery, and cleaning the gutters before fire season.’

I shake my head. ‘We’ve deviated a little. Perhaps been too light on the practical planning.’

I pause, then wink. ‘Next time?’

He looks at me with weary amusement.

The solar lanterns hanging in the tree have started to brighten, pinpricks glowing through the paper holes to meet the dark. It’s a stretch but, despite our lack of real planning, it somehow seems easier now to become the people we should already be.

‘Of course, we could start building something with others now,’ he says. ‘Perhaps a New Year’s resolution?’

I nod.

‘I liked your last story. But why no broomsticks for the family?’ he teases.

‘Not yet,’ I say. ‘I’m not sure how they would tie in with the rowan. It’s meant to save us from the witches. Though we don’t know how it ends.’

We sit together, protected by the tree for a while longer.