VOGUE VOICE

With the imminent release of his second novel – a story about heroes and villains – author Trent Dalton writes a poignant, heartbreaking yet inspiring essay on the crises Australians have so recently faced. In it, he explores not only the villains of fire and disease, but also shines a light on the valiant people and spirit of hope that keeps us going.

THE HEROES NEVER changed form. Always flesh and blood; arms and legs and beating hearts as wide as this country. It was the villains who kept morphing on me. I once thought the bad guys all dressed like Darth Vader. Then I learned that the villains in my world wore Jackie Howe singlets and Stubbies shorts and doubleplug blue rubber flip-flops that slapped against old wooden hallway floorboards to rhythms of their rage. That man-child monster my mum fell in love with once. That fat-bellied, fire-breathing dragon villain that she slayed without a sword, without a shield; nothin’ but a broke-down heart and two feet to walk away from the battle. And pistols at dawn for any mortal who dares to tell me she wasn’t Perseus, Odysseus and Luke fucking Skywalker hidden inside a body no bigger than Kylie Minogue’s.

Then the villains turned again. Shapeshifted. Changed their form to the things I could not see. Addictions. Anxieties. The cloaked shadow villains that creep in over time for anyone, crawl into our bedrooms and lock our doors and draw our curtains. Job-loss villains and rotten-luck villains. The kind of villains that swordless hero by the piano, Nick Cave, always sings about. Then an emphysema villain that clustered in the lungs of my durry-munching dad – the first and the last hero in all my stories – and dragged him away from the great quest when we still had another thousand bottles of XXXX Gold left to share over Trivial Pursuit.

But then another heroine gives help along the way. Some strange kind of warrior wearing black Dr. Martens boots and a You Am I shirt and I knew she was true and worth following – worth chasing – and so I ran. Bravest thing I ever did. Just running to catch up to her. I sprinted 100 metres and more just to stand beside her on Platform 2 of Bowen Hills train station, inner-city Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, where I caught my breath and fought off that villainous fear shadow that’s found a permanent rental space in the pit of my stomach and I coughed up that word, the most sacred and heroic word a boy could ever say to a girl he loves: “Hi.”

That girl, that hero of mine, helped me write a book called Boy Swallows Universe about all the heroes and villains of my childhood. The flesh and blood ones and the ones I could not see. She helped me write a second book called All Our Shimmering Skies. That one’s about heroes who hold on to the light in the face of the shadow villains. It’s a hope story about the art of looking up and the way our Australian skies shimmer for us through every miracle dawn and dusk we’re allowed to live through; skies that whisper for us if we’re willing to listen. Keep going, those Australian skies say. That’s what the blues in those skies want to tell us. You’re the luckiest people on Earth so keep going. Keep listening. Keep loving. Keep fighting. Keep hoping. Keep remembering that all 25 million of us sunburned southerners stranded at the bottom of the world are fuelled as much by water as we are by fire; by that little pilot light that burns inside all of us, the light that will only flicker out if you let it. Or if you want it to go out, and I totally get sometimes why a person might want it to. Just too many goddamn villains sometimes, I guess. Too few heroes to give help along the way.

And then came our endless summer. That last dreadful summer when the sky turned red and our country turned to flame. The Black Summer fire front villain that spread across Australia’s east coast, burning some 18.6 million hectares of land, destroying 5,900 of our buildings and killing at least 34 of our people and an estimated one billion of our animals. The greatest hero of them all and the most adaptable, most treacherous villain we’ll ever encounter, too: Mother Nature.

“The whole horizon was lit up,” said Wazza Shaw standing on the rickety wooden deck of his miraculously still-standing home in the town of Mogo in the Bega Valley Shire. “It sounded like a freight train. Woomp. Woomp. Woomp. This thing didn’t stop. Louder and louder and louder until that train pulled into the station.”

I’d gone to see the damage the fire villain had done. I knocked on Shaw’s door with a single question: “What the hell did you just live through?”

“The apocalypse,” Shaw said. A father of two. Mullet haircut. Heart the colour and size of Uluru. Shaw got his family to safety then returned to his Mogo street where he fought a raging kilometrelong fire front with a makeshift fire hose he ran from a generator fixed to the back tray of his ute. When he saved his house he put his life in great danger to save the homes of his neighbours. Terrifyingly and unmistakably alone, he drove up and down his abandoned street wetting down homes as the fire lashed and spat around him, eventually surrounding him with zero exit points. Plan A: wet the houses down until the fire sweeps out of Mogo. Plan B: open the iron grate in the gutter on the street and slide into the stormwater drain and pray a bloke don’t suffocate. “Thank fuck I never had to go to Plan B,” he said. His head told him he was dead. His busy head was certain of it. But his heart told him something else. His heart said there was hope. And that was the theme of that endless summer. All that hope in the dark. Our shimmering east coast turning to ash. Homes buried in black dust. Livelihoods stolen by flame. All that was left standing were brick chimneys and the toasted metal frames of backyard trampolines. The smell of animal death everywhere. But still all that hope in the dark. Still all them swordless heroes. What happens when life gets so rough that the very act of waking up, hopping out of bed, walking out your front door feels like an act of heroism?

You’re the luckiest people on Earth so keep going. Keep hoping

I remember the stunned faces of two Mogo locals, Rodney Yalg and Tracey Campbell, as they looked upon a field of scorched earth and rubble that once was their thriving neighbourhood. The fire had changed them. The morphing villain made them morph with it. Campbell had survivor’s guilt. She saw on the news all those grieving families and she wondered why she was spared. She started phoning old friends. She thought maybe she was still in shock. “I just started apologising to people for anything I’d done when I was younger,” she said, weeping. “I got in contact with family I hadn’t spoken to for a while and apologised for my bad deeds. I evaluated everything. That’s what that fire did to me.”

Jamie Robinson from Cobargo. He was 25 years old in 1996 when he received a bravery medal for saving an 18-month-old girl from a house fire in the Canberra suburb of Holt. He was

33 in the summer of 2003 when Canberra bushfires burned his home and all his possessions to the ground. He was 50 when his Bega Valley home was turned to ash by the Black Summer fire front. He found himself alone, days later, on his devastated property, but for his loyal half-kelpie, half-Australian shepherd dog, Omi, surrounded by the charred wood and tin that was once his home. He was thinking about good and bad luck, fiddling with an old rope he’d found on the ground. He was thinking about that 18-month-old girl he saved all those years ago and why that act of pure heroism didn’t grant him a grace period with the universe, a reprieve from that fickle monster named Mother Nature. When he was done with all that thinking he looked down at something he was absent-mindedly tying together with his shaking hands. It was a noose. “It’s like, fuck it,” Robinson told me. “There is no point. I just wanted to exit the planet. And then my beautiful girl here, Omi, she comes up, looks at me, and with her paws she kind of slaps my hands that are doing the tying and she just stares at me and I swear she does this big intentional blink like, ‘Don’t be a fuckhead, Dad. Who’s gonna look after me?’”

Robinson put the rope down and made his way into nearby Cobargo where he walked into the town’s bushfire relief centre. He didn’t tell anyone his story. He didn’t ask for any favours. “My name’s Jamie,” he said to one of the centre’s coordinators. “I’m here to help.”

The countless heroes willing to help along the way. Danielle Murphy and her friend Chris Walters who have spent the past six months working seven days a week running the Cobargo relief centre, giving now-homeless locals access to showers and fresh drinking water and bedding and food and toys to take all the pain away from kids. The boys from volunteer disaster relief organisation Team Rubicon – many of them ex-Australian soldiers processing PTSD – who flew immediately into the Bega Valley to spend five weeks clearing properties of burnt roofing and walls and kitchen sinks.

The strength of Renee Salway. Just the way she got out of bed each day, the way she kept going. I remember driving past the property where dairy farmer Patrick Salway, 29, and his father Robert, 63, died trying to save the family home. Patrick’s wife, Renee, was the very definition of grace the following day; light from the dark. She got out of bed and she turned her thoughts to the sky because I guess she thought it was listening. “I love you now, I love you still,” she said. “I will see you again, Patrick, my best friend. Hope you are up there fixing things in the stars tonight.”

“Have you got a name for your story?” Mogo local Rodney Yalg asked me. No name for this, I said. Barely any words for it. “What do you think my story should be called?” I asked.

Yalg shrugged. “It goes deep into human nature this all does,” he said. “It’s a story of people backing each other up,” his partner, Campbell, said. “People getting out and helping one another. The bloke at the IGA who opened his shop on a generator. Took so many ‘IOU’ orders. He just fed the lot of us.”

“You lose everything,” Yalg said. “You lose power. You lose your house. You lose hope but then you find all these other things in human nature.” There were tears in Yalg’s eyes and he wiped them with a forefinger and thumb. “It’s a survival story in the end,” he said. It’s a hope story, too.

But then the impossible became possible. The sublime became ridiculous. The villain morphed again, turned into a set of numbers – two, zero, two, zero. The year 2020. One whole heavy year of narrative antagonism. This great villain of a year and the chilling pandemic that came with it bringing fear and thoughts of death and loss as close to us as our fingertips. This watershed year that we’re all trying to conquer together. This year of measurement. The radius of a virus. The sweep of fear. The spaces between oceans, between cities, between Mum and Dad and sister and brother and daughter and son. Between Nan and Pop who don’t cope so well with this thing. The precious spaces between us. So far away from each other but somehow so bloody close. Maybe closer than ever before. That nasty leveller that howled at our best-laid plans. That boundless traveller that stole our calm, our job security, our financial security, our joy. That relentless killer that’s still skulking through our cities, slipping into our public spaces. That invisible villain raised the stakes and we rose to meet them. All those heroes who helped along the way. All those people who walked out their front doors and walked into work. The doctors. The nurses. The teachers. The first responders. Those glorious supermarket workers who never skipped a beat.

We measured the pain and the hardship together and we measured the sorrow and loss. And then we danced together. Together alone. People danced in their living rooms and then people sang. They came together for video-linked drinks and FaceTime friendship groups and Zoom book clubs and 100 things we never had the time for. Things like being there. Being here. All that freshly made sourdough. All those Depression-era recipes we shared. All those board games. All that home-schooling. All those beautiful little notes dropped in letterboxes: “Hi, this is Bob and Barb from Number 12. Just letting you know we’re here if you need us. Just letting you know we understand that none of this makes sense. None of it was in your life plan. None of it was supposed to happen. We don’t know where it’s all going to end, either, but we do know how we’ll get there. By smiling. By being kind. By getting out of bed.” All those ordinary heroes who got out of bed.

This is a hope story we’re living in today. Australia is a hope story. One great big chunk of wishful thinking some 4,000 kilometres wide and only 3.8 billion years old, filled with heroes and villains and fires that won’t ever go out. Little pilot lights that burn inside all of us. Bright little lights that will only flicker out if we let them. All Our Shimmering Skies (Fourth Estate) by Trent Dalton, is out September 29.

“It’s a story of people backing each other up. People helping one another”