2020: The Year That Changed Us

The Conversation

• Publisher: Thames & Hudson Australia
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781760761394
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Essays in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The year 2020 began with fire-fuelled orange skies over Australia and parts of New Zealand, before nations prepared for COVID-19 to hit their shores. What ensued was crisis: a pandemic, political upheaval, an international human rights movement, global recession and localised emergencies dwarfed by a world spinning on an axis of turmoil.These fifty essays from leading thinkers and contributors to The Conversation examine what will be one of the most significant and punishing years in the 21st century. 2020: The Year That Changed Us explores the key lessons from this remarkable year and kickstarts the discussion about what comes next. Contributors include: Michelle GrattanPeter MartinRaina MacIntyreJoëlle GergisPeter GresteThalia AnthonyShino KonishiFiona Stanley

PART I

The year that changed us

Destruction of Juukan Gorge: We need to know the history of artefacts, but it’s imperative to keep them in place

Jacinta Koolmatrie

Lecturer in Archaeology, Flinders University

A day before Reconciliation Week 2020, the day Australia was meant to be acknowledging and remembering the stolen generations, news came of something that seemed to put Australia back a few decades in its journey towards ‘reconciliation’. Rio Tinto had detonated a 46,000-year-old site known as Juukan Gorge.

This news was simply gut-wrenching.

Artefacts discovered at the site were among some of the oldest found in Western Australia, making the gorge incredibly significant not only for the Traditional Owners, the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura peoples, but also for the history of this continent. Also startling for many was the fact that this destruction had been in process for several years. The dating of the site had been determined through salvage excavation in preparation for this.

I cannot speak for the Traditional Owners, nor can I speak on the complexities surrounding the approval of the blast, but the removal of artefacts from their place has impacted every single Aboriginal person on this continent. That is what I can speak on.

Salvage excavations

Salvage excavation is archaeological work conducted to record and collect all evidence of human occupation at a site that has been or will be impacted by development. Excavation itself is destructive. The moment a trowel is inserted into the ground, the site has been destroyed. Salvage excavations, like all excavations, require this destruction to be worthwhile. The comprehensive recording of every aspect of an excavation is necessary, from changes in the soil to each artefact found.

Archaeology also considers how artefacts will be cared for in the long term: where they will be kept and who will be caring for them. It is preferable for artefacts to remain at their location. In cases where this proves impossible, salvaging is required.

At a surface level, it seems unproblematic if everything is collected from the ground, analysed and placed in a box: those artefacts will be preserved for all of eternity. Now they are no longer subject to erosion, animal activity or (the more perplexing argument) the threat of humans. But cultural institutions are not immune to disaster.

In 2019, Brazil’s national museum in Rio de Janeiro was devastated by a fire. This summer, Australian galleries closed due to the potential impact of smoke on their collections, and the South Australian Museum in Adelaide has repeatedly discussed the threat of water leaks to its collections. These institutions are built to preserve heritage but they should not be viewed as the only preservation option, especially for heritage heavily intertwined with place.

Why is place important?

There is a common narrative that Aboriginal people wandered this continent aimlessly. Rarely is there discussion of how our ancestors moved with intention, demonstrated clearly in the ways they passed down generational knowledge to us. Why else would they have mapped this land?

Where they chose to mark their presence should be viewed as representative of intention and significance. This significance has flowed through time, strengthening the connection of this place to us. In cases where there is a physical presence of our ancestors, it is integral that we maintain the connection of this physical history to place.

For many, Juukan Gorge was mainly significant because of its early date. But not all Aboriginal heritage is afforded this same interest. Not all of our heritage can be dated that early, and a lot of our heritage simply is not tangible. A vast majority of our heritage is found in our knowledge of the land that traverses this continent. Mostly, this goes unseen by our colonisers, making it easily overlooked in favour of development.

Sometimes, the tangible heritage found in these places is the only thing standing in the way of a place being destroyed. It is the only thing demonstrating we are a people who have deep connections to this land – not only from a spiritual side, but also from a linear Western view of time.

Aboriginal knowledge of these places, and how this knowledge links to the archaeological record, is what can fully contextualise the meaning of these places for our ancestors – and for us today.

The importance of empathy

Maintaining the connection of place with our ancestors’ possessions found at these places may be solidified through the implementation of stricter laws. But if a company wants something and our heritage is standing in the way, those laws can always be bent. The value of destroying these places is much higher than the value of keeping them – at least in the eyes of our colonisers. A loophole will be found, and our communities will suffer and grieve another loss.

If we want something long-lasting, something that transcends laws, empathy needs to be much stronger, embedded into the mind and heart. This is not the type of empathy that emerges when one has to say ‘Sorry’, but the type that exists before ‘Sorry’ is even considered.

With empathy, how could you justify the hurt Aboriginal people on this continent experience when we find out another culturally significant place has been destroyed?

Our field cameras melted in the bushfires. When we opened them, the results were startling

Benjamin Scheele

Research Fellow in Ecology, Australian National University

David Newell

Senior Lecturer, School of Environment, Science and Engineering, Southern Cross University

Jodi Rowley

Curator, Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Biology, Australian Museum

Michael McFadden

PhD Candidate, University of Wollongong

In late summer, male northern corroboree frogs call for a female mate. It’s a good time to survey their numbers: simply call out ‘Hey, frog!’ in a low, deep voice and the males call back. In 2020, the survey was vital. Bushfires had torn through the habitat of this critically endangered species. We urgently needed to know how many survived.

In late February, we trekked into Kosciuszko National Park, through a landscape left charred by the ferocious Dunns Road fire. We surveyed the scene, calling out ‘Hey, frog!’ At ponds not severely burnt, reasonable numbers of northern corroboree frogs responded. At badly burnt sites where frogs had been found for twenty years, we were met with silence. The adults there had likely died.

After completing our surveys, we collected the now-melted cameras we’d deployed eight months earlier. Some weeks later, these would reveal just what the frogs had endured.

A tiny frog with a big problem

Northern corroboree frogs are tiny – no more than 3 centimetres long – and feature distinctive yellow and black stripes. They are listed as critically endangered but are more abundant than their close relative, the southern corroboree frog. They’re found only in the high country of southern New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory.

Before last summer’s bushfires, just a few thousand northern corroboree frogs were thought to remain in the wild. Our preliminary post-fire assessment indicates a substantial number might have died where fires were severe.

Caught on camera

Of the frogs’ two key habitat areas in New South Wales, one was burnt by the fires and one was left untouched. Over the border in the Australian Capital Territory, the fire damage was relatively slight, but the worst came later. After the fires, heavy rain in denuded, burnt catchments produced water run-off laden with sediment. Some frog-breeding habitat was eroded and filled with silt and ash. Once-mossy ponds were now gravel and ash.

In March 2019, we’d set up cameras to take one photograph a day, to monitor water levels in ponds. The fires burned the cameras, and some were also waterlogged. One of the authors, Ben Scheele, took them home and left them in his garage, assuming the footage was lost. But several weeks later, bored during the COVID-19 lockdown, he chiselled open the warped casing and removed the memory cards. Amazingly, most still worked.

They contained some fascinating images. A series of photos showed a pond in Kosciuszko National Park transitioning from a green autumn landscape, to the same area covered in winter snow, then to dry earth before the fire, and then the decimated, charred, smoky aftermath of the blaze (when the camera had fallen to the ground). Other photos showed how heavy rain had filled ponds with ash and sediment.

A frog emergency

Australia is home to around 240 frog species, most found nowhere else in the world. The expert panel advising the federal government on bushfire recovery has identified sixteen frog species likely to have been severely affected by last summer’s fires. All but one was listed as threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature prior to the fires. Importantly, the panel noted that not much is known about how Australian frogs respond to fire.

Many Australian frog species have adapted to survive fire. But last summer, fires tore through areas where such events are extremely rare. These included World Heritage rainforests in northern New South Wales, the only place on Earth that the mountain frog calls home. How these frogs will respond to the fires remains to be seen.

For species associated with streams, such as the Barred River frogs, the impacts of fire may not be immediately apparent. Males typically stay near streams and may have escaped the flames, but females spend much time away from streams and many may have died. These frogs are long-lived, so it may be many years before population declines are detected.

A shared fate

The effects of last summer’s fires on frogs are likely to be felt for years to come. For example, regrowing forests use lots of water, which will affect species in forested areas such as the northern corroboree frogs. This compounds a trend towards less rainfall under climate change, which is already driving their decline.

Annual northern corroboree frog monitoring conducted under the NSW Government’s Saving Our Species program has been in place since 1998. This, coupled with the fact that about half the known sites were fire-affected, puts us in a good position to better understand the species’ responses to fire by comparing burnt and unburnt sites in coming years.

The Saving Our Species program and Taronga Conservation Society Australia have started work on a captive ‘assurance’ population for the species. The project, supported by Commonwealth funding, involves collecting eggs from the wild to safeguard the species’ unique genetic diversity.

Ongoing monitoring of other frog species is also critical. Importantly, anyone can get involved in helping us understand frog responses to fire through the FrogID app.

Habitat degradation, climate change and disease threaten frogs globally. In this, they have much in common with humans. Last summer’s severe fires were a direct result of climate change. Perhaps humanity should reflect on the fate we share with wildlife, and act.

David Hunter of the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment contributed to this article.

Some say we’ve seen bushfires worse than this before, but they’re ignoring a few key facts

Joëlle Gergis

Senior Lecturer in Climate Science, Australian National University

Geoff Cary

Associate Professor, Bushfire Science, Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University

Every time a weather extreme occurs, some people quickly jump in to say we’ve been through it all before: that worse events have happened in the past, or it’s just part of natural climate variability.

The 2019–20 summer bushfire crisis is a case in point. Writing in The Australian, columnist Gerard Henderson said: ‘In Victoria, there were further huge fires in 1983 and 2009. But until now, there was no suggestion that the state’s future would be one of continuing apocalypse.’

Of course, Australia has a long history of bushfires. But several factors make eastern Australia’s recent crisis different to infamous bushfires in the past.

First is the enormous geographic spread of this season’s fires, and second is the absence of El Niño conditions typically associated with previous severe fires. Third and most important, these fires were preceded by the hottest and driest conditions in Australian history.

Understanding Australia’s climate

As Australia’s climate has warmed since the 1970s, fire weather conditions have become more extreme, and the length of the fire season has increased across large parts of the nation. Human-induced warming has been evident in Australian temperatures since 1950. This has contributed to a clear long-term trend towards more dangerous fire wea...