Beneath the fear lies a darker knowledge. This is how it happens. This is desertification in action. And anger, because it needn’t be happening. We’re breathing woodsmoke, flavoured with burnt echidna, but it’s Scott Morrison’s coal-fuelled fire that’s turning our lovely world to ash. Loading It’s a less-than-two-hour journey but, determined to welcome 2020, we drove to the farm in deepening silence. Winding through empty paddocks, silent bush and orange smoke that sat on the road heavy as a protest movement, we were all thinking it. End-times. But in Sydney, tonight, they’ll party. They’ll laugh and dance in the streets, and thrill to the sheer visceral roar as the colours bloom in the sky, sharing the easy euphoria. It seemed obscene. I couldn’t believe they’d really do it. Nil carborundum, sure, but to spend $6.5million on “the biggest Harbour Bridge display yet” while, all around, people are living with the dead earth, starved animals, empty paddocks and inflamed skies of climate apocalypse seems like misplaced defiance. It’s bad manners, bad messaging and bad juju.

Excepting our political leaders, everyone seems affected. The chap serving in IKEA had family in the Hunter, Cootamundra and Mogo, all fighting or escaping fires. On the Cooma Road every vehicle carried a 1000-litre water tank. In Canberra Hospital Emergency, on Monday, waiting hours with a kid afflicted by heatstroke, everyone was checking Fires Near Me for news of property, friends or relatives. Same in the library café. All talk was of fire location, fire behaviour and how to emigrate to New Zealand. This isn’t just a land of drought and flooding rains. You expect a few days of this, every summer, not months. But for a month now our farm has sat under a pall of smoke. It lightens, now and then, but not for long. Illustration: Simon Letch Credit: Last week, on another day from fire hell, I had two pre-breakfast tasks: to muster the cows onto the last-remaining paddock of long grass, crunchier than a carton of fries. And check the creek. The water wasn’t still running. No one expected that. But I had to count what holes remained, should the spring dry up. Locals say that’s never happened. Now it seems almost inevitable. Same with our never-fail creek, mostly now a mass of dead river weed. Even so, we’re lucky. For these sad remnants of grass and water are the last in the valley. And although, ironically, the smoke impedes our solar, we’re not dying – yet.

In Braidwood, our nearest town, the Kings Highway zig-zags through to Batemans Bay. It should be chokka-block with summer traffic. Now it’s empty, smoky and suffering. Loading This isn’t normal. This is record drought, record temperatures and unprecedented fire behaviour. Gulgong has had under half its normal rainfall three years running. Braidwood has almost no water left. Mogo, Cobargo and Balmoral are destroyed. Australia broke its all-time temperature record twice in December – recording an average maximum of 41.9 degrees on the 18th. The continent-wide dearth of rain is due to the unusually pronounced temperature difference between the African west Indian Ocean and the Australian east; the Indian Ocean Dipole. Supercharged by global warming, this has brought flooding to eastern Africa (displacing 2.5 million people since July) and combustible drought to Australia. And every piece of coal we sell makes it worse. In the country everyone is alert, under threat. No one knows if their farm, house or town will exist at summer’s end. “How are the fires near you?” is the standard greeting. Everyone is off fighting fires, week after knackering week. No one is doing life-as-usual, much less business as usual.

Yet back in Sydney, NYE 2019 was very much business as usual. Tanya Goldberg, head of the city’s major events, was sent to extinguish media spot-fires. “Cancelling would seriously hurt Sydney businesses,” she said, “particularly in the wake of … a weaker retail season.” Moore argued that “people have already flown in and paid for hotels and restaurants”. Shopping? Tourism? Seriously? Loading Sure, people were encouraged to donate. But for the world, and for the country, the message was one of arrogance. The world already sees Australia ignoring its carbon commitments and becoming a “poster child for climate change”. It sees us pretending to be all white teeth, blue sea and bare bottoms a la Kylie “MateSong” Minogue while extinguishing native title for Adani. It sees our fires rage and burn while Sydney, oblivious, parties on. Sydney’s fireworks intransigence seems eerily to echo Australia’s intransigence on climate. As the Washington Post notes, “Morrison is an ardent supporter of coal.” Morrison’s planned India trip for coal-talks may or may not proceed. But until he confronts our reality of climate-hell, until he stops making bedroom eyes at Adani, with its12.5 billion-litre water draw-down from our drought-stricken rivers, until he brandishes a solar panel in parliament, we’re still going to feel his betrayal.