This year your online Australian and US editions have introduced a British readership to a wealth of new talented writers, and I am grateful for the increased understanding of the politics and cultures of those countries. You are doing a great service by embracing the English-reading world. In particular, I feel sure many Pommies feel great empathy with the Aussies in their plight with the unprecedented bushfires. As Brigid Delaney writes (The climate crisis is here, and 2019 was the year I saw it, Journal, 21 December): “It was the year many [Australians] stopped disassociating, woke up and realised the party is over.” We British are not far behind you in this regard.

Geoff Naylor

Colden Common, Hampshire

• It seems the economic losses and fatalities from the bushfire catastrophes we are experiencing are not enough to move the Australian government’s lack of resolve to deal with the elephant in the room. As the world watched Australia burn, Angus Taylor shamed us in Madrid, and Scott Morrison basked in the sun in Hawaii. Will it take a conflagration of biblical proportions to stir the Liberal party’s climate-change deniers?

Jon Jovanovic

Lenah Valley, Tasmania, Australia

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