Australia's National Climate

Commentary Australia’s national climate: learning to adapt?

Lauren Rickards,1* Timothy Neale2 and Matthew Kearnes3 1Centre for Urban Studies, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 2Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria, Australia 3Environmental Humanities, School of Humanities and Languages, The University of New South Wales, Kensington, New South Wales, Australia *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Received 6 December 2016 • Revised 18 April 2017 • Accepted 31 May 2017

Abstract

Pride in Australia’s extreme climate has long been a part of Australia’s national identity. Today, climate continues to be enrolled in a range of nationalistic projects, including the (re)development of climate science and other responses to climate change. In this paper, we outline some of the contours of the ‘Australian national climate’, claims to know it, and four idealised responses to it: bounce back, dismissal, endurance, and migration. We argue that the deeply cultural framing of climate in Australia—in particular, Australians’ emphasis on the climate’sinherent variability and unknowability, and their own historical adaptability—is being exploited by the federal government and hampering climate change mitigation nationally.

Keywords climate; climate change; nation; adaptation; resilience

The different meanings of climate in an effort to salvage their season’s income (Dowler, 2015, n.p.). Posting a link to the In 2015, southern Australia went through the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s warnings hottest October on record, beginning with the about the hot conditions, the President of the hottest Australian Football League Grand Final Victorian Farmers Federation Grains Group, ever played (Dmytryshchak, 2015). The day Brett Hosking, tweeted ‘this is not how October before the big game, the Victorian Agricultural should begin’. He explained to a journalist that and Regional Development minister, Jaala farmers ‘knew it was going to be a tough year’, Pulford, posted enthusiastic tweets about the and the hot weather would ‘make it sunny weather, including one regarding the exceptionally challenging for a great many town of Ballarat: ‘Oh my, that’s good looking growers’ (Wagstaff, 2015, n.p.). Reﬂecting on long weekend weather—perfect for a trip to Pulford’s tweet, he suggested that she try to regional Vic. #springst #GrandFinalFriday’. remember ‘that what is good weather for some is As an altogether different picture of ‘this challenging for others’ (Dowler, 2015, n.p.). weekend’s weather forecast’ emerged from Implicit in his rebuke was the familiar refrain that farming groups, critics damned the tweet as urbanites ‘do not understand “the bush” and evidence of the Minister’s inexpert cannot be trusted to protect rural interests’ understanding of the agricultural meaning of (Botterill, 2009, p.61). In turn, this refrain implies weather. Record temperatures in the Victorian that failing to understand the climate and the grain belt had vulnerable grain buds ‘frying on meanings of its variability is to be less than fully the stalk’ and many farmers harvesting quickly Australian.

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The apparent disconnect between the as the grounds for chauvinistic notions of white Agricultural Minister’s and farmers’ views of the national character and territorial sovereignty.^ hot weather illustrates how climate and climate The argument was twofold. First, climate was knowledge is political; climate ‘means different enrolled in pseudo-scientific claims about the things to different people in different contexts, inherent inferiority of the original inhabitants and places and networks’ (Hulme, 2009, p.325). Ideas the consequent legitimacy of violent acts of settler of the nation, the national, and nationalism infuse colonisation (Anderson, 2006). Second, climate our understanding of climates past and future, was enrolled by settlers to help appropriate and vice versa. As the climate now changes rapidly indigenous identity for themselves, elevating them and materially, our learnt relation to it may no above not only indigenous peoples but also the longer be relevant or adaptive, even if this learnt British elite. Huntington (1924, p.5) directly relation is that to be Australian is to be climate applied his thesis on the ‘profound influence’ of adaptive. In this paper, we suggest that climate’s climate to Australia, positing that settlers could cultural character is revealed in how Australians ‘enjoy phenomenally good health’ in a seemingly are reacting both to human-induced climate inhospitable climate because they were change and to the ways in which climate change ‘physiologically different from the average people is being used to creatively and strategically of the British Isles’. In this view, settlers’ avowed reimagine the nation.^ In particular, Australia’s adaptation to the continent’s climate made them slow progress in mitigating human-induced biologically Australian in an inimitable way climate change, we suggest, reflects the fact that (Anderson, 2002). accepting and even celebrating this continent’s Adapting settler society to the continent’s ‘wild climate’ is core to a nationalistic sense of confronting climate also helped build the nation belonging and thus is something we are reticent in a more literal way by motivating the move to panic about or try to ‘fix’. from disparate colonies to federated states and territories. Between 1850 and 1900, the idea of Contested climate nationalism an Australian nation developed from ‘not much more than a geographical conception’ (Blackton, While climate is generally depicted as an 1955, p.121) to a distinct nationalist ethos among atmospheric and geochemical phenomenon, the colonies, compelled in part by environmental separated out in the non-human domain of challenges requiring coordinated governance such ‘nature’, it is deeply cultural and political. Just as as the aptly named Federation Drought (1895– climate is physically shaped by dynamic earth 1902) (Blackton, 1961). As elsewhere, the system factors, in which humans are significant dominant scientific voices of climate—climate actors, it is imaginatively moulded to the smooth science and meteorology—were entangled in cartographic boundaries of nations. The very idea these nation-building efforts, and enrolled in of climate, Hulme (2016, p.11) argues, is ‘bound mapping, securing, and cultivating the nation’s up with, inter alia, imperial power, chauvinism, territory.1 In Australia, as in the USA, identity, nationhood, diet, colonialism, trade, investments in atmospheric sciences were shaped health and morality’. Entangled and originally by, and shaped, the strategic prerogatives of an unchallenged histories of environmental and emerging nation, with its drive to secure territory climatic determinism (Anker, 2009) helped through pastoral and agricultural settlement germinate the notion of a ‘national climate’ by helping consolidate forms of techno-nationalism enrolling climate as a tool of territorialisation and (O’Gorman, Beattie & Henry, 2016). Other forms sign of belonging. In Australia, the unusual of techno-nationalism included government convergence of our political and continental meteorological surveys, as well as engineering borders makes this claim to a national climate and irrigation projects that were explicitly seem unremarkable. But what climate actually designed to immunise land managers, rural means for our sense of nationhood—and how communities, and the national population at large emerging changes to this climate are entangled against a variable climate. Although modest in with questions of nationalism—remains under- scale compared with US and Soviet projects, examined. Australian climate and meteorological science Historically, settlers across the British Empire after the Second World War was characterised strategically used Ellsworth Huntington’s now- by a focus on forecasting—and in some cases infamous theory that ‘the races of the Earth’ manipulating—weather systems in the service of emerge from specific climates to naturalise climate farming and grazing (Morgan, 2011).

The ‘nation’ of nationalism is always contributed to the work of the International Panel contested, and climate nationalism in Australia on Climate Change which, in turn, has informed is no exception; it too is a contested nationalism increasingly forceful United Nations guidance on characterised by particular antagonisms over the international action. Presented as ‘your national interests of Australians (Smith, 2011). This science agency’ (CSIRO, 2009, p.1), the CSIRO contestation is starkly apparent in how climate- has helped lead efforts to render the southern related sciences have been used in divergent hemisphere climatically legible, and been ways in relation to climate change. The commissioned to produce climate change infamous and regressive moves of recent fed- projections and other climate services to inform eral government administrations on climate decision-making across the Asia-Pacificregion. change action have enrolled Australian scien- The pervasive presence of CSIRO climate tific institutions in defensive forms of na- information in many businesses and agencies tionalism, using scientific research about the today points to its role as a trusted institution and continent to assert how exceptional Australia’s to the sense that its climate research is a ‘national environment, society, and global climate change treasure’ (Szelak, 2016, n.p.). However, responsibilities are. The self-serving Australia perversely, the very success of ‘our’ climate Clause insisted upon by the Australian dele- models was used in early 2016 to justify an attempt gation during the Kyoto Protocol negotiations— to reduce CSIRO’s research budgets and climate which enabled Australia alone to increase science capacity and reorient it toward private its emissions by including terrestrial carbon gain. The defunding of CSIRO climate research offsets in its emissions accounting—was based on the basis of its success to date implies that not just on its claims about the unusual Australians have now ‘domesticated’ their climate, importance of land clearing in the nation’s intellectually, if not practically. It is because we emissions profile. The negotiating strategy Australians already ‘know our climate’,CSIRO’s adopted by Australia also reflected prior new venture capitalist CEO and others imply, that investments in carbon cycling modelling that we can now forfeit much of our capacity to allowed terrestrial carbon fluxes to be quantified understand it (even if part of what we know is that (Pearse, 2013). In recent years, this interest in this climate is fundamentally altering due to land-based carbon offsetting projects has helped anthropogenic climate change). drive a policy push to create what could be called ‘Australian carbon’ in the form of Australian climatic identities Australian Carbon Credit Units. Although the program appears now to be under threat, carbon Entwined with the claim to ‘know’ the Australian farming has enjoyed bipartisan political support, climate is a long-standing emphasis on how wild underpinned by significant investments in and variable it is, at least to those intimate with it. national soil science infrastructures. Projects Situated within what is often described as ‘the regulated through the Carbon Farming Initiative most variable climate on Earth’, Australians seem (CFI)—and, more recently, the Emission cynical about the smooth homogeneity of the ReductionFund(ERF)—have generated global climate monolith presented in many climate Australian Carbon Credit Units using range of change discussions (cf. Hulme, 2009). Rather, ‘carbon farming’ methodologies. The aim of there is pride in understanding that ‘our’ national carbon farming is not simply to reinforce our climate is more about outliers than averages. national love of both carbon and farming, but For European colonists arriving in the to meet the nation’s international carbon eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as for many obligations, to boost the agricultural sector (as who followed, the unfamiliar variability of it begins to struggle with the emerging effects Australian weather and climate was disorienting. of climate change), and—critics such as the As Anderson (2002, p.11) describes, early Climate Council (2016) suggest—to delay the European settlers were shaped by the predictable necessary end of Australia’s economic dependence and sharp seasonality of western Europe and felt on fossil fuel consumption and exportation. self-consciously ‘out of balance with the new Australia’s transnational expertise in climate climate’; subsequently, those who managed to science has also recently become entangled in this thrive in ‘unruly’ Australian nature were quickly defensive formation. For several decades, the idealised. The Federation Drought and 1939 Black Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Friday fires were narrated as ‘epic elemental Organisation (CSIRO) and others’ models have dramas’ (Griffiths, 2003), establishing a now-

© 2017 Institute of Australian Geographers 472 Geographical Research • November 2017 • 55(4):469–476 familiar ‘battler history of endurance’ (Anderson, ‘bouncing back’ than on minimising or denying 2014, p.xii) written in the language of war. Images any bounce, the mode of resilience at work here of the ‘heroic squatter, the selector and the uses what psychologists call ‘positive reappraisal’, bushranger’ valorised forms of white masculinity wherein belief in one’s own capacities helps capable of thriving in this environment (Rickard, reframe challenges as actually benign (Troy & 1979, p.13). Today, the regular publication of Mauss, 2011). When such belief leads to popular histories of major natural disasters, like underestimating actual threats, such reappraisals the parties convened in the settler capitals of parallel the forms of climate change scepticism northern Australia when a cyclone is declared, that argue along the lines that it is ‘no big deal … suggests that Australians still revel in the at least for us’ (Norgaard, 2011; Van Rensburg & ‘wildness’ of the continent’s climate. But what is Head, 2017). the relation between this nationalistic pride in the Comfort and confidence in the face of power of our climate to shock and the much- challenges resonates with the traditional symbolic discussed settler impulse to ‘tame’ the figure of the ideal Australian, forged by the virtues environment? This apparent contradiction may be of ‘patience, endurance … and [a] salty attitude of resolved by the sense that, more than the irony’ (Sidney Nolan 1952, in Smith, 2003, p.57). environment itself, what we Australians need to In folklore, at least, Australians appear to greet master is our relation to and outlook on the climatic extremes with a pragmatic shrug and a environment. In the remainder of this paper, we determination to get on with things, whether that discuss four such idealised responses to the be politics, sport, or harvesting. During the continent’s climate: bounce back, dismissal, October 2015 heatwave mentioned earlier, endurance, and migration. journalists reported how ‘Locals shrugged off the The goal of quickly bouncing back from sweltering conditions’ (Verley, 2015, n.p.), just climatic adversity resonates with the belief that a as during the record-breaking January 2014 capacity to thrive in extremes is a sign of settler heatwave in Melbourne, Australian Tennis Open belonging. In the nineteenth century, one of the officials ignored complaints that the hot most climatically extreme states—Queensland— conditions were ‘inhumane’ while international was often represented as ‘the most “Australian” tennis players and fans collapsed around them colony’ because its residents avowedly embodied (Bishop, 2014, n.p.). And in October 2013, ‘fundamentally Australian traits developed then Prime Minister Tony Abbott dismissed through adaptation to a harsh pastoral climate’: suggestions that roiling fires in Sydney’speri- ‘practicality rather than book learning’, urban surrounds were linked to anthropogenic ‘mateship’, ‘independence’, and so on (Megarrity, climate change by insisting the conditions were 2008, p.127). In 2011, this pride in defiant ‘part of the Australian experience’ and had been resilience to a variable climate was illustrated present ‘since humans were on this continent’ when the Queensland government responded to (Hartcher, 2013). In this one deft denial, Abbott record breaking floods with Operation Bounce transformed the expanding fire season into both Back. Wearing an Akubra, the State’spremier a national trait and proof of the latter’s antiquity. declared to journalists: ‘We are Queenslanders, A different kind of climatic resolve, rooted in we will not be defeated!’ (Queensland hope rather than confidence, is captured by the Government, 2011, n.p.). word endurance. According to Elizabeth Povinelli The ways in which governments use climatic (2011), endurance is a defining characteristic of extremes and related emergencies to reinforce the “late liberal” present in settler democracies variants of nationalism and sovereign power are such as Australia, bound up with the vexed role well known (for example, Adey, Anderson & of indigeneity in national identity. At one level, Graham, 2015). Less acknowledged, in Australia Australians affirm Aboriginal peoples as ‘the at least, are equally common refusals to recognise world’s oldest living culture’, a revived or actively avoid disasters. Just as US wildfire determinism that positions Aboriginal peoples as fighters often view the dangerousness of fire as a intrinsically adaptive and resilient and, therefore, function of incompetence, and so do not see a source of wisdom for all (Neale & Vincent, themselves as being at risk (Desmond, 2008), the 2017). But at another level, positivity about sort of breathless awe of climate described earlier Aboriginal peoples’ endurance has clear limits, in is often paired in Australian culture with a that, while their perseverance is co-opted into phlegmatic attitude to climatic challenges legitimising narrations of the settler nation, the (Hayman & Rickards, 2013). Based less on same perseverance is simultaneously undermined

© 2017 Institute of Australian Geographers L. Rickards et al., Australia’s national climate 473 by continuing racialised governmentality. Further, Bouncing back from, dismissing, and enduring discourses of endurance rest on what Povinelli climatic extremes all summon images of people (2011, p.81) calls ‘messianic time’:the deepening their sense of belonging as they battle reassurance that persistence under present it out on the ground. But the last response we want suffering—including suffering imposed by the to flag—migration—provides a different state (Howitt & Havnen, 2012)—will be redeemed perspective on the striking expanse of the in some anticipated future. Today’s privations are continent and human movement. Often presented displaced and made ‘worth it’ by referencing both as a ‘last resort’, and associated with adaptation past and future greatness (Adams, 2016). failure, migration away from extremes has a For many early settlers, the enormous ambition certain legitimacy in the Australian context. The that drove their endeavours was whittled into a settler story itself begins with grand exoduses from quest to simply endure when facing Australia’s Europe and subsequent experimental settlements most iconic ‘disaster’: drought. Increasingly whose booms and busts were driven by climatic indistinct against climate trends, droughts in cycles and resource discoveries. Today, mobility- Australia have sometimes invoked strong based approaches to adapting to place-based government responses while also being used to climatic problems are increasingly lauded as culturally distinguish adapted ‘natives’ from others innovative (Bettini, Nash & Gioli, 2016), building by, for example, coding concern over drought as a on the way those in some regions have long tried form of incompetence and failure to understand to attract restless settlers by emphasising the the national climate (Botterill, 2009). In a famous relative merits of their climate (as Pulford’stweet exchange in the 1890s, for example, poet Henry above indicates). Reflecting the value placed on Lawson used his poem “The City Bushman” to choice of residence, both the farming and mining implicitly critique his contemporary Banjo sectors are decoupling worker residence from Patterson as an inauthentic bushman who ‘sought workplaces by using faster transport, improved the greener patches’ and ‘travelled like a gent’ communication networks, and automated (Lawson, 1896). Real Australians, as poet technologies to allow workers to engage more Dorothea MacKellar also suggested, were drawn flexibly with work sites (Standing Committee on not to green environments, like the British, but to Regional Australia, 2013). With climate change brown. This lesson has perhaps most forcefully impacts reducing the long-term feasibility of been directed at farmers, long criticised for certain businesses in their current locales, managing the land ‘like Brits, not Australians’. relocating them to other parts of the nation— Driven by Australian climate science findings temporarily or permanently, partially or fully— about the naturally high variability of the nation’s is increasingly an approved risk management rainfall (Stone, 2014), drought was removed from strategy. ‘Early adopters’ of such the National Disaster Relief Arrangements in ‘transformational adaptation’ are often hailed as 1992, accompanied by strong messages to forward-looking, agile leaders (for example, farmers that drought is a ‘natural’ occupational Marshall et al., 2014). Even non-human species hazard (Heathcote, 1988). Although an are being enjoined to adapt by utilising their Exceptional Circumstances legal clause has since capacities for mobility (for example, Gimona been called upon repeatedly to enable assistance et al., 2015). to certain farms, the governing expectation is that The ‘voluntary’ migration involved in farmers should presume drought is imminent transformational adaptation reinvigorates the (even in the wettest years) and prepare modernist sense of mobility as a quintessential accordingly. Moreover, policy emphasis on how marker of freedom. But in Australia, the concept drought is as much a demand as a supply of nomadism, historically used as a basis to problem supports the sense that such ‘disasters’ dispossess indigenous peoples, also serves to are avoidable by those well-adapted to the unique ground settler nationhood. In the contemporary Australian environment and are thus partly mobility-based view of Australian nationality, attributable to those suffering them. While such not only is climatic variability and environmental a message clearly has some merit this degradation logically managed through the astute responsibilisation of subjects for drought exploitation of spatial variability, but the nevertheless risks deflecting attention from associated movement across territory performs changes in climate by reiterating instead the multiple forms of nationalism, both modernist familiar message about the need to adapt to the and indigenous. In Australia, so-called ‘nomad continents’ uniquely variable conditions. tribes’ of bushmen were once celebrated for their

© 2017 Institute of Australian Geographers 474 Geographical Research • November 2017 • 55(4):469–476 self-reliance and adaptability (although, reflecting particular, peculiar sense of how humans should the contingency of such endorsements, these relate to their environment, and that now carries tribes were later reframed as ‘pathetic and the fingerprint of our nation’sresultantand downtrodden … the European equivalent of ongoing activities. Aborigines’ (Waterhouse, 2000, p.213)). Even today, while migration by others into Australia Conclusion is highly restricted and racialised, internal migration is normalised and associated with As Australians’ activities in coal, livestock, and personal success (Easthope & Gabriel, 2008). urbanisation help accelerate human modifications Internal movement across the country to the global climate, and Australian national demonstrates an ease with the expanse, diversity, policy continues to delay action and downplay and opportunities of the continent, and the mere the risk, it is worth reflecting on the factors that potential for such movement holds the promise contribute to this self-defeating situation. In this of a fresh start, replicating spatially the sort of essay, we have suggested that Australians’ pride creative destruction (implosion and rebirth) that in our ‘national climate’—with its naturalised is celebrated in many depictions of how resilient, climate variability—is potentially one such well-adapted subjects respond to climatic factor. For over two centuries, settler Australians extremes. Deborah Bird-Rose (2004, p.5) have been trying to understand and adapt to the suggests that many New World settlers still peculiarities of this place, while also strategically ‘imagine themselves free to depart … to escape avoiding responsibility for their interventions in the results of their actions, to search yet again those same peculiarities. The attempt to now for that better future’. This detachment from ‘pivot’ CSIRO towards climate change place, Rose continues, means living in ‘an adaptation is apiece with this narrative, side- endless overcoming’ of, and detachment from, stepping the need to mentally denaturalise the the present (p.5). It is an imaginary that climate and understand it anew as both affecting reinforces the modernist myth of overcoming us and affected by us. As the tweet by Brett nature, presenting unfettered freedom of Hosking above indicates, it is increasingly movement as a way of purportedly escaping past apparent that seasons are no longer functioning and future impacts of localised environmental as they ‘should’. It is also apparent that the new harms; a tactic that the global character of statistical normal is being confused with a new climate change reveals to be as ill-conceived as moral normal. On taking his leadership of the it is unethical. Liberal Party in 2015, for example, Prime Whichever one of the aforementioned climatic Minister Malcolm Turnbull (2015, n.p.) proposed identities—bounce back, dismissal, endurance, that ‘the Australia of the future … can’tbe and migration—dominates in any one time and defensive, we can’tfuture–proof ourselves’; place, they are collectively interpolated in calls ultimately, (economic) ‘volatility and change is for us to learn to ‘become Australian’ (for our friend, if we are smart and agile enough to example, Gammage, 2011). This sense that being take advantage of it’. In terms of the intrinsically Australian is something that we must learn related question of climatic volatility, what is positions the climate as both teacher and judge of missing from such a challenge is the fact that our belonging, a centring force for the nation and volatility is not something the smart simply source of nationalist differentiations between its embrace uncritically, but is also something they residents. Much as Tim Flannery (2002, n.p.) has recognise as potentially avoidable, often harmful, argued, the climate is ‘the only thing that we all, and frequently unjust. uniquely, share in common … the only force As the climate changes and climate variability ubiquitous and powerful enough to craft a truly increases, we need to look critically at the way Australian people’. More than one climate per se, colonial settlers psychologically incorporated and though, we suggest that what this continent’s tried to immunise themselves against such change occupants share is an entanglement in spatially, in the process of adapting to and claiming the temporally, and culturally variable articulations ancient continent as their own. This process of of climate. The question now is whether we can adaptation has been positive in many ways, and relearn to be Australian in a manner that so, in turn, have attempts to rectify the many acknowledges global and long-term, not just environmentally maladaptive ways of living that continental and transient, changes underway in settlers brought with them. But as the climate the climate; a climate that has shaped our now alters in new ways, being au fait with the

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