It seems wrong, as a supposed writer, to be silent about the bushfire crisis. I haven’t even written anything in my diary about it. It’s like someone living through the opening days of a terrible war and not remarking on it. But like so many Australians, I’ve been following compulsively. Through Twitter in my case, the feed refreshing to show photos out of Mallacoota as the sky turned red and then black, and tears came into my eyes at the thought of those thousands on the beach and in the hall as they waited for the end of the world.

The compulsion has also been because I thought that this, finally, had to be the turning point. This was when Australians woke from our complacent sleepwalk into climate change. This was when we realised what a hotter world was going to be like. But someone tweeted weeks ago that climate action is to Australia like gun control is to America. And sure enough, the fossil fuel industry, the Murdoch empire, the LNP, and the other climate deniers are trying to fool us again, to take us away from the moment we could demand real action.

Australia, don’t be fooled. Listen to the science. Get out on the streets, demand change.