Looking for water

by Hannah McManus (New Zealand)

I didn't expect to find Australia

The blue gums gave up sprouting leaves years ago, but thinning herds of cattle still stand motionlessly under them, remembering a sanctuary that dried up long ago. Their skin pulled taut across their concaving ribs, their hips jutting out at right angles, barely mustering the energy to blink away the flies that swarm at their eyes. We’ve been driving along the Mitchell Highway for three hours, with Sydney and the once-blue mountains behind us, and nothing but dust and more ash ahead. The dirt on the highway shifts steadily under the heat and across the bitumen. A shimmering empty promise of something more than dust. Something more than drought. When we’re 30 kms outside of Wellington we see a mob of kangaroos just metres from the road. But unlike the cattle, they haven’t found the bones of a tree to shelter under. “What’re they doin’ out here?” I mutter, too hot to throw any effort into my words. “Never seen ‘em this close at midday.” Dad’s silence lasts for a beat too long and pulls me from the wasteland outside the Falcon’s window. I look at him for the first time in hours. His cracked lips are pressed into a thin, hard line, deepening like the ruptures splintering across the earth in front of us. “They’re doing what the rest of us are doing,” he croaks, his voice as scorched as the earth around us. “They’re looking for water.” Yesterday my colleague asked if I was excited to fly back to Australia. We were sitting inside the small breakroom while rain pelted the warehouse roof with a vengeance. It had been raining in Christchurch for three days straight, but it elicited nothing inside me other than a vague annoyance. Rain is an old friend in New Zealand, and after living here for two years, I’ve come to expect the dark clouds to tumble over the mountains and knock on our door at least once a fortnight. “Are your family affected by the fires?” my colleague had asked, raising his voice over the deluge. “No,” I’d said. “We’ve been lucky.” Lucky. The word pushes into my mind like a thorn as I get out of the dusty ute and walk towards my childhood home. What was once grass crunches under my feet as I walk over the front lawn where we played cricket as kids. The rust-coloured sky is thick and even tastes charred. But yes, we’ve been lucky. The needle on the fire warning sign at the edge of town has pointed at “catastrophic” for so long that the paint has faded around it. Water restrictions mean 3-minute showers are the only reason to turn the tap on. And the dam that is the lifeblood of the town sits at a harrowing level of 1.6 per cent. But still, this is lucky. Across the state, across the country, 18 million hectares of this land has burned. While our home stands defiant in a blanket of smoke and ash, 3,500 have crumbled. While our dogs lazily wag their tails under a blistering sun, one billion animals have perished. And while we come together as a family, 34 lives have been lost. So yes. We’ve been lucky. My mum always said, “Give Hannah some dirt and a bucket of water, and she’ll be happy for hours.” But it was never just any dirt, and there’s no longer enough water to fill a bucket. I trace my fingers over the tired earth in our front yard. Over the lines that look like deep wrinkles on an immovable face. It groans and crumbles as my fingertips stain the colour of the sunburnt land. A deep red that soaks into the ridges of my fingerprints. A red that will last as a reminder when I’m 2,000 kms away, holding my breath as we descend over the green hills of Canterbury. And it’s not until I’m 30,000 feet above New Zealand, watching the hills gently nudge one another towards the alps, that the first droplets will fall. The only water to touch the red soil from home in years.