Proceedings of 1995 International Conference on Power Electronics and Drive Systems : 21-24 February, 1995, Singapore

Once you become alive to the multitude of relations that nourish you and make it possible for you to write, and of their reach well beyond the ones you have with other humans, you also realise that acknowledgements ought to be near infinite. Given the confines of the page, I limit myself to acknowledging just some of you. The land that has held me through this writing, the rainforest that has transformed from brittle back to cool and dank, the trees that have changed from summer to autumn to winter and now into spring, the birds whose songs kept me company and brought me joy when I felt dark, to all of the animals with whom I live and who never cease to remind me of your myriad ways of experiencing and communicating the world.

Turning now to the humans, my first thanks are to my friend and colleague Scott Stephens at the ABC. Beyond publishing three of the original pieces that formed the embryo of this book, you provided the listening into which I felt able to write in all of the rawness of the moment. Thank you also for reading and commenting on multiple drafts of this book, and along with your comments, always sending back an image of myself worth striving towards.

It was in the Sydney Environment Institute that I landed as I began to appreciate the true scope of ethics and politics, and the demand they placed on me to work in the world of environmental thinking and acting. Thank you for welcoming and supporting me Michelle St Anne, David Schlosberg, and all of the SEI crew. I also want to acknowledge the SEI for publishing some of the early material about Jimmy that made its way into this book.

The members of the Multispecies Justice collective have created an intellectual and emotional home for me as I have grown my ideas about what it means to live as part of a multispecies world. Thank you especially Sophie Chao, Dalia Nasar, Astrida Neimanis, Thom van Dooren, Dinesh Wadiwel, Anik Waldow and Christine Winter. Thank you Gemma Viney and Genevieve Wright for what you do to make our collective sing.

I shared the first draft of Summertime with the women in my writing group who have been a source of wisdom, sustenance and humour these last years. You offered me invaluable ideas that made this a far better book than it would have been without you. Thank you Barbara Caine, Helen Groth, Clare Monagle, Julia Kindt, Tess Lea and Glenda Sluga.

To my best friend and thought partner, Moira Gatens, thank you for being my teacher and continuing to be a reader in whom I have complete trust. As always, you provided me with keen insights into the text and the perspective of readers.

I am fortunate to have a number of people in my life with whom I am in an ongoing conversation about what it means to live and to live ethically in a climate-changing world. Our conversations have sunk into my own thinking and are woven through this book. Thank you Arielle De Bono, Andrea Durbach, Oliver Kunz, Sacha McDonald Shaw, Hugo McDonald Shaw, Laura McManus, Simon Perrett, Josh Salzman and Richard Sherwin.

Although they were not directly involved in my writing this book, I also want to acknowledge the people who played a critical role in our lives throughout the period of the fires, many of whom made it possible for us to care for the animals as the threat approached. In my local community, thank you Naomi Barrett, Wayne Barrett, Hilary Brickhill, Susan Locke, Sassi El Husseini, Di Ellis, Michael Ellis, Jen Rootham, and all of the people in the horse rescue network who came the moment I called. My special thanks to Heather Lord. Thank you to the friends and family who were so mindful in holding us as we tried to hold ourselves together, Toni Baumann, David Celermajer, Noirin Celermajer, Chris De Bono, Maryanne Kovaks, Chris Lawton, Lydia Loberthal, Karl Maton, Ruti Teitel and Julie Vulcan. Thank you to the extended network of folks who were intimately involved in caring for Jimmy, and who have been my teachers and partners in the world of animals, especially Melissa Boyde, Colin Dayan, pattrice jones and Catherine Schuetze. Thank you to the animal sanctuary network, especially Charlie Jackson-Martin, Penny Cameron, Melanie Ellis, Naty Guerrero-Diaz and Judy Woods. A very special thanks to the people whose hearts Jimmy touched and who sent healing remedies and thoughts to him in those weeks when he was deciding if he was going to live. My deepest acknowledgement and gratitude to you Marylin Mills; your love for animals, the constancy of your care and your courage are a perennial inspiration.

The team at Penguin Random House Australia has been brilliant and I am deeply grateful for your support, your encouragement, your advice, your expertise and your dedication. Until I worked with you, I had not imagined how wonderful it would feel to be part of a book-creating team. Thank you especially to my publisher, Nikki Christer, who saw Summertime before I did and who has been an invaluable conversation partner in bringing it to fruition. Thank you Genevieve Buzo, for your thoughtful editing, and to all the folks at Penguin who were responsible for what it takes to make a book and get it into the hands of readers. Thank you Richard Flanagan, for the gift of the name, and Dan Spielman for seeing Rilke in Jimmy and Katy as they lay, still together, in the sun.

I am very grateful to the photographer Adam Stevenson for noticing and capturing the moment of the kookaburra looking out at the fire-ravaged landscape and his generosity in allowing me to use it for the cover of Summertime .

All of the experiences written here were refracted through endless conversations and silences, then tossed back and forth and wrought into words until they were ready to rest for good on the page. That is you, L.

A professor at the University of Sydney, Danielle Celermajer has written two previous books, The Prevention of Torture and The Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apologies , for Cambridge University Press, the top publisher in her field. She has edited several other books for Bloomsbury, Stanford University Press and Routledge. She is a regular on ABC Radio Nationals The Minefield with Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens and The Philosophers Zone . She has also written for the Sydney Morning Herald , the Guardian and the Conversation.

I went and sat alone where Jimmy has been lying. It is way down in the bush. The light is soft, the air and the earth are cool, and the smell is of leaves and the river. I cannot presume to know what he is doing when he lies here, but it seems that he is taking himself back to an ecology not wrought by the terror of the fires, not fuelled by our violence on the earth. He is letting another earth heal him.

Philosopher Danielle Celermajers story of Jimmy the pig caught the worlds attention during the Black Summer of 201920.

Gathered here is that story and others written in the shadow of the bushfires that ravaged Australia. In the midst of the death and grief of animals, humans, trees and ecologies Celermajer asks us to look around really look around to become present to all beings who are living and dying through the loss of our shared home.

At once a howl in the forest and an elegy for a countrys soul, these meditations are lyrical, tender and profound.

Some words come to mind. They are the ones people from my culture say to each other when someone who was loved dies.

May their memory be a blessing.

Let the words not stop there.

May their memory be a blessing and a curse.