Paddy Manning - Body Count: How Climate Change is Killing Us

Praise forBody Count

Moving stories of heroic courage and tragic loss. A pause to reflect on the lives lost and how urgently we need change.

David Pocock, former Wallabies captain

Like the climate nemesis stalking our witless human herd, this book is credible but unthinkable. It is 48 degrees in the shade. A climate emergency tour de force.

Dr Bob Brown, former leader of the Australian Greens

Poignant stories of heroism and unimaginable loss Body Count is a brilliant exposition of why we must deal with the climate problem now.

Professor Ross Garnaut AO, Professor of Economics at the University of Melbourne and author ofThe Garnaut Climate Change Review

The connection between climate change and the cost to human health is no secret. It has been recognised for decades, and for decades, politicians have failed to act. Through the accounts of people who have lost so much, Paddy Manning drives home the deeply personal impact of climate change. Governments continue to ignore the impact on climate change on human health at OUR peril.

Dr Kerryn Phelps AM, Adjunct Professor NICM Western Sydney University, former independent federal member for Wentworth and past president of the Australian Medical Association

This book gives us a compelling exposition of the connection between the health of our planet and the health of its people [It is] a stunningly powerful call to political leaders everywhere who hear the warnings of the devastating impacts of climate change on health but fail to act.

Dr Helen Haines MP, independent federal member for Indi and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Rural Health, University of Melbourne

This important book is an insight into the consequences of ignoring the warnings of climate and public health scientists. Featuring journalistic precision, and a storytellers gift, Body Count is not just a compelling read, but a timely reminder it is our lives that are at stake.

Fiona Armstrong, founder and executive director of the Climate and Health Alliance; Honorary Associate, Department of Public Health, La Trobe University

Body Count should be on everyones reading list. It cuts through the swathe of propaganda that climate change is not something to worry about. Spoiler alert: it is. Australias climate wars have moved well beyond Parliament House, placing all Australians on the front line. It is precisely what all Australians need to read.

Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW, and publisher of Scorcher.org.au

This anthology of human stories about health and global warming makes clear that climate change is not an abstract, future issue. Our climate has already changed, and its claiming the lives of people we know. We must act urgently. There is no time to waste.

Tony Capon, director of the Monash Sustainable Development Institute and chair in Planetary Health in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University

BODY COUNT

First published in Australia in 2020 by

Simon & Schuster (Australia) Pty Limited

Suite 19A, Level 1, Building C, 450 Miller Street, Cammeray, NSW 2062

A CBS Company

Sydney New York London Toronto New Delhi

Visit our website at www.simonandschuster.com.au

Paddy Manning 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

Cover design: Lisa White

Cover image: Alex Coppel/Newspix

Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

ISBN-13: 978-1-9254-5676-9 (eBook)

To the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives in the stories told here:

Dick and Clayton Lang

Alison Tener

Leigh and Charmian Ahern

Jenny and John Barnett

Vivian Chaplain

George Nole

Chuck McLeod

Donna and Jordan Rice

Llync Chiann Clarke-Jibson, and Garry and Jocelyn

Brian Wilson

Trevor Foster

Mary Allford

Sam Lau

Leonie Jackson

Andrew Wilford

Annemarie Jubb

Tony McMichael

and the relatives of Bruce Shillingsworth.

They died too soon.

Thankfully weve had no loss of life.

Scott Morrison, Australias prime minister, was grasping at empathy.

Two, a local woman corrected him. Weve lost two.

Morrison had come to South Australias Kangaroo Island following a wildfire described as virtually unstoppable, at the height of a disastrous summer when it seemed most of the country was ablaze.

Two. Yes, two, thats quite right. I was thinking about firefighters firstly, Morrison explained awkwardly, to polite nods. The prime minister had put his foot in it again.

Wherever he went on his tour of devastated firegrounds ostensibly to provide support, comfort and a semblance of leadership Morrison was managing to turn natural disaster into a public relations disaster. In Cobargo, in the New South Wales South Coast hinterland, firefighters refused to shake his hand. Youre not welcome, you fuckwit, yelled one man as Morrison retreated.

The fires on Kangaroo Island, a world-famous retreat with rugged coast and stunning wilderness known locally as KI, had begun with lightning strikes a week before Christmas. The largest were at Ravine, in the Flinders Chase National Park in the north-west, and Duncan, in the north. The Duncan fire was soon contained, but over the next two weeks the Ravine fire escaped the park and burned down nearly half the island almost 200,000 hectares knocking out power and water treatment on the western side. The clifftop Southern Ocean Lodge, ranked the best hotel in the country, was reduced to cinders while a skeleton staff huddled in a bunker. Parndana was evacuated. Emergency warnings or watch-and-act advice were put in place for most of the island.

In the aftermath, local KI farmer Dave Halloran told Channel 7 the Ravine fire could also have been contained. Halloran was an official aerial fire spotter and was in the air with the local Country Fire Service chief at dawn on Monday, December 30th a day of catastrophic fire weather. At that stage, he recalled, the Ravine fire was burning about as big as a football oval in light vegetation. Aerial water bombers arrived after lunchtime, but by then the fire had taken off.

Soon the Ravine fire was threatening the family property of another local Gosse farmer, Dan Florance, who posted phone videos on Facebook first a tower of smoke, then a firenado tearing across his paddocks. On New Years Day, as a CFS back-burn upwind of his farm raced towards them, Florance posted a short sharp message: If anyone can and is close to us come to our side fucken quick. His neighbours rallied, and so did Dick and Clayton Lang, whose property at Wisanger was an hour and twenty minutes drive away.

Desert Dick Lang, 78, had just retired a month earlier, and was planning to finally spend more time with his wife of 55 years, Helen, after decades running his adventure touring business without ever taking a holiday. A knockabout former maths teacher from Adelaide, Dick became a renowned bush pilot and tour guide. Outdoorsy and garrulous, Lang had realised back in the sixties that he could offer four-wheel drive tours to remote spots like the Flinders Ranges and Lake Eyre. Initially run out of the high school common room, Langs Desert Trek business took off. He quit teaching, got his pilots licence and took charter flights all over the outback, and abroad to Papua New Guinea, even venturing into Zimbabwe and Botswana.