The Dusty Ground And The Dying Koalas

Australia is in deep shit. It’s the driest inhabited country in the world, and many parts have been in a state of perpetual drought since the mid-1990s. People across most of the country are now living under some form of water restrictions. You can’t even spill a couple of drops of the stuff accidentally without an angry neighbor smashing you in the back of the head like, “Dickhead, we’re in a drought!” And yeah, sure, it’s a problem for people in the suburbs who want a swimming pool (let’s make this simple—you have no fucking chance) and the sort of knob who wants to wash his car 11 times a week. But it’s those out in the bush, living off the land, who are bearing the true burden of the Australian drought. A friend of ours who grew up in outback New South Wales tells of a pretty typical experience for people there. On his way to school, he’d walk through a bunch of sheep paddocks. He recalls, “There was no water. All the mother sheep and their lambs had died as a result. I was like nine years old, looking at these sheep die and then watching the carcasses being eaten by flies. There would be a dying lamb, too weak to walk, crying out next to its dead mother while the flies were already laying maggots in its mouth. Every day. It wasn’t exactly

.”

And it’s getting worse. In fact, it’s so sad that if we don’t break down how bad it is into bite-size chunks, we would cry so much that our tears would fill up our keyboards and short-circuit our laptops and we would be electrocuted, and then we wouldn’t be able to tell you about the drought. It’s a paradox if ever there was one.

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