We’re All Going To Die

By the time I was ten years old, Australia was the only home I really knew. I had been born in Southampton, but my family moved to Perth when I was four. Perth may have been one of the most isolated cities in the world, but to me it felt like paradise. Sunshine, beaches, bushland and an enormous blue sky that seemed to go on forever.

In 1999 my concerns were those of a fairly sheltered ten-year-old girl. I listened to the Spice Girls and experimented enthusiastically with blue and pink eyeshadow. I devoured magazines that advised me to practise kissing my pillow so I’d know what I was doing when the real thing eventually happened. My favourite television show was The Brady Bunch. It was, in retrospect, an extraordinarily innocent existence.

I was also a tomboy. I climbed trees, ran around with the boys, and kicked footballs. The brown, elliptical Australian kind, not the sensible round British kind. We lived in the countryside and sitting high in the branches of a tree, surrounded by nothing but bush and sky, was my favourite place to be. I was an incredibly happy kid. I had no reason to believe the world was anything other than beautiful, enormous and waiting for me. My hopes for the future were limitless. Anything was possible.

Then, on an otherwise completely ordinary day at school, our class filed into the library to be given our first proper assignment. We were ten now, and apparently mature enough for serious academic work. We had six weeks to choose a current problem making headlines in the news, research it thoroughly and write a report. I opened up the school computer. We had only just learned how to use this new sensation called the internet and had even been taught how to make a webpage in HTML. Clearly, I was already something of a computer whiz. I looked at the headlines.

I clicked.

Apparently, something called global warming might turn the Great Barrier Reef, our national treasure, splashed across virtually every Australian postcard, into an environmental wasteland within 100 years. I would be ancient by then, probably dead. But my children wouldn’t be. Then I found other articles saying it could happen much sooner. One expert was warning of just 30 years. That was different. Thirty years wasn’t some unimaginable point in the future. I would only be forty.

I couldn’t believe it. We were always taught how important the Great Barrier Reef and its tourist industry were to Australia. Whole towns and businesses depended on it. I remember thinking this could be disastrous for the entire country. I kept searching global warming. One article led to another. Flooding. Hunger. Disease. Water shortages. My stomach tightened. Then there was the ozone layer.

I clicked.

Apparently, Australians were more vulnerable than the rest of the world, especially to cancers, because there was a hole in the ozone layer directly above us. I knew the ozone layer protected us from the sun, and too much sun could give you cancer. Were we going to be burnt alive? I looked up at the sky, half expecting to see the hole. Could I feel it right now? Was it giving me cancer already? Apparently, it would harm marine life as well. Poor turtles. I felt dizzy.

Until then, the future had meant boys, makeup and all the exciting things I imagined adulthood would bring. Now I was starting to question whether I had a future at all. Suddenly this wasn’t just a school project anymore, it quickly became an obsession. I copied and pasted all the information I could into a document and printed out my finished assignment that night. Thirty pages worth. I handed the whole thing in the next day, enormously proud of myself.

My teacher was not impressed. “You’re not supposed to hand it in until the end of term,” she said, with the particular exasperation of a teacher, confronted with a child who has spectacularly misunderstood the point of an exercise by trying far too hard. It wasn’t the first time I’d handed something in early. Goodie-two-shoes alert. But I desperately wanted her to read it. Did she know our planet was on the brink of collapse? Had she been to the Great Barrier Reef? Did she realise we were all going to die?

Her name was Ms Chin and, to my ten-year-old eyes, she was very old. I wanted to tell her she’d better hurry up and see the Great Barrier Reef before it disappeared, but I thought better of it. Ms Chin was a little scary if I’m honest, and apparently even impending planetary catastrophe had its social limits. If the newspapers were worried and the experts were warning us, then as far as I was concerned, it was going to happen.

I have always been an over-thinker. In less than forty-eight hours, I had gone from wondering about whether I was kissing my pillow correctly, to worrying about ozone holes, invisible gases, radiation, and the temperature of the entire planet. These were problems so enormous that I could barely comprehend them. But I wanted to do something. I wanted to help save the world, like my TV hero Captain Planet. There was only one slight problem. I was ten. So, I did the only thing that I could do. I worried.

The threats I had discovered the previous day didn’t disappear when Ms Chin put my thirty-page masterpiece on her desk. They followed me home. My world had changed. These were not the sort of problems you could forget about. They became the new monsters in my closet.

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