By Mark Kenny
We all know Canberra is chilly.
Some wear it as a badge of honour, while others find cold comfort (literally) in the sharp beauty of crisp mornings, azure skies.
By contrast, the sodden picture above shows the intersection of Captain Cook Crescent and Canberra Avenue in Manuka as seen from the front seat of an Uber ride.
This can be an inhospitable spot at an early hour with chill winds and frost under-foot – something I know only too well as an early morning runner.
However, the picture was not taken in winter nor even in the morning. Rather, it was snapped at the height of summer – January 20th at around 2:00 pm. And notwithstanding the leafless trees and abundant ice, it was far from cold.
Welcome to Canberra’s capricious, mercurial summer.
In the smouldering lee of Australia’s worst ever drought-heatwave-bushfire plexus, some might baulk at applying the term ‘disaster’, to the hailstorm which came like a crazed assassin from nowhere on that day.
Hunter S Thompson might have described nature’s fury as a “million-pound shit-hammer”.
Certainly “disaster” does not feel like a stretch to those who were outside when it hit. Nor even to those who emerged from homes and offices after the Armageddon of ice relented, ending as suddenly as it began.
Officially designated a catastrophe for insurance purposes, the damage from this extraordinary event - 10 violent minutes that changed the world – remains to be quantified.
A next-morning stroll around my neighbourhood in the inner-south suburbs of Manuka and Griffith revealed the ferocity of a tempest that saw thousands of tons of ice hurled at homes and businesses, shredding trees and shrubs, smashing birds out the air, shattering windows and skylights, tearing through awnings, and literally destroying thousands of cars.
Pets were terrified. Some were injured. Wildlife died. Again.
Along Canberra Avenue where the road curves around Manuka Oval - itself left white under the frozen deluge - decades-old fir trees now stand virtually leafless. As do many other varieties in the area.
It requires a double-take. At another time of year, such a vista might be unremarkable because deciduous trees lose their leaves in the colder months. This contributes to inner-Canberra’s distinctive Euro-Australian aesthetic.
But fir trees are evergreen and some in this region were already so stressed by the drought as to be marginal anyway. Now stripped of their foliage, many will not survive.
Along the streets running off Canberra Avenue it’s the same story. Conifers, plane trees, ash and elm, eviscerated, losing most of their leaf structure to the ground beneath.
Cars in the driveways also attest to the storm’s ferocity with the majority showing multiple dents, smashed windscreens and sun roofs, headlights and mirrors bludgeoned off, every panel pounded.
House after house also suffered. From the street one can see a shattered window here but many fared far worse.
Beautifully tended gardens in this leafy well-established area have been savaged.
Footpaths are barely navigable under centimetres of leaf and branch litter. Roads are strewn with the same, their gutters clogged.
Around Telopea Park, locals told me that dozens of birds had been blasted from their trees – even these harbingers of a change had been taken by surprise.
At ANU which had been closed for several days over summer due to the appalling air quality in Canberra, 80-plus buildings were hammered, with roofs, gutters, and skylights succumbing and again, cars wrecked in their hundreds.
Ducks near the Menzies Library were pelted.
Staff took those they could reach to the nearest vet.
The worst damaged vehicles were still in the uni’s parks the next morning despite another official campus closure, most had been rendered unserviceable.
In my own place, two skylights were smashed, but as the storm brought little accompanying rain (of the unfrozen kind) associated water damage was minor.
But many householders were not so lucky. Emergency services were overwhelmed. Homeowners were advised to join the queue.
A friend close by had several windows smashed and believed a ceiling collapse was imminent. She told of a stainless steel bin in an internal bathroom suffering a concaved lid – courtesy of an ice-missile through a roof window.
Canberrans are skittish after a summer in which the national capital has been baked and blanketed in a trauma-triggering haze for weeks on end.
An unnerving absence of rain, lethal heatwaves, and the wall-to-wall reporting of firestorms on all sides, have taken an emotional toll on a city ravaged in recent memory by fires which took out 500 homes and killed four.
Finally on Monday the smoke cleared, and the temperature abated. Reprieve.
But then this.
In Manuka, I sought solace in Canberra’s best bookshop, only to find it closed until further notice, yet another victim of storm damage.
Jan 20, 2020, provided a reminder that with a warmer more turbulent atmosphere come wilder, more terrifying micro-cells.
Or as one colleague put it, “climate change feels very real, very dangerous, and very personal when you’re in the thick of it”.
Mark Kenny is Senior Fellow at the ANU’s Australian Studies Institute and is host of the popular podcast series Democracy Sausage.
This article appeared first in the Canberra Times on 23 January 2020 - view here