SAMMY HAWKER

Tom - evacuated to Narooma (watching pyrocumulus travel over the Pacific), 2019
pigment inkjet print on archival cotton rag

84.1cm H x 59.4cm W [edition of 10 + AP] | $1380 unframed

The talk on the radio has a hushed doomed feeling to it. The fire season has barely begun and bushfires are already ravaging the country. The rhetoric makes it sound like we are going to war, preparing our troops against an unimaginable catastrophic evil.  

We wake at 6am to pitch black skies and a NSWRFS EMERGENCY BUSH FIRE WARNING telling us to evacuate. The Badja Forest bushfire had moved in a type of blitzkreig over night decimating the township of Cobargo and now making its way towards the coast.

We head to Narooma and watch as birds flee the anarchic logic of the bushfire's own weather system. Around dinner time the world is cast in an eerie monochromatic red and I feel like I'm in a living nightmare of Olafur Elliason's Room for One Colour. We cook what feels like a type of last supper and sit around a cordless radio trying to work out which way the fires are moving. The newsreader tells us the Director of Mogo Zoo is sheltering red pandas in his laundry.

In the first month of 2020 the doomsday clock moves the closest to midnight in its 73 year history. Magpies learn to mimic the sound of emergency sirens.