If you come from rural Australia, you're probably worried about this...

By SAM MILLAR

Yackandandah. Where is that, you say? If you locate yourself around Tangambalanga, Mudgeegonga, Tallangatta or Mt Murramurrabong you’re not far off. Wodonga and Wagga Wagga are also just a stone’s throw away.  Yack (that’s what we call it for short) is the place that I grew up.

Being located in a region where bushy hills meet the Murray River and farmland vistas, the days of my childish innocence were spent swimming in creeks and dams, climbing eucalyptus trees, riding horses and exploring the bush beside my parent’s hobby farm.

But I’m worried about Yack. In the space of my secondary schooling, Yackandandah and surrounding towns have been threatened numerous times by devastating bushfires. The first was in 2003 when a nearby forest fire started burning directly towards the Yack township. We watched from my childhood property as the fire would ‘spot’ towards not only us (‘spotting’ is where a fire creates new fires ahead of itself through airborne embers), but the entire town.

With every 10 minutes that passed, a new set of enraged flames would light the dark silhouette of the hills, making us more and more nervous about whether we would have our house, and our lives left by the end of the night. We raced to get our gutters filled with water, sprinklers set up and fire-safe clothing on to fight our first ember attack. Just as the fire started to hit the first properties on the town’s outskirts, the winds changed and blew the fire away from both us and the town. It was a close call.

When in 2009, on the day of Black Saturday, a fire started near the town of Beechworth, we thought ‘here we go again’. Being a member of my local CFA brigade, I was called to go and fight the fire. As a newly joined volunteer, they put me on the flank of the fire, defending local property two days after the fire had started – it was hot, smoky and often hard to see and breathe, but it was bearable. For the guys in my brigade who were nearest the firefront, it was a different case.

‘Unbearably hot air filled with embers’….‘Like no fire I’ve ever experienced’…. ‘So hot you couldn’t go even get in.’ This was how it was described by the other firies in my brigade. It was second time lucky for Yack, but by the time the fire was put out, lives had been lost in a neighbouring valley and many properties destroyed in the surrounding region.

As many in regional New South Wales, South Australia, rural Victoria & Melbourne’s outer-north will have discovered over the last summer, living through a bushfire takes its toll not only physically and financially, but psychologically.

The CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology finds that due to changes in our climate, there is an increased risk of bushfires in South-Eastern Australia. No fire can be primarily attributed to climate change, but the fires experienced by Australians both in recent years and over this, long, hot summer can be taken as a sign of things to come.

I know that the only way to limit the effect of extreme weather on Australia is for strong action on climate change. At a time when our current Government is taking us backwards on climate action, the only way we can make them listen is to build a movement of people who demand action on climate change.

That’s why for the last five years I have also been a volunteer with The Australian Youth Climate Coalition. We’re building a generation wide movement to solve the climate crisis – we currently have over 115,000 young members.

The AYCC has a vision for the ambitious action we need to secure a safe climate – our Safe Climate Roadmap:

1. Reduce our pollution at least 40% by 2020
2. Invest in transitioning to 100% renewable energy within 10 years
3. Move Australia beyond coal and gas

So far 7,000 individuals and organisations have signed the Roadmap, including a Reverend, a firefighter, a supermodel, and Independent MP Andrew Wilkie. We’ll be taking these stories to our politicians to call on them to make the Roadmap a reality.

If we don’t aim higher and implement our vision, we risk seeing more summers and more bushfires like these.

One day, I’d love to move back to Yack and provide my future children the same experience as I had of growing up in a healthy environment filled with life and adventure. However, the thought of dealing with bushfires year in, year out is hard to fathom and will make all the difference in whether this dream of mine becomes a reality.

Sam Millar has been a volunteer with the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC) since 2009. The AYCC is currently building Australia’s vision for tackling climate change through the Climate Roadmap campaign.