Hot Enough For Ya?

Not sure why this should be, but memories made in summer seem stronger somehow.

Maybe it’s extremity that lodges more easily in the mind; and summer could be that, especially compared to the moderate inconsequence of southern Australian winters.

Sitting today with the hot memories from very distant boyhood. Of Adelaide sweltering, waiting through a baking day with the winds pouring hot from the hills, eager for that first relieving whisper of an evening sea breeze.

I remember the houses of elderly relatives, locked down tight from early morning. They knew the drill: welcome the evening air then close the place down. Pull the curtains, shut the doors and windows tight. The long canvas rolled blinds came down to shade in porches, the bottom wooden bar secured with a buckled strap of leather to a metal loop in the polished concrete floor.

Come midday these homes were comparatively cool burrows, dark, a little airlessly close, the occasional chilled bottle of Woodroofe’s lemonade produce from a fridge that spilled light into a deeply shaded kitchen.

There’s a misty memory of one place, one aunt or another, where the entry hall was halved by a thick velvety drape a metre two inside the front door. You parted this curtain like an arras to move into the back of the house. I remember coming in off the street, that vivid, heat-whitened spread of concrete and tar, stepping through the iron and galvanized wire gate in a tall hedge, and then into the house and its overlapping sequence of slowly cooling shades.

I did the same from memory and instinct today as Melbourne set itself for an afternoon that might peak at 45 degrees. It was a lovely morning of soft cool air; hard to imagine what would follow, but by noon we’d reached 36 and climbing. No aircon here, so we darkened the house, closed off the furnace of the outside world.

The morning news reports carried an almost triumphalist air: heat records! Hottest ever! Hottest place on earth! Not a whisper, of course, of the long causal chain that has brought us here, of climate change, coal and culture war. Ouyen, 50 degrees! Punching above our weight.

I struggle to reconcile this heat with the heat of childhood memory. There’s an edge of extremity I guess, but also the modern overlay of cause and effect. These days seem no longer innocent, we’ve tampered with the blamelessness of nature. Now the heat carries with it the weight of its anthropogenic extremity and the promise of what is yet to unfold.

But I wonder too whether we’ll meet that future with this same sense of constant present, of events like today arriving from a cloudless nowhere. It feels like the pattern: meeting each gathering crisis with no thought for how and why. Some of that is wilful, some of it wishful. None of it is likely to lead to nostalgic reverie half a century on.