According to the scientists, stationarity means that the statistical properties of a process generating a time series, do not change over time ( ). Watts calls this relentless unforgiving heat that swamped Australia, the ‘end of stationarity’. There wasn’t a day last winter when I didn’t see posts on Facebook with photos from my family of red skies at night covering Sydney, news reports of rural communities standing in the sea to protect their lives and animals, and tweets from a friend in Canberra on how the air was, for a brief time, the most polluted on the planet.
What until recently seemed so distant, untouchable, unidentifiable, is rapidly becoming personal, to us all. I thought about my mother’s experience as I read Madeleine Watt’s debut novel, The Inland Sea, and the countless other stories we now all have of climate change. An asthmatic, she panicked, but managed to rest in a nearby air-conditioned café, caught her breath and returned home. The sky had turned red, blistering, angry. But the further she walked, the more her lungs tightened, the more her legs weakened, the more the sweat stuck to her forehead like a piece of gaffer tape. The wind was picking up, but she decided to continue towards the train station. Leaving the air conditioning of the modern block behind, she was met with sauna-like air, thick, syrupy.
The air seemed clear that morning, the forecast calm, despite the summer fires. With little to do, she decided to venture into the centre of town, maybe catch an exhibition or have lunch. The apartment she was staying in had emptied of family, and she was alone for a few hours.
My mother recounts a story from a recent holiday in Sydney, Australia. The End of Stationarity: a review of Madeleine Watts’s The Inland Sea by Miki Lentin
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