Having traced an elegant double helix across south-eastern Australia on a recent 3000 km discovery tour – sampling remote beaches and national parks, small-town motels, walks, regional galleries and op shops, whilst dodging floods, mosquitoes and school holidays – we’d returned home after 16 days tired but inspired.

It had been tough and tedious pulling out of COVID + Sydney’s wettest year since white-fella records began (1858). Weathering 2500 often-torrential millimetres, our bathroom ceiling had begun to resemble a sieve + the factory’s vast, seeping corrugated roof had needed 400 ageing screws replaced. Out in the garden our hardy but now-waterlogged banksia and xanthorrhoea had hung on only by a thread.

Such urban discomfiture (the mild panic of rain drumming too violently upon tin?) of course bears only scant comparison with the savage disruption and emotional distress wrought by extreme weather across regional communities in recent times. So it is quite wonderful to report that on our serendipitous journey south we found ourselves constantly (almost guiltily) buoyed by joyous, often unscripted encounters with people, nature and art… in Bowral, Canberra, Braidwood and Bermagui, in Eden, Sale, Binginwarri, Inverloch and Korumburra, on Phillip Island, in Mornington, Melbourne, Seymour, Shepparton, Benalla, Bright, Mt Hotham, Omeo, Cann River and Saltwater Creek.

On lonely roads with limited reception we heard newly-installed independent senator David Pocock speak truth to power in federal parliament with impassioned attacks on coal and gas, and environment minister Tanya Plibersek pledge to halt extinctions.

Everything seemed (miraculously) interesting again… alive with possibility. Beside the highway’s damp macadam ribbon unimaginable new shapes and colours burst gently before our eyes.