Bushfires have of course long been a part of Australian life. The lexicon of bushfire is an important part of Australian English. The word bushfire itself is an Australianism, first recorded in 1832. From the late nineteenth century, we record many bushfire compounds, including bushfire risk (1892), bushfire threat (1895), bushfire country (1901), bushfire smoke (1870), bushfire season (1876), and bushfire menace (1906). Many of the terms we have seen mentioned in this recent bushfire crisis (a term dating from at least 1932) date back to the early decades of the twentieth century. These include bushfire plan, bushfire survival plan, bushfire warning, bushfire-affected, and bushfire emergency.

Our ‘emergency’ vocabulary has also expanded in recent years (and months) with a variety of technical and other terms entering the lexicon. We now find ourselves looking to see what the AQI (air quality index) is and whether it has reached a hazardous rating so we can use our P2 mask; we have become familiar with what a pyrocumulus, an ember attack, and a fire tornado are; and we know the difference between watch and act, emergency warning, and fires operating at advice level. Phrases such as stay and defend and too late to leave have entered our consciousness and, for some of us, have informed life-changing decisions.

Our recent bushfire disaster has taken place within a broader debate around climate change. Anthropogenic climate change has steadily transformed our public language, despite the presence of climate denialism. We have talked for some time now about the climate crisis and climate emergency, both terms that have dramatically increased in usage. Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2019 was climate emergency, Collins Dictionary selected climate strike.

Words that speak to the threat to humanity’s very existence have become more prominent. We see increased use of terms such as climate breakdown, tipping point, apocalypse, and mass extinction, and we have been introduced to the idea of omnicide. The latter, defined as ‘the killing of everybody or everything; the destruction of all living things’ was coined in the 1950s, but few of us were familiar with it until it started to be used in the media in recent months.

Although the bushfire crisis may pass for now, our public language is likely to have been changed forever. Will a language of crisis become what we live with? Will it help to motivate a feeling of urgency about doing something? How do we learn to live with a feeling of endless crisis? Eco-anxiety and climate change distress are now things many of us are experiencing.

Language does matter. A language of crisis can help to impart a sense of urgency and to make people more aware of the significance of the issues at stake. But it also might have counter-productive consequences. Perhaps most notably we have seen that the Morrison government, although no longer able to avoid discussing the consequences of climate change, appears to be developing a language that repeatedly uses phrases such as new normal. Such phrases run the risk of making us think only of adapting to consequences rather than, for example, addressing the need for our country to take immediate drastic action to curb carbon emissions, or to reduce our consumption. And the new normal is likely not to remain normal – things will almost certainly get worse.

Climate activism offers us the hope that we may be able to do something to effect change. School strikes, climate strikes, people’s climate assemblies, and climate protests might help to raise awareness. We now talk of climate justice. Calls for sustainability and living sustainably are more broadly informing our lifestyle choices, and community and volunteer efforts will help to make a difference to things such as the regeneration of the bush.

Resilience, climate mitigation, and (deep) adaptation are words we are hearing more of, as we learn to find ways to live, if we can, with a hotter planet and country. The increased spotlight on Indigenous ways of managing land offers one path. Zena Cumpston, a Barkindji woman and research fellow at the University of Melbourne, recently called for Aboriginal people to be restored as custodians of Country. There is much to learn from cultural (or traditional) knowledge of the environment, cultural fire-management practices such as cultural burns, and the leadership of Indigenous fire practitioners.