For most of 2023, it felt like the world was screaming.
If 2022 felt like the year in between – post the shock of the pandemic, unsure of where we were going – 2023 delivered some terrifying suggestions that it was nowhere good, delivering cascading catastrophes that mostly bore human fingerprints, from war to nature’s fury, both relentless.
In a sense, it was a year in keeping with recent times.
We all know by now the Chinese suggestion that we might like to live in interesting times, but that now seems quaint, so let’s quote a Russian instead. “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen” is a quote sometimes attributed to Lenin, whose death centenary we will mark in a few weeks. Had he seen 2023, Lenin might have added that there are days when months happen, weeks when years happen, and years when you wonder how on earth we ended up here, sometimes feeling helpless.
To summon the other Lennon: Imagine all the people living life in peace? Yeah, no. Not right now.
People mourn as they wait to collect the bodies of friends and relatives killed in an airstrike on December 25, 2023 in Khan Yunis, Gaza.Credit: Getty Images
The horrors of war (Israel-Gaza; Ukraine) mostly defied belief, explanation and solution. The horrors of climate change – humankind’s greatest hits of the past century, condensed into a year – suggested the “alarmists” were right to be alarmed and might have understated the case. Oceans boiled, ice melted, lakes shrunk, rivers burst, species died. Locally, there was little to inspire us and many reasons to wonder if we are stalled. The country felt in a funk, never more so than when the Voice referendum went down in October, after a national conversation that felt grubby, no matter how you felt about the outcome. Bright spots? Thank goodness for Barbie and Taylor Swift and the Matildas – more on them later.
The year began as it intended to continue, with Australia underwater in three states. January brought floods in New South Wales, Western Australia and Queensland, a harbinger of a dire year to come in which fresh weather calamities arrived every day. The northern hemisphere summer petrified the already horrified, when a heatwave drove large cities to their knees. Canada was ablaze, fires so fierce the smoke decamped south to clog New York.
Few places were spared. Mid-year, the records burned.
The stories that shone some light in the darkness of 2023
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30.12.2023
For most of 2023, it felt like the world was screaming.
If 2022 felt like the year in between – post the shock of the pandemic, unsure of where we were going – 2023 delivered some terrifying suggestions that it was nowhere good, delivering cascading catastrophes that mostly bore human fingerprints, from war to nature’s fury, both relentless.
In a sense, it was a year in keeping with recent times.
We all know by now the Chinese suggestion that we might like to live in interesting times, but that now seems quaint, so let’s quote a Russian instead. “There are decades where........
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