oming from Pakistan, I have grown up in a culture where even the mention of a pig is considered haram or forbidden. Living in Vanuatu, I have discovered a society where killing pigs is a revered tradition that carries great significance in determining one’s position in the social hierarchy. In fact, a person’s status in the community is measured by the number of pigs they have killed and shared with others. Furthermore, the pig tusk is regarded as a national symbol and exchanged as a valuable cultural gift. The story Daniele Celermajer has tried to tell in her epic Summertime-Reflections on a Vanishing Future traces the personal loss and grief of losing her pig Katy to the bushfires and observing the loneliness and recovery of Katy’s companion Jimmy.

Beyond that, it is an account of a lived experience of how one felt for weeks and months before, during and after the fire. It is a trail of what Celermajer calls an omnicide – the destruction of all life due to human activity and the struggle for survival, of saving the lives of all living beings towards which one has a responsibility.

The book takes you on an emotional journey where you must stay alert for weeks on end, never sure if the world you’ve adapted to, and every living and inanimate being, will survive. You search for ways to gauge the fire’s direction, speed and intensity and stay prepared - 24/7 - to evacuate all living beings and ensure their safety. You also read about the experience of bringing the animals back to their permanent home and how to share their grief until they recover and come back to life. These are some of the aspects of the journey you’ll undertake while reading the book.

Words alone cannot capture the story of Katy and Jimmy. To truly understand their tale, you must make a journey to their farm on the coast of New South Wales. A breath-taking two-and-a-half-hour train ride along the magnificent coastal line of New South Wales will take you to a small town. From there, you’ll drive up the hill for another 20 minutes until you reach the high valley that was once Katy’s home. Although she is no longer there, her larger-than-life presence can still be felt when you enter the door. To the left are the horses’ stables, and as you make your way through the farm, you see the homes of many different animal species, each with its unique living quarters. Then, as you walk down to the valley and approach the river, you feel the enormity of Katy’s presence around you.

The custom-designed houses of humans and animals in this farmhouse are envisaged around multi-specie justice, where all living beings are given due care, love and attention. From horses to ducks to pigs, donkeys, goats and trees, every specie living here has a name and gets equal attention from the caregivers – Daniele and her partner Leonardo. Not only humans and animals are equally valued here, but the books and the art collection too are held in reverence.

I was particularly impressed by two masterpieces from Pakistan, beautifully hung on the sitting area along with kitchen and dining table with a panoramic view of the farmhouse. One of them is a steel disc titled Teardrop by Anila Agha, “cut so that the light that passes through the stencilled patterns forms a counterpart shadow on the wall behind it”. The other masterpiece by Adeela Sulaiman is “made of 484 small sculpted pewter birds, threaded together with pieces of wire to form a huge curtain…”. This amazing piece of art is titled “After all, it’s always someone else who dies”, which sums up the story that Celermajer has tried to tell.

Across 197 pages of the book, Celermajer invites you to not count the losses caused by Australian bushfires of the summer of 2019-20 in terms of the numbers but feel the loss of every individual life that was lost to it. Why she does not like the idea of counting the numbers is because if you start counting the loss in terms of numbers, you cannot imagine them. She does quote an estimated number: three billion animals. If you start paying attention to each of these three billion animals for 10 seconds each, you will require 950 years to barely register them as individual beings.

The story of Katy, Jimmy, and the other three billion living beings lost to the fires is a call for thinking about our individual and collective responsibility to the world; what it has become and how much of that is result of our actions? It may not provide you with all the answers, but it will encourage you to ask the right questions. By investing her heart and mind into the world of Jimmy and many other animals at her multi-specie farmhouse, she has also started walking the talk.

A professor of sociology and social policy in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney, and deputy director at the Sydney Environment Institute, Danielle Celermajer has previously written two books, The Prevention of Torture and The Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apologies. She has also edited several books.

Summertime

Reflections on a

Vanishing Future

Author: Daniele

Celermajer

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton (An imprint of Penguin Books), 2021

Pages: 197

The reviewer is a writer, poet and translator. He is a pioneer of Pakistan Mother Languages Literature Festival. A democratic governance expert by profession, he is currently working for UNDP in Vanuatu.

He can be reached at niaznadeem@gmail.com