Building up to the international climate change rallies on Friday September 20, I approached the event carefully with the girls, and I didn’t have any expectations that they would come. I didn’t want to force them to attend, and I had little faith in my ability to make them want to come. If they didn’t, I didn’t think I would attend either as I saw it as an event for children.
I picked them up from after school care the Wednesday before and had a short video of teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg on my phone that I was watching when they got in the car. After this piqued their interest, I found a longer one for the car trip home in which Greta explained why she was standing up against governments’ inaction, including how she had first become aware of the issue at the age of around seven and couldn’t understand why governments weren’t doing anything about such a huge global threat. I also showed them a video message from an Australian child speaking to Scott Morrison and explaining what climate change is and why it’s important in a playful way. I asked the girls that night and the next whether they would like to go, adding that I’d buy them sushi for lunch if they came. They both said that they would.
Friday was an unseasonably hot day, the regularity of which has been increasing in recent years. The traffic was really bad close to the park where they were gathering so I let the girls out to play in the playground there while I parked, letting Steve know he could meet them there. When I joined them all after parking and buying the sushi, the speeches were well underway but very hard to hear amongst the huge crowd. Steve supplemented the sushi with fresh orange juice with ice and then choc-cinnamon muffins for them while I finished up the girls’ leftover sandwiches from the day before, with some cold water I had brought. Eventually, after we had shuffled over to shelter under the shade of a nearby tree and had stood there for a while, the marching began.
I left Steve to retrieve Rhea who wanted to go to the playground instead, and Lara and I joined the crowd, comprised mostly from what I could see of adults, some with children. It was the biggest rally I’ve been to, and I’ve attended a few in my time. The roads were blocked off to accommodate us and Lara looked around, asking what the police were doing there. I felt very much part of a community as we all streamed under an underpass, repeating the chanting that some were leading. Lara and I stopped at the pink truck stationed at a corner, blasting out music and exuding bubbles, and we saw and waved to several of her friends with their families who marched by as we faced the crowd.
After reuniting with Rhea and Steve, we left the march to get the girls back to school and so I could get back to work. We saw a couple of the girls’ schoolmates when I took the girls back. One asked if they had been to the dentist. ‘No’, said Rhea. ‘We’ve been to a climate strike.’
We didn’t see ourselves on the news that night and when Rhea heard that the Government had done nothing in response to such large crowds, totalling 300,000 nationally, she was surprised and disappointed.
The movement is building though, and on a personal level, the girls have come a long way.
