On the last Wednesday morning of November, 2021, Sergeant Bob Davenport sat at his desk in the Burra Police Station scrolling through emails and half listening to Radio National. Someone from the Bureau of Meteorology was describing the weather pattern, which had delivered five times their average monthly rainfall in a matter of a few days earlier in the month, as an atmospheric stream of moisture driven by warmer than usual waters off the north coast of Australia.
Climate change, thought Bob, leaning back in his chair to listen. Everybody he’d spoken to in town was talking climate change. He hadn’t seen that much water flowing in any of the local creeks ever, and neither had any of the old-timers who had spent their entire lives in Burra.
When he’d been posted to Burra, in what the loca
