Surfacing

Written By Adam Martin

25-minute read:

A dream, a town meeting, and the little boy who moves the Pacific

I had a dream last week: I was swimming in Waubs Bay when the hills caught fire.

This is not a metaphor I built afterwards, the way a person tidies a dream into meaning once the kettle is on. It is what happened, in that other country we visit each night without a passport. I was in the water, cold even in memory, the colour somewhere between turquoise and glass, the granite boulders lit orange with lichen the way they always are, as though someone had taken a match to the rock itself and it had only half caught. I turned to breathe, and the hills behind the town, the low dark shoulders of bush that stand over Bicheno like something crouched and patient, were burning.

Not a smudge on the horizon you could mistake for cloud. A wall of moving orange, with black holes torn in it where the smoke thickened, and above it that particular copper light that real fire makes and film never quite counterfeits. I felt no heat, and I felt no wind, though I could see the wind in the way the fire leaned and doubled and threw itself forward along a ridgeline I know from a hundred ordinary drives, the one you see over your left shoulder coming into town from the south. I could not hear it either, which is its own kind of wrongness: a fire that size makes a sound like a train that never arrives, and my dream, for whatever reason, had taken the sound away and left only the picture, silent and enormous, the way grief sometimes arrives before the news that explains it.

That is the mercy and the cruelty of the dreaming mind: it shows you the ending without making you pay for the getting there. I trod water and watched the town burn from the sea, and then I woke, in the ordinary way, to an ordinary ceiling, my heart doing the thing hearts do when the body has just finished convincing itself, for several minutes, that it was drowning or burning and has not yet been told otherwise.

I set the dream down first, and plainly, because of a coincidence I have not been able to talk myself out of since. In that same fortnight, the same run of nights that produced the dream, I found myself, on an entirely ordinary Tuesday, sitting in the Bicheno Memorial Hall at a council meet-and-greet, an evening for the town to put a face to its incoming council chief executive, with an agenda that ranged, as these evenings do, over roads and infrastructure and community needs. And in that room, unbidden, again and again, the conversation kept finding its way back to fire. Nobody had set the evening up to discuss it. It was simply, that week, apparently what a good many of the community were already carrying, the way I had apparently been carrying it too, in the only hours of the day I do not get to choose what I think about.

I do not believe the dream caused the meeting, or the meeting caused the dream. I am wary, as I think anyone should be, of the kind of tidy causality a person reaches for because an unexplained coincidence feels almost rude to leave alone. The likelier explanation, if I am honest with myself, is duller and easier to trace than any premonition: I had spent the preceding weeks reading and researching this very subject: El Niño, the Pacific and its cycles, this coast's particular exposure to them, and my phone, with the patient, untiring attention no editor could ever match, had spent those same weeks quietly assembling an algorithm built from the same material, article after article, warning after warning, until the subject had simply moved in, uninvited, and taken up residence in whatever part of the mind stitches a dream together out of the day's leftovers. A mind fed nothing but fire will eventually dream in it. That is not prophecy. It is only digestion. But even granting that ordinary explanation, when a private mind and a public room arrive, independently and in the same fortnight, at the same fear, I have come to think it is worth taking that fear seriously on its own terms: not as an omen, but as evidence that something real is moving under both of them, something that had found its way into my sleep and into the Bicheno Memorial Hall before either of us had quite agreed to talk about it out loud. A summer is coming that people who watch the ocean for a living have started calling, cautiously, a serious one. I want to explain, as clearly and as honestly as I can, what that actually means for this particular stretch of coast, not in the language of catastrophe, which this subject does not need any help attracting, but in the plainer language of exposure: what is coming, why it raises the odds, and where, precisely, this small town is thin enough for those odds to matter.

————

The name for what is coming is, itself, a small child.

El Niño. The little boy. It is not a scientist's word. It was given by Peruvian and Ecuadorian fishermen, working the cold currents off the western shoulder of South America centuries before anyone had thought to measure a sea-surface temperature. Most years, around Christmas, a warm current would slide down from the north and lie over the cold water their anchovies depended on. The fish would thin. The birds that fed on the fish would go quiet. Because the warm water tended to arrive near the feast of the Nativity, the fishermen called it El Niño de Navidad: the Christ Child of Christmas, and then simply El Niño. In an ordinary year it was a mild, almost affectionate disruption, the kind a fishing village learns to mend nets around. In the rare, savage years, it flooded a coast that is one of the driest deserts on earth, and emptied the sea that fed an empire's fertiliser trade. It was those exceptional years, and the nineteenth-century scientific writing that finally took an interest in why a Peruvian current could apparently sink an economy, that narrowed the word until it stopped meaning "the yearly warm current" and started meaning only its rare and violent cousin.

I find something almost unbearable in this, and I don't think tenderness is out of place in an article about fire. A phenomenon capable of drying out half a continent is called, in the language of the people who first noticed it, the little boy. Not the destroyer. A child, arriving more or less on schedule, sometimes gently and sometimes not, indifferent to whether we are ready for him. It took until the 1960s, the work of the meteorologist Jacob Bjerknes, reading decades of scattered data, for anyone to understand that this coastal visitor off Peru was in fact the visible edge of something the whole Pacific Ocean does, roughly every two to seven years: a vast, slow breath, taken in concert by ocean and atmosphere together, whose consequences do not stay off the coast of South America. They travel. This year, they are travelling here.

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Here is the mechanism, stripped of its poetry for a moment, because a reader deserves to know exactly what is meant before I dress it back up.

For most years, trade winds blow steadily east to west across the tropical Pacific. In doing so, they push warm surface water ahead of them, piling it into a great mound near Indonesia and the western Pacific, while off South America cooler water rises from the deep to replace what has been pushed away. This is why it rains, reliably, over northern Australia and the western Pacific, and comparatively little over the eastern Pacific. The whole system holds its shape through a kind of negotiated tension between wind and water, each reinforcing the other.

El Niño is what happens when that tension slackens. The trade winds weaken, sometimes reverse. The warm mound of water in the west slumps back east, taking the rain-bearing convection with it. Because the atmosphere is one continuous fluid wrapped around a spinning planet, this shift does not stay local, it nudges the high-altitude rivers of air, the jet streams, that steer entire weather systems. This is what meteorologists call a teleconnection, and it is the reason a warm current off Peru can arrive in Tasmania, months later, not as water but as absence: as a low-pressure system that does not form when it should, as a winter and spring that run drier than the ledger expects, as a soil that no longer holds the moisture required to keep a fallen gum leaf from becoming kindling rather than compost.

That is the whole of it, really, though it is worth walking through slowly, because the chain of cause and effect is longer and more patient than the word "bushfire" usually suggests. Less rain falling on the ground this winter and spring means less water sitting in the ground come summer. Less water in the ground means the grass, the bark, the litter under the trees, cures, dries and stiffens, earlier and further than it would in an ordinary year. This is not a dramatic transformation to watch happen; it looks, from a car window, like nothing more than a paddock going gold a few weeks early, a hillside losing its green a little sooner than the calendar says it should. But dry fuel catches faster, burns hotter, and carries fire further on a given wind than damp fuel ever will, and a few weeks of early curing, multiplied across a whole coastline of forest and heath, is the difference between a fire season that behaves and one that does not.

Add the warmer air that El Niño also tends to bring to the eastern states, not a heatwave necessarily, simply a shift in the average, a degree or two stacked across months rather than days, and you have raised, quietly and by measurable degrees, the two things that most determine how a fire behaves once it starts: how ready the fuel is to burn, and how much heat and wind are available to help it once it does. Fire scientists compress all of this into a single travelling number, the Forest Fire Danger Index, which climbs and falls through a season the way a tide climbs and falls through a day, and it is this index, not any single dramatic image, that the Bureau and Tasmania Fire Service watch through a season like the one now building in the Pacific. A high index does not mean a fire is coming. It means that if one starts, from a lightning strike, a spark off machinery, a campfire not quite out, the conditions are arranged to let it travel further and burn hotter than they would on an ordinary day.

None of this makes a fire certain. I want to say that plainly, because the honest version of this story is more useful than the frightening one. El Niño loads a die. It does not throw it.

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So what does a loaded die mean for a town like Bicheno?

It means the numbers move, this year, in an unfriendly direction. For this coast specifically, the number that matters most is a quieter one: root-zone soil moisture, the water held in the top metre of ground, which agencies monitor almost the way a doctor monitors blood pressure: not dramatic in itself, but predictive of what happens under stress. Going into a summer shaped by a strengthening El Niño, that number is expected to run low. Low soil moisture, dry fuel, warmer air: this is the arithmetic underneath every fire warning this town will receive over the coming months.

But arithmetic is abstract, and Bicheno is not. The risk this year does not fall evenly across some featureless map of Tasmania. Fire danger in a strong El Niño year tends to concentrate along exactly this kind of country: the drier, more exposed eastern seaboard, rather than the wetter forests of the west and south-west, which is one reason the seasonal outlooks issued this year single out the east coast for particular attention. It falls, with particular weight, on the specific shape of this specific town, on a handful of exposure points that were built into Bicheno's geography and its history long before anyone here had heard of an El Niño, and that a warm Pacific simply makes more dangerous to have.

I want to walk through these one at a time, plainly, because I think a town understands its own risk better when that risk has been named rather than merely felt. A forecast tells you the odds have shifted. It does not tell you where, exactly, a shifted set of odds will find you thin.

The first exposure point is the town's shape itself.

Bicheno is not a town in the compact, huddled sense the word usually implies. It is a ribbon, houses and shacks strung for some fifteen kilometres along the coast, thickening a little around the old harbour and thinning to a scatter of rooftops further out among the banksias, gums and she-oaks. This is part of what makes the place so pleasant to drive through, so photogenic in its scattering of granite and lichen. It is also, in the particular arithmetic of fire, a liability: a long, thin settlement has a great deal of edge, kilometre after kilometre of the boundary line where a house meets unmanaged bush, and comparatively little of the compact, defensible centre that a fire crew can actually plant itself around and hold. Behind and beside much of that ribbon lie two substantial reserves of dry forest: Douglas-Apsley to the west, Freycinet to the south, carrying, in an ordinary year, the fuel load any Tasmanian eucalypt forest quietly accumulates. A ribbon town pressed this closely against that much bush does not need an unusual fire to be threatened by one. It only needs an ordinary fire to find it, somewhere along fifteen kilometres of edge, on a bad day.

The second exposure point is the road.

There is, in the strictest sense that matters during an emergency, only one way in and out of this town: the Tasman Highway, the same road that carries the tourist traffic and the milk truck and, on an ordinary Tuesday, me. Coles Bay, the township a little further south that shares this coast's geography and its risk, is served by an equally singular road of its own. When either of these roads is cut by fire, and both have been, more than once, in living memory, a town does not simply lose its route to the shops. It loses, simultaneously, its route away from danger and the route by which help arrives. A resident trying to leave and a fire truck trying to enter are, in that circumstance, competing for the same narrow strip of bitumen, and there is no second option to relieve the pressure.

The third exposure point is who is here, and when.

The town's permanent population is modest and, on average, older than the state as a whole: a demographic fact that matters enormously on a day of heat and smoke, when the people least able to move quickly are often the people who have lived here the longest and know the place best. In summer, that permanent population is joined by a multiple of itself: visitors drawn by the penguins and the wine and the particular quality of light this coast has, filling the caravan parks, hotels and short-stays along the ribbon of houses. The town, in other words, is at its most crowded exactly when it is at its most flammable, since both facts follow from the same season. An evacuation plan built for a thousand residents has to somehow also work for several thousand people who do not know the back roads, do not have a fire plan of their own, and may not fully understand, until the smoke is visible, that the postcard they are holidaying inside of can also burn.

The fourth exposure point runs overhead, on poles, through the trees.

Much of Bicheno's power arrives along lines strung through forested corridors, the same corridors that carry fuel loads and, in a strong wind, falling branches. When fire cut off Coles Bay a few years back, it took the power lines with it, and something close to seven hundred properties lost electricity along with, for a time, the pumps, the phone chargers, the modems that keep a rural community's communications running. A fire does not need to reach a house to disable the systems that the house depends on to receive a warning about the fire.

The fifth exposure point is the one nobody can plan around with quite the same confidence as the other four, because it does not come from the town at all, but from the sky above the forest behind it. Tasmania's fire managers have noticed, in recent years, more fires beginning not from a dropped cigarette or a spark off a mower but from dry lightning: storms that produce electricity without producing enough rain to matter, striking down into forest that a warm, dry season has already primed to burn. A fire that starts this way can smoulder for days in some folded, roadless gully before anyone sees the smoke, which makes it a genuinely different kind of problem from the human-caused ignitions that fire education and total fire bans are designed to prevent. You cannot run a public awareness campaign at a thundercloud.

Laid over one another, these five things- a long thin settlement pressed against heavy bush, a single road, a population that swells and ages in exactly the wrong rhythm, infrastructure that runs through the fuel itself, and an ignition source that arrives from the sky rather than from anyone's carelessness, describe a town that does not need an exceptional fire to have an exceptional day. It needs only an ordinary fire, on the wrong wind, at the wrong time of year. What El Niño does, this year, is make that wrong time of year somewhat more likely to arrive.

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The council meeting itself was billed, in the gentle language local government reserves for such things, as a meet-and-greet: Glamorgan Spring Bay Council setting out an urn and a plate of snacks so the town could put a face to the person who will be running it, and the evening was, for the most part, exactly what that billing promised: introductions, a run through the machinery of a small municipality, questions about the things a council is asked about in any ordinary year. But the topic of fire kept surfacing anyway, the way a held breath keeps surfacing in a conversation that is nominally about something else. It came up when someone asked how the council works alongside Tasmania Fire Service on hazard abatement, the unglamorous, unending business of clearing roadside grass and scrub before it becomes fuel, work that a council does mostly without anyone noticing until the year it matters. It came up again around a question I had not expected: whether the council could do more to assist water-bombing aircraft based locally through the high-risk months, rather than have them stationed elsewhere and flown in only once a fire has already found its feet. A plane on the ground twenty minutes away is a very different thing, in the arithmetic of a fast-moving fire, from one an hour out.

And it came up, most plainly, when talk turned to Douglas-Apsley, the national park that presses against the western edge of town, the same reserve I have already named as one of Bicheno's two great walls of fuel. More than one person in that hall said, in the unadorned way people say a thing they have clearly turned over many times before saying it aloud, that they were afraid for the houses along that boundary. Nobody reached for an abstraction to make the fear respectable. They reached instead for Dolphin Sands, for the fire, only months old, that had taken nineteen homes on the far side of the peninsula and left its glow visible from this town's own highway. It was mentioned more than once, not as history but as evidence, the way a person points at a nearby scar rather than a distant statistic to explain why they check the fence line twice now instead of once.

Nobody in that hall said El Niño. They didn't need to. What they were discussing, in the unglamorous vocabulary of abatement schedules and airstrip access and a towns worth of quiet worry about its own western fence line, was the same little boy, the practical, ground-level translation of a Pacific Ocean two degrees warmer than usual into a list of things a small council can actually control, and a much longer list of things it cannot.

There is a particular rhythm to a room like that one, and I don't think you can understand it properly unless you have sat in it. Nobody performed alarm. Nobody, either, performed the kind of breezy reassurance that treats fire readiness as a formality to be ticked off before the tea goes cold. What I noticed instead was a kind of working calm, people who had clearly had this conversation before, in other years, comparing notes on which paddocks had already been slashed and which hadn't. Nobody had a complete answer, and I noticed that nobody pretended to. The honesty of that, the willingness to say we don't fully know, so here is what we do know, felt like its own kind of preparedness.

I found myself thinking, sitting there with my pen sweating in my hand, that something quietly moves when a community draws together, to discuss what if the worst happened. It is not a dramatic act. It looks, from the outside, like nothing more than a community doing its work. But it is, underneath that, a town choosing preparation over either denial or panic, which is, I have come to think, the only sane response available to a place whose risks are too numerous and too indifferent to one another to ever add up to certainty.

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The fires that make a discussion like this imperative and necessary, did and does not always share a single cause.

In January of 2013, in a summer chiefly remembered elsewhere for the destruction of the town of Dunalley, a second and less famous fire front burned through the country around Bicheno and Coles Bay, taking some nineteen structures with it and turning the Bicheno Community Hall, the same room the council met in this week, into an emergency refuge. Down the coast at Dunalley, more than half the town's buildings and its primary school were gone within hours; on the Tasman Peninsula, some eighty properties were lost and thousands of people found themselves isolated as the only road out, the Arthur Highway, closed behind them. A volunteer firefighter from Victoria, who had come to help fight the fires, died of natural causes on the Tasman Peninsula while helping with the mop-up once the worst of the front had passed, a reminder that the toll of a fire season is not always taken by the flames themselves, and can fall on the people still out there long after the emergency listing has been downgraded.

September of 2023, it was Coles Bay's turn. An unseasonably early run of hot, windy spring weather sent a fire through the bush south of the town, closing the only road in or out and leaving Coles Bay cut off for a night. Something close to seven hundred properties lost power as the lines came down; around thirty people sheltered in the Coles Bay hall while another hundred or so simply sat it out in their cars, and the fire's glow was visible that night from the Tasman Highway near Bicheno, the very hills, more or less, that stood over the water in my dream.

And then, only months before I sat down to write this, came Dolphin Sands. In December 2025, on the spit of land south of Swansea, a fire took nineteen homes and shacks, damaged a further dozen or more, destroyed fifteen outbuildings and four vehicles. A local oyster farmer escaped by boat, gathering with neighbours on the water to watch the fire move over the land they had just left. What turned one smouldering ember into a fire that took nineteen homes was a broader pattern moving over the whole state that season: Tasmania's spring rainfall had run well above average overall, and yet this coast, the east coast, recorded rainfall below its own average, because a rare warming of the atmosphere above Antarctica that September had weakened the polar vortex and sent unseasonal, drying westerlies streaming north across the island. The same pattern that soaked the state's west left this coast comparatively parched and primed for exactly the kind of wind-driven run a small escaped fire needs to become a large one.

Read side by side, these three fires span nearly 15 years and about as many different weather patterns, and yet keep returning to the same handful of structural facts. A single road, cut: in 2013, in 2023, and again in 2025. A community hall, filled with people who did not expect, that morning, to be sleeping on its floor. A gap, in more than one of these fires, between the warning that was sent and the warning that was actually heard, Dolphin Sands residents telling reporters afterward that they had learned what they knew from a neighbour rather than an official channel, an echo of complaints that surfaced in the formal inquiry that followed 2013, which recommended clearer lines of command between police and fire services during an evacuation. Recommendations are written and adopted, and still, more than a decade later, someone on this coast can find themselves relying on word of mouth rather than a message from the state. That is not, I think, evidence of anyone's incompetence so much as evidence of how genuinely difficult the problem is, how a landscape this large, and a road network this thin, keeps presenting the same narrow set of failure points to whichever generation happens to be standing in front of them.

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There is a fact in the middle of this story that I think matters more than any other, and it is one I would be doing this article a disservice to leave out, because it is the fact that keeps the whole picture honest rather than merely alarming.

Dolphin Sands, the most damaging fire this coast has seen in years, happened without any help from El Niño at all, and its origin, once investigators traced it, turned out to have nothing to do with the Pacific, the stratosphere, or any of the grand systems this article has spent so many words on. What it needed to become a disaster was simply wind, dryness, and a coast that had, for entirely separate atmospheric reasons that same season, gone drier than the rest of the state around it.

I set this down not to undercut everything written above it, but to keep the record straight. It would be tidy, and it would be false, to say that this town's fire risk is simply a function of a Pacific cycle that fishermen named for a child four centuries ago. The truer and less comfortable version is that this landscape can burn for many reasons, some written in the ocean, some in the stratosphere, some simply in the shape of the town itself, in the single road and the long thin ribbon of houses and the bush that has pressed close against both since long before anyone thought to name a current after anything.

This is also, I think, the most useful thing a piece like this one can offer a reader who actually lives here, as opposed to one reading from somewhere the fire cannot reach them: not a single villain to watch for, but a way of holding several causes at once without letting any one of them become an excuse to stop watching the others. A quiet, wet spring is good news, and it is not the whole of the news. A declared El Niño is a reason for vigilance, and it is not a guarantee that vigilance will be rewarded with an easy season, nor a guarantee that its absence next year would mean safety. Abel Tasman, sailing past this coast in December of 1642, in what is thought to be the first written European reference to an Australian bushfire, noted smoke rising from the land he was charting, three and a half centuries before any meteorologist had a name for the pattern that might, or might not, have been driving it. This country was alight before it had the name Tasmania, before Peru had a fishing village, before anyone anywhere had said the words El Niño. What changes, from year to year, decade to decade, is not whether this landscape burns but the arithmetic of how likely, how large, and how fast, an arithmetic this town has now spent a hundred and fifty years slowly, imperfectly, learning to read.

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The sea is not exempt from any of this either, and it is worth a short pause before returning to the fire, because the two are more connected than "bushfire" and "ocean current" usually suggest to someone standing on dry land.

In El Niño years, the East Australian Current tends to push further south than usual, laying a tongue of warm subtropical water down past New South Wales and Victoria and into seas that have, for most of this coast's history, run cooler and more temperate. Citizen scientists here already log, in years like this one, fish with no business being so far south. It is strange evidence, these lost tropical fish drifting into cold water, but it points at the same underlying truth that governs the risk on land: a system that has run to a certain rhythm for a very long time is being nudged, this year, toward a different one, and the creatures and the vegetation built around the old rhythm are the ones left working out, in real time, what the new one means for them.

This matters to Bicheno in a way that is not only ecological. The town's economy is not separable from its water, the crayfish and fishing boats that still work out of the harbour, the oyster leases further down the coast, the tourism that trades, quite openly, on the promise of a particular kind of clean, cold, dependable sea. A current running warmer and further south than it should does not announce itself the way a fire does. It shows up instead in a season's catch, in a species that used to be reliable and now is not, in a slow renegotiation of what this coast can be relied upon to provide. I think of the little penguins on Diamond Island, just offshore from the harbour, waddling ashore each evening to the delight of the tour groups, and wonder whether they feel a warmer sea the way we feel a warmer spring, as an ambient wrongness, noticed before it is understood, long before anyone thinks to write it down.

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I want to end where I began, in the water, because that is where the honest ending is.

I don't believe my dream was a prophecy. I am wary of the vanity involved in treating one's own anxious sleep as a message from anywhere other than one's own anxious mind, fed all season on Bureau bulletins and council handouts and the low, constant hum of a summer this coast can feel coming the way you can feel, in the last hour before a southerly change, that the air itself has begun to lean. But I don't think the dream was nothing, either. I think it was my own body doing, crudely and at night: taking the abstraction of a forecast, a Pacific two degrees warmer than usual, a trade wind faltering somewhere north of the equator, a probability nudged upward on a graph most of us will never see, and translating it into something a nervous system can actually hold. Fear is, among other things, a kind of literalism. It takes "elevated risk" and gives it a shoreline, a set of hills, a colour.

That is the more honest note to end on than anything I could take from a dream: not instructions but the plain fact that this coast has been answering the question of how to live with fire for longer than any of us, through inquiries and hazard burns and community halls filled at short notice, arriving, so far, at neither panic nor denial but the unglamorous, ongoing work of paying attention. The little boy is somewhere out over the Pacific still. What happens when he reaches this coast will depend on the wind, the ignition, the soil, on the same handful of causes this piece has tried to hold apart rather than collapse into one story. It will also depend, in the ordinary and unremarkable way it always has, on whether this town keeps doing what it has always done: watching, and getting ready, together.

AM -

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Adam Martin
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