That Sky Wasn't Fire, But I Get Why We Thought It Was

Someone posted a photo yesterday morning of the sky over Melbourne looking like the whole city was ablaze. Deep orange, streaked with cloud, the kind of colour that makes you check the CFA Vic app before you check the time. Turned out to be a fairly spectacular sunrise, nothing more sinister than that. But the comments were the best bit: half the thread trying to work out where the photo was taken, someone guessing Footscray, someone else convinced it was a drone shot from out past Port Melbourne. Nobody panicking. Just genuine, mild curiosity.

I like that about this place. A sky goes weird and the collective response isn’t dread, it’s “where’s that from, I want to see it too.”

I was up early that morning, coffee in hand, letting the dog out before work, and I did actually stop for a second. Not because I thought Melbourne was on fire. Because it was genuinely beautiful, the kind of light you don’t get very often, and my brain still did that little stutter step: is that smoke. Years of summer bushfire seasons will do that to you. 2019 rewired something in a lot of us. A pretty sunrise now comes with an asterisk.

That’s the tension I can’t quite resolve, and I’m not going to pretend I can. On one hand, it was just a sunrise, gorgeous, harmless, the sort of thing that used to just be a sunrise and nothing more. On the other, the fact that so many people’s first instinct was “fire” says something about what a few bad summers did to the collective nervous system down here. We’re not wrong to be jumpy. Black Summer was real, the smoke haze that sat over the city for weeks was real, and treating that as a fluke rather than a preview feels like wishful thinking.

I don’t know how you hold both of those at once, the wonder and the wariness, without one cancelling the other out. Maybe you don’t have to resolve it. Maybe you just notice the sky, feel a flicker of unease, then let it go because the CFA app says all clear and the dog needs feeding.

What I keep coming back to is how ordinary the thread was in the end. No conspiracy theories, no doom-scrolling spiral, just Melburnians asking politely where a nice photo was taken, and one bot reminding everyone about the daily discussion thread like clockwork. Small, low-stakes, slightly daggy community stuff. On a morning where the sky looked like the apocalypse, that felt like the right amount of reaction. Wonder first, worry second, and then get on with your day.