Ian Warden | As the climate blowtorch approaches, the unthinkable awaits

For this columnist two of the very special joys of spring in Canberra are my boycotting of Floriade - Australia's biggest celebration of spring (Oh the rapture of avoiding the hell of its madding throngs and vulgar flowers!) and the first appearances in my garden of the eastern blue-tongued lizard, Tiliqua scincoides.

This week's first meeting of this spring with the species was enriched by how, sensitised to First Nations' people's stories by everything to do with the Voice, I have just learned how the species got its blue tongue.

And so, while I had the dear reptile's tongue-flickering attention, I told it one of the Dreamtime explanations of its blue-tonguedness, the one that has the lizard assisting a very sick elder by hurrying to the coast to ask a squid for a gift of its medicinal ink.

Racing home with the ink carried in its closed mouth (no other kind of container being available) the good lizard arrived just in time to save the elder's life. From that day forward its species' tongues are always stained (a stain of honour) by the blueness of the ink.

"And in another version of the legend ..." I began, but the lizard, surely already very well aware of these truths about itself, turned and left with a slow, elegant slither, melting away into the shrubbery.

But the delight hitherto always given by the wild things in and around our gardens in this bush capital is commingled now with anxiety over what will become of them.

Every day, now, the media bristles with dire forecasts. "Hawaii's deadly wildfire a bad sign of what's to come for Australia" the headlines fret and soothsay.

There is open despair now among some climate scientists who fear we have passed some kind of "tipping point" and must now watch our once heavenly planet becoming a hell.

See for example climate scientist Joëlle Gergis' sometimes despairing essay The Summer Ahead in this month's The Monthly.

"As someone who understands the seriousness of what is at stake," she writes, "some days it's hard to not be consumed by despair, anger and grief."

"This coming summer will be a grotesque showcase of what we can expect as our planet continues to warm. As the northern hemisphere summer comes to an end and the El Nino ramps up in the Pacific, it will be the south's turn under the climate blowtorch ... I dread to see what this summer will bring."

In the swirling nightmare of what's happening, and unable to bear the thought of what is to become of one's grandchildren and their children, I find myself turning to the somehow slightly less unbearable nightmare of what is to become of our wild animals.

Unscientifically, with a pollyannaish irrationally, one wants to imagine Tiliqua scincoides surviving climate horrors that may make Homo sapiens extinct.

Their species is almost unimaginably ancient, splitting away from other skink families some 25 million years ago, and so will surely so far have survived climate transformations and horrors not dreamt of in our philosophies. Perhaps an Australia, an ACT uninhabitable for humans will still be habitable for Tiliqua scincoides.

But then one worries too about the wild native birds of Canberra's suburbia.

My garden and its suburban bailiwick are blessed every day of the year with gang-gang cockatoos (the ACT's faunal emblem) even though all there is to attract them to my place (other than perhaps my charisma) is a frugal smorgasbord of sunflower seeds.

They are relatively fearless and even though one must never encourage it sometimes even whoosh down to perch on one's arms and even one's head while one is in the garden.

To have one's city's faunal emblem stand on one's head (sometimes they stay, unperturbed, as if lost in thought, for several minutes) stokes contradictory feelings in one's bosom.

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It is something one must never encourage, for, as I lecture them, it is unbecoming for wild birds to behave as if they are tame.

But on the other hand one feels enormously privileged by such a surely unique-to-Canberra experience. Your city's faunal emblem, ladies and gentlemen - standing on your head!

There can be nowhere else in the world where the people have a faunal emblem they can so closely interact with.

Many of those emblems, such as Montana's grizzly bear and our Northern Territory's wedge-tailed eagle, are man-eatingly flesh-rippingly dangerous.

Others, such as Scotland's unicorn and Wales' red dragon, are so shy and reclusive no one, not even Sir David Attenborough, ever catches more than a fleeting glimpse of them.

Being able to be so close to the gang-gangs one notices and feels, sensitised now by forecasts of fiery summers, how vulnerable and fragile they are, how terribly flammable their feathers make them.

They are already officially listed as an "endangered" and "threatened" species. Their contrary relative abundance in my Canberra neighbourhood is only due to scarce stands of old trees on nearby Red Hill, flammable old trees (with the nesting holes the species needs), that are only one big blaze away from erasure.

What is to become of us, all creatures great and small, as this summer and the next and the next Australia takes its turns under the climate blowtorch?