HEARING YOUNG VOICES FROM THE FUTURE
It’s 2031 and for their history assignment, two ten-year-olds, Cy and Tan, have been asked to write an essay together about Wangaratta in 2021, the year they were born. The boys cornered Cy’s Danish granddad, Poppy Klist, on a lazy Sunday afternoon, in the veggie patch at the community farm that had been built at Wangaratta High School. They lounged under the shade of the big gums for hours, munching on string beans and peppering Poppy Klist with questions about what had changed in Wangaratta over the past decade. They discovered that, in 2021, everyday Australians craved leadership and were alive to the power of their vote. They demanded climate change be treated as a national emergency. This was especially true in northeast Victoria, where the environment and the economy were still scarred from the 2019–20 Black Summer fires. They discovered that, in 2021, after the COP26 Climate Summit, the Australian government was under intense pressure to commit ...