The EAC is just one of many sleeping serpents stirred up by our warming world, a friendly force made unfamiliar. When we talk about climate change, this is its face.

The woman I knew best, of course, was my own mother. I could see my hips, legs and breasts becoming hers, and I heard her every self-abasement as my own. She’d take up walking regimes, or cut out bread for a month, and then on weeknights I’d come into the kitchen to find she’d caved and drunk an entire bottle of white wine. It was a cliche, a stock-standard Electra complex, but there was no way in hell I was going to become her.

I flew to Hobart to pay my respects to an ecosystem already long gone. Tasmania’s giant kelp forests, Macrocystis pyrifera, once fringed the eastern coast. Each languid frond of these once-towering marine metropoles harboured multitudes of fish, invertebrates, plankton and algaes. But giant kelp forests are fragile. As of 2017, only five percent of the original Tasmanian kelp forests remained. For the Aboriginal community in Tasmania, the sea is women’s business, and so their relationship with the kelp forests is strong.