Tasmania is burning. The climate disaster future has arrived while those in power laugh at us | Richard Flanagan

Scott Morrison is trying to scare people about franking credits but seems blithely unaware people are already scared - about climate change

As I write this, fire is 500 metres from the largest King Billy pine forest in the world on Mt Bobs, an ancient forest that dates back to the last Ice Age and has trees over 1,000 years old. Fire has broached the boundaries of Mt Field national park with its glorious alpine vegetation, unlike anything on the planet. Fire laps at the edges of Federation Peak, Australia's grandest mountain, and around the base of Mt Anne with its exquisite rainforest and alpine gardens. Fire laps at the border of the Walls of Jerusalem national park with its labyrinthine landscapes of tarns and iconic stands of ancient pencil pine and its beautiful alpine landscape, ecosystems described by their most eminent scholar, the ecologist Prof Jamie Kirkpatrick, as "like the vision of a Japanese garden made more complex, and developed in paradise, in amongst this gothic scenery".

"You have plants that look like rocks - green rocks - and these plants have different colours in complicated mosaics: red-green, blue-green, yellow-green, all together. It's an overwhelming sensual experience really."