All thinking Australians are struggling during this horrific summer, our racing minds brimming with unusual combinations of emotions. The label-words for our sensations, words like grief, fear, disgust (the latter because so many of us are disgusted by our politicians) cannot properly nail feelings that are so new and so unusual as to be indescribable.

One can imagine the chief psychologist giving an essential nationwide address, attempting to help all Australians to make sense of what we are thinking and to somehow try to remain buoyant. At this shocking time the alarmed mind skedaddles from wild thought to wild thought. Thoughts like these:

Is Australia going to become uninhabitable? Never a day goes by without one noticing a sensible-sounding person uttering that previously unthinkable thought. Already today (it is a Tuesday morning) I've just heard a thoughtful, fearful Bateman's Bay GP speak the u-word, utter the u-thought in an ABC radio interview.

And so to the bundle of our this-very-minute worries is added to the futuristic fear of what is to become of our Australian children and grandchildren if the climate continues its transformations of Australia. Where will they go, our grandchildren? Where will have them?

This columnist migrated here in the 1960s, from meteorologically damp and dingy England, lured in part by the promise of hot weather and dazzling sunlight. In this changed Australia, will my Australian grandson grow up hankering for migration to somewhere English, attracted by soft, misty drizzles, in an inversion of the way I as a child hankered for the sunny south of Australia?

As well as a dollar for every time one hears the u-word, one would like a dollar for every time one hears, now, someone say a heartfelt "I HATE summer!" How quickly this has happened. Till now we have lived for our summers.

"Summer is the king season," poet Les Murray divined in his The Australian Year (1985).

"In its full majesty ... summer is a strong lord of pleasure. Many millions passionately love it, regarding the rest of the year as a mere interval between summers."

But the sensitive Murray was fully alert to summer's terrible sides. Yes, summer is a "strong lord of pleasure", but "almost everywhere it is also a lord of fear, as it presides over snakes, and heatstroke, skin cancer and thirst and fire".

Murray (who left us last year) is surely the finest of all thinkers and writers about Australian droughts and fires. He harps on Australia's sheer sunburnt uniqueness in the world.

"Only in rainy weather does the Australian bush know the ethereal, aqueous effects of northern mythology. The gum forest's smoky ambience reminds us that the presiding spirit who sleeps at its unreachable heart is no troll or goblin, but an orange-yellow monster [fire]. You cannot live in the predominant forest of Australia, or even too close to it. We keep paying a price in loss and anguish for ignoring this."

It is impossible to well articulate the new feelings generated by this summer, and so I have just listened with enthralled sympathy to ABC radio goddess Geraldine Doogue inviting two smart guests on her ABC Radio National Saturday Extra to do their best to think aloud about this hellish time. (You can podcast the item, Summer of Discontent.)

Sensitive guests Sophie Cunningham and ANU historian Tom Griffiths (he is an historian of Australians and our fires) did their very best to be articulate but methought struggled, like the rest of us.

The studio three agreed, alarmed, that we no longer know this Australia.

Griffiths owned up to unusual feelings of "shock and disturbance" and said that while he has followed all of Australia's fire seasons so as to study them, "this summer is something else again" with, instead of just particular days of horror, a "never-ending unease and threat and anxiety and exhaustion". Cunningham, grieving for what this summer is doing, probably irreparably, to our land's creatures and landscapes as well as to people and property, thought that before our very eyes this summer "Australia is becoming something else".

The aforementioned GP owned up to finding herself now doing a lot of impromptu crying. What is happening is tenderising all thinking Australians. Your columnist owns up (so as to show solidarity with those of you similarly wobbling) to an extreme this-summer sensitivity to almost everything, to weeping unmanly tears over hitherto commonplace things that wouldn't normally jerk a single tear.

Tenderised, there is suddenly a special value-added loveliness about the gang-gang cockatoos feasting in my shopping centre's pistachio trees, but then as well a special tenderised sensitivity to the apparent wickedness of sports-rort minister Bridget McKenzie.

Then, summer-tenderised, there is deepened grief over having a prime minister (his late behaviours and inadequacies earning him the people's "loathing and disdain", Tom Griffiths marvels in the ABC's Summer of Discontent) with whom one has so little in common that he might be another, unattractive, Hawaii-holidaying life form from a galaxy far away.