Australia’s student strikers for climate believed they could change their future. Where are they now?

On a stinking hot November day, seven years ago, Grace Vegesana and a handful of other young climate activists set up a small stage in a large square in Sydney’s CBD – and waited. Inspired by the first school striker for climate, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, the high school students decided to organise their own rally.Vegesana expected a hundred people to show up. Five thousand came. “It was like, oh my God, we’ve unleashed some kind of beast, people want more,” she recalls. In the months afterwards crowds doubled and then tripled.A year later, the devastation of Australia’s black summer bushfires collided with a conservative government that was perceived to be failing to act. It was, as Vegesana says, “a tinderbox of fury”, which on 20 September 2019 was set alight: An estimated 300,000 people attended hundreds of rallies across Australia in what were probably the largest public demonstrations since the marches against the 2003 invasion of Iraq.“It was this exhilarating moment of...