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Oh Sunny Danger Time
This article concerns the title essay of Smith's 2024 collection. For broader context, see Fellow Disjecta, Oh Sunny Danger Time. The collection is part of Smith's unfinished triptych; Their Most August Public Organ is book 2 in progress.
"Oh Sunny Danger Time" is the title essay of C. W. Smith's 2024 lyric-essay collection, written as the narrator turns forty ("the year of fours"). Originally commissioned as journalism, it documents the author's encounter with a solar-punk anarchist hacker-gardening community across the Great Dividing Range near Newcastle, built from reclaimed radar igloos and aircraft graveyards—an inversion of the novel's autonomous data-farms.
Leif and Katita both appear, transformed. Leif is the one-armed founder ("Abolish Power, Grow Freedom"), running a VR/Moondust simulation. Katita manages the property, serving as philosophical counter-voice to Leif's utopianism—staging the tension between cyclical return and escape.
Secondary threads: the dog **Combray** (a Proustian echo); two letters from Gerald Murnane, author of The Plains (Smith's epigraph source); pirate radio, how Smith met his wife; and an imagined symphony by "a girl who pushes a pinball machine across the Australian landscape, from outback to sea to moon."
The essay canonises Leif and Katita as "instruments of return": we do not escape ourselves by inventing new lives but by returning to and misremembering the one we have. The solar-punk community becomes an act of refusal—not utopia, but deliberate recursion into care.