🥵 Fever risks and cool canopies
Also including: How to stay cool as Melbourne's eastern suburbs heat up.
Matthew Sims
September 24, 2025
⏱️ The 78th edition of our newsletter is a seven-minute read.
Hi there 👋
Matthew Sims here, your reporter at the Eastern Melburnian.
Our subscriber count just ticked over 12,750 - a big hello to all our new readers.
Heat has been my main topic of the past week - no, not the classic 1995 Michael Mann film, but literal heat and how it impacts our lives in many ways.
Australia has always seen hot days and bushfires- it’s part of our identity. You see blistering hot deserts in our movies; going to the local pool or beach is a popular pastime in summer; and, “Geez, how hot is it?” is a common rhetorical question heard during the warmer months.
Following the release of Australia’s first National Climate Risk Assessment - which shows the potential for many more days of extreme weather - I spoke with eastern suburbs-based gastroenterologist Dr Christopher Leung about heat and health.
He recalled working during the 2019/20 Black Summer bushfires. He and his family were coughing from the smoke, and he was unable to use an operating theatre at a Melbourne hospital as the smoke had clogged its filters.
This week, I spoke with urban planning researcher Dr Thami Croeser, who said part of the answer to preventing deaths due to heatwaves would come in the form of broader tree canopy protections near our homes.
He said with more housing development coming via the Suburban Rail Loop East’s housing plans, and “activity centres” planned around 60 key train and tram zones, conversation around how to retain our current mature tree canopy and how to make green spaces a part of these new developments should be front and centre.
I’ve appreciated the engagement around my story last week on the history of Caribbean Gardens and Market. I’ve been loving all your comments about the weird and wonderful things you saw walking around the market back in its heyday, from monkeys in cages to an underwater submarine.
A few readers suggested we check out the history of Wobbies World in Nunawading. I’m looking into it, but there’s not a lot of history out there beyond the iconic old TV ads, so I’m going to do a bit more digging. In the meantime, please reach out with any old photos or your memories of going to Wobbies World.
You can remain anonymous, as what I really want is to hear your stories first hand.
📩 Just reply to this email, or ping me directly: [email protected]
🤔 If you have any thoughts, opinions or ideas of what we should do next, just reply to this email and I’ll be on the other end. We’re building the Eastern Melburnian to serve this community, and it all starts here. With your help, tips, feedback and involvement we can continue to grow and improve.
🗞️ Here’s what the Eastern Melburnian has been up to
Currently, there are about four days of extreme heat - days where the average Australian temperature is in the top one percent of records - per year in Australia. According to the first-ever National Climate Risk Assessment report, this would increase to up to 18 days per year under a 3°C warming scenario.
WHAT’S ON THIS WEEK 🎟️
EVERY DAY, 10AM to 2.30PM | Dinosroar Experience
EVERY DAY, 10AM to 5PM | Tesselaar Tulip Festival
EVERY DAY, 10AM to 5PM | Blossom Festival @ Cherry Hill Orchards, Wandin East
EVERY WEEKDAY, 23/09/25 to 02/10/25, 11AM to 4PM | SkyHigh’s September Children’s Festival
23/09/25 to 25/09/25 and 30/09/25 to 02/10/25 | True Fairies
25/09/25, 7PM | Peter Bibby @ Sooki Lounge
28/09/25, 9AM to 1PM | Mooroolbark Community Garden
📰 THIS WEEK’S HEADLINES
During the Black Summer bushfires of 2019/20, eastern suburbs-based gastroenterologist Dr Christopher Leung came into work at a Melbourne hospital while he and his children were “choking” on the smoke outside.
Leung, Deputy Chair of Doctors for the Environment Australia, had to do an endoscopy - a procedure in which he puts a small camera down the patient’s throat to look at their stomach and pinpoint internal bleeding.
“I entered the theatre, and to my shock and absolute dismay, I could not use the emergency theatre because of the smoke,” he told the Eastern Melburnian. “The smoke had overcome the filters in a hospital where you need to do life-saving procedures and surgery.
“It was at that point that I absolutely realised this is directly affecting how I deliver healthcare.”
The National Climate Risk Assessment report, released last Monday, details how climate change threatens and will continue to endanger our communities, economy and health.
The report said extreme heat, bushfires and poor air quality from smoke would escalate health risks, while people with pre-existing health conditions, young people, people who work outside and elderly populations would be the most vulnerable.
Leung said extreme heat presented a range of dangers to the human body, including heat exhaustion, heat stress and heat stroke, the latter of which can be fatal within a few hours if not treated.
“Overheating worsens the symptoms of other chronic diseases,” he told the Eastern Melburnian. “If you've got heart problems, lung problems, lung and kidney disease, it puts an extra strain on those organs.”
“Make sure you keep cool and stay hydrated, seek shade or fans if you don't have air conditioning, and go to public areas like community and shopping centres,” Leung said.
Leung said the report was a “shocking” glimpse into what Australia’s future could look like, and should serve as a “call for action” for the country’s health system and the broader Australian community.
“As doctors, if we see that you've got a serious bacterial infection, we don't just give you an ice pack,” he said. “We give you antibiotics to tackle the root of the infection.
“Within our generation, we can mitigate or turn some of this around, so that we're not hit with the full brunt of three degrees of warming.”
While the State Government’s announcement of new planning protections around trees was a positive step, there was still a “huge shortfall” in the state’s investment - about $2 billion - needed to achieve the state’s 30 percent canopy coverage targets, according to an urban planning researcher.
On September 15, the State Government introduced an amendment to all state planning schemes, with the new clause requiring a planning permit to remove, destroy or lop a “canopy tree” in specific circumstances.
RMIT’s Thami Croeser told the Eastern Melburnian that urban construction materials had a high thermal mass, meaning they can absorb a lot of heat, and that air in urban areas can be eight to 10 degrees hotter than rural areas.
“Tree canopy is an antidote to that,” said Croeser, a Vice Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at RMIT’s Centre for Urban Research.
Croeser said while more housing was needed, greenery needed to be incorporated into new developments, particularly those around planned new Suburban Rail Loop East precincts in areas like Glen Waverley and Box Hill.
“If we take out everything within a 300-metre walk of these stations and densification precincts, and it just becomes wall-to-wall big buildings, that means every bit of private tree canopy and backyard [are] lost,” he said.
“We need (the tree canopy) to go up, not down, which means bigger, healthier trees and more of them, not cutting them down whenever we build a house.”
SEEN THIS WEEK 🤓
Word on the street: What do you think about pokies and gambling?
Following the recent temporary closure of the Pinewood Shopping Village Bendigo Bank branch, I decided to pop down there and have a chat with shoppers about the closure and other issues.
I spoke to Emmanuel and Alan about the prevalence of pokie venues and the popularity of gambling across Melbourne’s eastern suburbs.
Thanks for catching up with us this week at the Eastern Melburnian. We hope you enjoyed this issue, and we’d love to hear your thoughts. We’ll be back on Friday to shine a spotlight on the under-reported issues in our patch, so stay tuned!
Cheers,
Matthew and the Eastern Melburnian team