DISASTERS teach us a lot about human beings, don’t they?

When faced with a crisis, some people stop and think: “how can I deal with this effectively without taking responsibility for any of it?”. Or: “what can I do that will make me look good and my rivals look bad?”. Or: “is there a way this can be exploited so that I can have another tilt at the leadership?”

Those people are called politicians. And Australians have been let down badly by too many of them in recent months.

Thank goodness there are better angels still walking among us, inspiring some to ask: “What is the most constructive, effective thing I can do to help right now?”

Comedian Celeste Barber is a great example. With members of her own family endangered by fires, she took the initiative and used the tools available to her to pitch in and support the firefighting effort. With a significant social media following already, it made sense to post a call-out for donations.

You probably know the rest. Barber initially hoped she’d raise $30,000 for the Rural Fire Service. Instead, she raised more than $50 million. On Sunday, she hosted the Fire Fight Australia concert, which generated another $10 million.

That’s more than $60 million in total, amassed mainly through the fierce efforts of a woman who just got stuck in and did her bit to help. You know, just how the politicians tell us things should be done, while rarely actually doing any of it themselves.

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Another woman who’s been  doing her bit is American performer. Amanda Palmer. Perhaps best known for her punk cabaret band Dresden Dolls, Palmer flew into Australia a few days before Christmas to tour her latest show, There Will Be No Intermission.

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While still recovering from jetlag, she performed a few pieces at the Woodford Festival, where I was lucky enough to be in the audience. To be clear: you don’t really watch Palmer perform. Instead, you engage in an exhilarating game of emotional dodgeball, where she hurls rapid-fire shots of anger and joy and sadness and hilarity into the audience and you never know when you’re going to be hit or how hard, until the tears are flowing down your face or your belly is convulsing with laughter.

But by the time I saw her again, at the Brisbane Powerhouse in late January, Palmer confessed she was completely drained.

Touring the country in the interim, she’d felt the trauma that had settled across our regional communities along with the ashes and soot. In Tasmania for the MONA FOMA festival, she had sat in a confessional each day as an interactive performance, listening as folks dropped by randomly to talk about their sins and darkest secrets. Perhaps she had expected it to be naughty, fun and playful. But what Palmer heard was people’s pain: their shame, regrets and nightmares.

She wanted to do something positive. So Palmer asked her fans on the crowdfunding platform Patreon for suggestions.

Overwhelmingly, they implored her to create something for charity, to help Australians overcome summer’s devastation.

So… back to the studio Amanda Palmer went. In the middle of a busy international tour. And in the midst of her rare days off, when she could otherwise have been chilling with her husband, the brilliant writer Neil Gaiman, and their four-year-old son Ash. Instead, she called up friends like Missy Higgins and Clare Bowditch, and dialled in her fellow Dresden Doll, drummer Brian Viglione.

Together, they created Forty Five Degrees, Australia’s very first bushfire charity album, in just five days.

It is a collection of covers requested by Palmer’s devoted patrons – songs like Goanna’s Solid Rock, and Beds are Burning by Midnight Oil – as well as Suck It Up, Buttercup, a new work dedicated to those visitors to the Launceston confessional, and a version of My Favourite Things that strays just a little from Julie Andrews’ original.

It will be released today, and Palmer will donate all profits to Firesticks Alliance Indigenous Corporation. Appropriately, the beautiful cover art was created by Palmer’s friend Sarah Beetson, who lives on a farm near Mt Tamborine, also threatened by fires last year.

Did I mention the woman is still touring with a four-hour one-woman show? But somehow she has also organised a bushfire charity gig in Melbourne next month, where Gaiman will do readings of his work and Palmer will perform and no doubt many friends including the delightful Missy Higgins will stop by.

Who was it that said that if you want something done, ask a busy person?

But she’s no Mother Teresa, by the way. A rebel by nature with the mouth of a punk rocker, Palmer often asks her audiences to teach her weird and even obscene local sayings.

In Brisbane, she gleefully discovered another one in Brisbane: “We’re not here to f*ck spiders.” In other words, we’re not here to muck around, to get caught up in the details or the petty enmities.

It’s perfect. It explains how she created a charity album in record time, for all of Australia to share.

Amanda Palmer is not here to f*ck spiders. She’s here to connect with her fellow human beings, to lift them up and to share their pain and to help out a bit where she can.

Oh, that our politicians might listen and learn!

You can order Forty Five Degrees here.