'A Taste of Hell': Fires, Landscapes, Emotions, and Renewal

Abstract

Australian settler fiction and poetry stage shifting notions of temporality in relation to bushfires. The fire was an important plot device in settler writing, initially adding a touch of local colour for readers back home in England through stories of melodramatic rescue. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, understandings of fire had begun to change, as settlers began to learn that fires were not simply one-off catastrophes, but rather they were recurring phenomena. Underpinning my arguments with theories of affect, in particular Brian Massumi’s work on ‘fear of future fire’ and the philosopher Alexander Bain’s work on trauma, I argue that as settlers became increasingly conscious of the cyclicality of bushfires, their understandings of time and its relation to landscape altered. Realist writing responded to this deepening knowledge of the Australian environment, and instead of emphasizing the fleeting drama of a fire, fiction began to focus on its seasonal return. These stories and poems highlight the extreme vigilance that accompanies heightened knowledge and memories of the land. We see characters waiting for fires to arrive in scenes that are often agonizing in their slow pace, leaving them caught, as Barbara Eckstein expresses it, ‘between bushfire and approaching’ (Eckstein 2014, 256). Yet we also see bushfires, both actual and anticipated, accumulate memories of fires that have come before, and the devastation they have caused.
    Memory and nostalgia play important and complicated roles in attempts to mediate and manage the Australian landscape, exposing the fiction of a land that could be tamed or pastoralized to become just like the home settlers had left behind. Drawing on the fire historian Tom Griffiths’ notion of the amnesia that enables survivors of bushfires to return to the site of the blaze and to build anew, I examine representations of characters who doggedly rebuild their old lives. In particular, I consider the fraught nature of ‘willed amnesia’ or the denial of the reality that fire will return, while also considering connections between memory and place.     Keywords: bushfires; memory; disaster; fear; Australian settler culture