AustLit

A bush fire is not an orderly invader, but a guerrilla. It advances by rushes, by little venomous tongues of fire in the grass; it spreads by sparks burning leaves and bark. Its front is miles deep. It is here, it is there, like a swarm of venomous wasps. It shams dead and stabs you in the back. It encircles you so that there is no sure line of flight for its intended victims. It destroys bridges in your rear. It bars the road with blazing trees.

H.G. Wells,  'Bush Fires', in Travels of a Republican Radical in Search of Hot Water. Penguin, 1939, p.47.

Welcome to AustLit's research dataset on Black Summer, Australia's 2019-2020 bushfire season.

This is not a critical engagement with the Black Summer bushfires and other bushfire writing in Australia: it is, rather, a set of pathways into bushfire writing, a way of gathering together the disparate ways in which Australians have written about fire.

The main focus is Black Summer: using the navigation tabs on the left, you will be able to access a series of curated lists on different types of writing about the bushfire season on 2019-2020, from children's books to autobiographies, or access the full list of works with 'Black Summer' as a subject.

Because Black Summer is part of a continuum of bushfires on this continent, we have also collated material under 'Other Bushfire Writing': here, you will find writing about bushfires generally, but also pathways into works about other catastrophic fire events: Black Thursday (1851), Ash Wednesday (1983), and Black Saturday (2009).

We have also provided a space for people looking for ways to teach bushfire writing, from works with teaching resources to our own Necessary Conversations. Finally, we have a list of further reading, with an emphasis on materials easily available online.

The above image shows maps of areas of Australia burnt by bushfire between June 2001 and May 2019. The images are drawn from NASA's MODIS imaging sensors onboard Terra and (from May 2002) Aqua satellites. We acknowledge the use of data from NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS), funded by NASA Headquarters.

The full range of images can be viewed on Wikimedia Commons.

Please contact us if you have any concerns about the images or materials used in this research dataset, or if you would like to suggest additions or corrections.