Bushfire stories
Bushfire stories are important resources. They reveal how people directly and indirectly understand and experience bushfires and their general ideas about the environment. These ways of seeing inform how people act toward both. Notably, recent bushfire inquiries have emphasised local and individual action, responsibility and knowledge as the way forward for preparing and navigating future fire seasons. Bushfire stories can also enrich our approaches to the complex and contested issues surrounding Australia’s fire seasons.
This project collected and archived community stories about Australian bushfires on a dedicated website; these stories are now available below. This archive serves as a valuable platform that enables people to tell their stories and be heard. It provides an online space to express, engage with, and understand diverse experiences of bushfires – including those not necessarily covered in the mainstream reporting on bushfires. This archive will also inform our research into how communities understand, experience, and narrate bushfires.
Contributors: Associate Professor Thom Van Dooren, Dr Blanche Verlie, Dr Scott Webster, Dr Fiona Allon
Explore the Bushfire Stories archive
Story by Julie Vulcan. After the fires have past, leaving a trail of devastation, we often forget what happened before, in the lead-up. This is a telling of that before, with all its signs, preparations, anxiety, frustration and emotion. It is more than a story, it is also an offering of lessons learnt, things that worked, and things I hold dear.
Download Reading the Signs: My Year with Fire to continue reading.
Story by Sophie Chao. This poem fleshes out the lifeworld of the endangered Gilbert’s potoroo since settler-colonization and in the aftermath of the Black Summer. The poem seeks to celebrate the ecological significance of the Gilbert’s potoroo within Australian ecosystems. It also traces the various forms of violence that have been inflicted upon this species by human actors, whose activities increasingly threaten the potoroo’s environment and future.
Download Ode to the Gilbert’s Potoroo to continue reading.
Story by Dr Jonica Newby. A story of blood-red skies, accidental heroes, a disaster-movie-worthy action sequence, and an incongruous encounter with the film Frozen as ordinary people confront towering fire fronts the size of nightmares. (extracted from Beyond Climate Grief, New South Publishing).
Download Horror to continue reading.
Story by Dr Jonica Newby. Adrenaline? Jumping at noises? Hyper busy? A wind phobia? Kids with nightmares? Disaster experts on some of the things to expect if you or your kids went through the monster fires – and how to handle them.
Download So you’ve been through a disaster: Practical tips from disaster psychologists to continue reading.
Story by Nicole Webster. Our first child was born on New Year’s Eve 2019. It was a time of mixed emotions for us as we welcomed our daughter into the world before we realised that we could not return to our old fibro home because it could not keep the smoke out.
Download Home, Smokey Home to continue reading.
Story by Blue Mountains World Heritage Institute. This documentary film explores the 2013 bush fires that devastated the Blue Mountains townships of Winmalee and Yellow Rock, and documents the recovery of the community afterwards.
Download Fire Stories 2: Living with Risk to continue reading.
Story by Blue Mountains World Heritage Institute. This documentary film explores the impacts of the catastrophic fires in 1957 on the Blue Mountains community in Leura.
Download Fire Stories: A Lesson in Time to continue reading.
Story by Anonymous. This story discusses the reaction of the Rural Fire Services’ Incident Management Teams (IMTs) to the Gospers Mountain Fire in 2019.
Download Duty Tells to continue reading.
Story by Kim Grace aka Amos O’Henry. Christmas 2019 saw large areas of the East Coast of Australia burning, including in the Blue Mountains. Kim Grace watched these fires with growing apprehension; he had seen it all before and just hoped that this time he would not lose everything.
Download Blue Mountains on Fire, 2019 to continue reading.
Story by Kim Grace. Kim Grace was a child when the 1967 fires destroyed his home, town and most of the State of Tasmania. The fires, and the events that took place afterwards, were mostly buried in his subconscious until he returned to Snug 30 years later.
Download Black Tuesday, Tasmania, 1967 to continue reading.
Story by Elizabeth Morgan. What’s it like being the meat in a fire sandwich? I spent two months on the edge in the 2019-2020 summer as two megafires – in the Blue Mountains – Gospers Mountains to the north, Green Wattle Creek to the south – raced towards each other, the firefront sometimes gaining 12 kilometres a day.
Download Two Months on the Edge to continue reading.