Burning: Australia’s Black Summer bushfire documentary lays out who the villains and heroes are

You will find yourself in tears multiple times, but most of the emotional reactions will be driven by a palpable rage.

OPINION

Documentaries often share many of the same narrative hallmarks as its fictional feature cousins – including a well-defined villain.

Sometimes that villain is institutional injustice where the blame is spread far and wide, but other times, the villain is an individual, a Hans Gruber-esque bogeyman whose mere presence evokes a guttural growl.

In Eva Orner’s Burning, a wrenching documentary about Australia’s Black Summer bushfires, streaming now on Amazon Prime Video, the villain-in-chief is Scott Morrison.

The Prime Minister is repeatedly drawn-and-quartered for his belligerent approach to addressing climate change, to the point that, according to Burning, Morrison isn’t just responsible for his government’s failure, but his government’s sabotage.

Perhaps you agree, perhaps you don’t (certainly, Morrison wouldn’t) but Burning puts forward a very convincing and both emotional and logical argument.

Burning director Eva Orner. Picture: Amazon Prime Video

Not that the documentary’s run-through of Morrison’s greatest hits is particularly revelatory because we all know Morrison abandoned post during Black Summer and then obfuscated before reluctantly “accepting” he shouldn’t have gone to Hawaii.

We also all know that Morrison held up a lump of coal in Parliament, fearmongered about electric vehicles and then advocated for a fossil fuel-led post-pandemic economic recovery.

We know he’s been dragged by an electorate desperate for climate action to a net zero commitment by 2050, but without any concrete plan.

So, yes, Burning is a story that is mostly told through binaries.

But it works. Because where there is a villain, there are heroes and victims and Burning has plenty of those – and, truly, the story belongs to them.

The documentary features the voices of climate scientist Tim Flannery, former RFS chief Greg Mullins, youth activist Daisy Jeffrey and Atlassian co-founder and solar farm investor Mike Cannon-Brookes.

Orner uses them to contextualise the science, the youth story and the business case for renewables, but the power of Burning is the experiences of those most directly affected by the horror of Black Summer.

Their stories will make you cry, repeatedly.

Mike Cannon-Brookes is one of the experts interviewed for the documentary. Picture: Amazon Prime Video

When Cobargo RFS volunteer Brian Ayliffe tells you that in 50 years of fighting fires, he’d never seen conditions like Black Summer, that lump in your throat swells, out of distress, empathy and rage.

When parents Dr Roly Stokes and Amber McDonald speak of their newborn baby who spent 17 days in ICU because of respiratory problems as a result of the weeks-long smoke, your heart breaks.

When Mallacoota resident Jann Gilbert describes the devastation of losing her home, it’s horrific, but the point that sticks the most is how she mentions that she can no longer stand outside in the wind because the sound of its fury triggers the terrors of that day.

Through contemporaneous news and amateur footage taken that summer, including video from Gilbert of pitch-black skies in the middle of the afternoon, Orner weaves that confronting vision – including the sound of that wind – through the doco so that audiences never forget how appalled they were at the time.

When Black Summer literally consumed Australia in the spring and summer of 2019 and 2020, there was this urgency in the community to address the conditions which led to 59 million acres being burnt, including wet and cold forests that had never before been touched by fire, the three billion animals that were killed and the nine firefighters who died.

Amber McDonald and Roly Stokes’ baby was born with respiratory problems during the Black Summer. Picture: Amazon Prime Video

But with Covid landing so soon afterwards, Morrison and the government lucked themselves into a climate reprieve, at least for a while.

With the glare around COP26, and now that we’re at the two-year-anniversary of Black Summer, Australians’ attention is swinging back. Burning isn’t even the only Black Summer screen project, following on the heels of documentary A Fire Inside and ABC drama Fires.

Like An Inconvenient Truth was a flashpoint for the climate movement in 2006, before energy companies and global politicians managed to cynically muddy up the narrative for profit and power motives, Burning and its ilk could be a potent force in the national conversation.

Some may level the criticism that Burning doesn’t present “the other side” of the story (Morrison declined to be interviewed for the film), but when the country is literally burning down and the science has reached consensus on why, there is no real “other side”. It’s not a debate anymore.

In Burning, Mallacoota journalist Rachael Mounsey recalled crouching down in a hall with her neighbours and her community, huddled together as the fire closed on them. She genuinely feared that it might’ve been the end.

And then her voice breaks as she says, “I felt I’d put my child in this situation”.

That’s what the villains are doing to everyone’s children.

Rating: 4/5

Burning is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video