After the flames, blame

WHAT is it about disaster -- natural or at the hands of humanity -- that fires the Australian imagination?

WHAT is it about disaster -- natural or at the hands of humanity -- that fires the Australian imagination?

  Inferno: The Day Victoria Burned
By Roger Franklin
Slattery Media Group, 288pp, $39.95 (HB)
Disasters that Changed Australia
By Richard Evans
MUP, 198pp, $32.99
Australian Tragic: Gripping Tales from the Dark Side of Our History
By Jack Marx
Hachette Australia, 369pp, $35

All people experience tragedy, and most weave great catastrophic events into their cultural milieu, searing meaning into calamity to at once explain and heal. But few countries note natural disasters in the margins of their history quite like Australia does. But that's probably appropriate for a society founded on twin misfortunes: a dispossessed British and Irish convict underclass, itself dispossessing indigenes in waves of violence, cruelty and privation. It's a grief founded on a melancholy built on a sorrow.

Yet that was only the beginning for a harsh and far-flung land in which natural disaster would always find accommodation. In the 20th century alone, perennial droughts merged with the merciless Black Friday and Ash Wednesday bushfires of 1939 and 1983, just as the 1955 Maitland and 1974 Brisbane floods underscored parallel tales of cyclonic storms, of which Tracy in 1974 remains Darwin's defining moment. Then there are those catastrophes that come only with human endeavour: the collapse of the Westgate and Tasman bridges in 1970 and 1975, and the Voyager disaster -- our worst peacetime maritime incident -- in 1964.

Add to those the cultural tragedies, from Gallipoli to the death of Phar Lap, and we find ourselves comforted with a hairshirt tapestry of quintessentially Australian drama.

And while we don't revel in, or even celebrate, disaster, we do embrace it. Unafraid of the pain, we wear our darkest moments like braids on the sleeve of a stoic people. Disasters, then -- at least of the natural variety -- are as Australian as the cicadas of the long hot summer, and our languid acceptance of them as calm as an afternoon breeze.

The books under review draw on such sentiments. Inferno, written by veteran journalist Roger Franklin in the sweeping prose of a mammoth feature article, was prompted by the Victorian bushfires of February 7 this year, a day that will be forever known as Black Saturday. Quite apart from Franklin's adroit handling of incendiary science, this book is remarkable for the speed and energy of its production.

But, despite a gap of barely seven months between event and publication, haste has not compromised quality. This is at once a heart-rending account, written with a journalist's ear for the human angle, of a singular, tragic episode and a transcendent wake-up call to a community long accustomed to and complacent about natural disasters. The almost poetic incursions only add to the urgency of Franklin's message. Florid descriptions of the inferno as "fists of roiling fire" and as the "tyrant's torture and the martyr's lament" don't seem out of place when reflecting on a national tragedy of this scale.

There's also a welcome historical narrative. Among references to the Battle of Waterloo and Vesuvius at Pompeii -- other annihilating events lasting but a wrinkle in time -- we're reminded that disaster in the Australian bush is the rule and not an exception. And Franklin's reference to war is illuminating in just how much of the vocabulary of conflict we use in describing fire: a phenomenon that "advances" on "fronts", and where "attacks" and "defences" are countenanced. But, for a nation numb to frequent inferno, Black Saturday shook even the most complacent. With energy equal to 1500 times that of the atomic bomb the destroyed Hiroshima, the conflagration claimed 173 lives, 2000 homes, 430,000ha of bushland and upwards of a million native animals in tragic dimensions dwarfing all others. Across national and international news, the localities of Kinglake, Marysville, Flowerdale and others briefly became synonyms for the depth of human misery.

It's in this context that Franklin presents two humanities. He introduces us to the survivors via short biographical sketches that underscore their Australian ordinariness, yet who stand out not because of the disaster but for their fortitude despite it. Indeed, Franklin explores some sharp sociological shifts. Where, just 40 years ago, dead women were found burned inside houses with husbands dead out front, today wives and husbands will be found together outside, joined in death as they were in life.

We also learn something of the courage of firefighters and of the generosity of donors who, together, have allowed many a cultural observer to emphasise, rightly or wrongly, Australians' sense of community.

But Franklin conjures another, darker inhumanity: the arsonist who commits the crime as foul as it is impossible to comprehend.

After the shock of tragedy comes anger and accusation. Blame must be laid, and sense must be made if the healing is to begin. Much of this book is pointed in this direction, with the first three chapters elementally labelled Fire, Wind and Earth. It's on this plane that Franklin will meet his toughest critics, as he links the uncontrollable natural variables (summers will always blow dry, scorching winds) to the controllable, indeed avoidable, human factors of a climate change wrought by global warming. But he also points to the chest-deep piles of leafy detritus, fuel for the dragon pyres that, from indigenous times on, were once purposely burned in preparation for the next big fire, but now encouraged to grow amok in the name of conservation and natural vegetation. But, as Franklin wryly asks, what, exactly, is natural?

Franklin concludes with a summary look at the interim findings of the royal commission into Black Saturday (included as an appendix, with the full report due mid next year), and with a sharing of culpability. In earlier pages, Franklin blamed the excessive death toll on failing alarms, poor leadership, broken communication lines and the questionable "stay and defend" option. More generally, he laments an alleged "skein of fatalism" that became "woven into a big ball of fuzzy thinking", producing, it seems, a "mood of innocent ignorance and misplaced optimism". But, ultimately, he finds that

Black Saturday was the fault of no particular group or individual, but of mankind in general ... rapacious humans were baking the planet with their carbon emissions, so who would be surprised if mother nature struck back?

Fourteen unsettling colour photographs complete the book, offering more than words could alone.

Disasters that Changed Australia, by historian Richard Evans, could hardly be a more different volume. Inspired long before Black Saturday, Evans offers similar sentiments in affirming thatblame is central to dealing with disaster. Conservationists, global warming and even God's retribution for Victoria's abortion lawswere touted as causes for the Februaryapocalypse.

Honing the idea that disasters can bring out the best in humanity, Evans presents a vital pivot point -- kairos, Greek for "critical time" -- for his argument that disasters become watersheds in cultural perception. Kairos also describes a rupture in the world of the beholder. It could be a national disaster or, more commonly, a personal tragedy such as the death of a loved one that leaves the individual's life forever divided into times before and after the event.

The book begins with a remarkably sober and scholarly premise. Disasters, Evans writes, "have an economics, a political science, a theology and a psychology". But it's their history, or rather their historiography, that sparks his interest. This book -- which Evans concedes is the result of a "long personal journey as a writer and an historian" -- soon resembles something of a personal mission: a duty to "peel back (those) familiar comforting stories", and to separate them from the myths that "do not withstand scrutiny". It is, Evans suggests, not just a personal duty but a national one.

The book is divided into 10 chapters, each of a single disaster. Unsurprisingly, Cyclone Tracy leads, with the present drought and Black Friday the only other two natural events; the remainder are feats of mortals. Evans tells, for example, of Darwin's other heartbreak, the Japanese bombing of Darwin in March 1942, and offers good evidence for a deconstruction, even demolition, of heroic legend. In Darwin, Evans argues, "the legend ofAussie courage under fire took abattering". While many stayed andfought, some, including military personnel, fled in panic from what theybelieved to be an imminent Japanese invasion.

Evans also covers lesser known tales. He makes a compelling case, for example, for including a chapter on the slaughter at Flanders during World War I. Where most schoolchildren know a little of Gallipoli, howmany know of the equally bloody events atBullecourt, Preston or Passchendaele? Evanspulls no punches: "Why were (these places) worth fighting over? The short answer is: they weren't."

The Depression and the introduction of rabbits (usually overlooked in favour of the cane toad as our worst naturalist disaster) also receive good treatment, but it's the inclusion of the Snowy Mountains scheme (to Evans, a "great white elephant"), and Australia's poor showing at the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games, that will rankle many a reader. How accurate, or even tasteful, is it to rank the disappointment of a single silver medal alongside the genocide of Tasmania's indigenous population?

Ultimately, Evans's findings resemble Franklin's: that people, and not nature, have the case to answer, with disaster proving but "a measure of human impact". If nothing else, this book is a call to action as we rethink our use of finite resources. Evans concludes simply: "We need to change."

Jack Marx's Australian Tragic may contain stories of lesser significance, but his desire to make Australian history more accessible is no less ardent. In fact, it's the relative obscurity of many of the 30, mostly macabre, tales that will appeal to lovers of the bizarre. Marx, a freelance journalist, could easily have been a history teacher, frustrated by the apathy of students, hamstrung by the tedium of a syllabus that, at least in the Australian context, might lack the thrill of, say, the American War of Independence. Australian students, Marx cheekily suggests,

are forced to dream up ingenious ways to stay awake during lectures on the gold rush, Federation, and the "adventures" of Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth.

As a comprehensive history of Australia, the volume would fail. But Marx intended to write no such thing. Instead, his mission is "to present real stories in the sensational 'dime novel' style of old". For Marx, "history's not just about education. It's about storytelling, wonder and pointless, amoral voyeurism."

Marx has technology to thank for assisting his task. As old newspapers, with obscure tales of tragic human interest, become digitised, new audiences are awoken to times long forgotten. The terrible fate of 19th-century physician turned actor Arthur Dacre, and his wife, Amy, is a classic example. But not all stories are ancient history. Marx gives new context, for example, to the death of naturalist Steve Irwin, and reviews the life of a father of a troubled Tasmanian boy, whose name we learn only at the end. With some tales bordering the supernatural, the first chapter, Moloch, covering the terrible fire on the ghost train at Sydney's Luna Park in 1979, is a stand-out.

Australians -- proud of their mettle, questioning of orthodoxy and fond of a good yarn -- will always read their own stories. And even if we have to wait years for the next crop of this type of book, it'll be well worth it.