The bushfire situation in Victoria is dire and worsening this week, with more than 300,000 hectares burnt and well over 300,000 hectares impacted. The fires have also had a devastating effect on the state’s forest reserves and parks, many of which remain exposed to questionable management practices.
So far than 400,000 hectares of parks have been burnt, destroying diverse environments across the Wimmera–Mallee, the Otways, central Victoria, northeastern Victoria and the alpine region.
Large areas of forest have been lost, along with significant portions of the state’s unique plants, animals and ecosystems. Severe burns, smoke, radiant heat and injuries have caused widespread mortality among insects, birds, frogs, reptiles, mammals and other species. Recovery has been made even harder as surviving wildlife struggles to find suitable habitat outside the burnt zones. The Victorian government has provided financial support for the Bushfire Biodiversity Response and Recovery program to help protect and restore flora, fauna and habitats affected by the fires.
As of Australia Day, January 26, more than two dozen towns and localities in the Otways region were told to evacuate, with firefighters warning that the Carlisle River fire could escape containment. Emergency personnel were also withdrawn as a precaution. Authorities said it was “almost certain” the blaze would spread through the week, prompting evacuation warnings for more than 1,100 properties. Temperatures have surged to 48.8°C in recent days, with several locations expected to reach 50°C.
Meanwhile, Wood Central also draws attention to a report, A History of Australia’s Bushfire Reporting, by Fianna Morgan, PhD candidate at the Australian National University. Her work explores how bushfire coverage has evolved from the 19th century to the present, revealing how reporting shapes public memory and understanding of disaster.
From Reporting to Literature
Australia’s Black Summer bushfires of 2019–2020 brought scenes of flames crowning trees, fire trucks engulfed in smoke and communities sheltering on beaches. For European colonists in the 19th century, bushfires were already a familiar, if unsettling, part of life and quickly became a focus of media attention. Newspapers not only reported fires but also published hundreds of serialised bushfire narratives, often appearing during the fire season itself. Reading these accounts together reveals shifting attitudes toward disaster and the ways in which fire is mythologised, memorialised, or forgotten.
One of the earliest bushfire narratives, William Howitt’s Black Thursday (1856), adapted his own reporting on the catastrophic 1851 fires. Black Thursday, February 7, 1851, is considered the first great fire disaster of Australian settlement, with estimates suggesting almost a quarter of the Victorian colony was burned. Howitt’s literary version revised and sensationalised his earlier reporting, drawing on multiple newspaper accounts to portray unprecedented destruction. His protagonist, Robert Patterson, embodies settler endurance, yet the narrative relies heavily on journalistic descriptions of the fire.
Later interpretations, such as Rolf Boldrewood’s An Australian Squire (1878), offered a more realistic reappraisal. Newspaper reporting is woven directly into the story to convey the scale of the disaster, with accounts describing “loss and ruin over the length and breadth of the land which were appalling.” Other narratives, including the didactic The Burning Forest (1853), highlight the limits of reporting. That story recounts a fatal fire caused by a careless gold digger whose actions never reached the newspapers, underscoring how many incidents remained unrecorded.
As fires increased in frequency and severity across the century, reporting styles shifted. Extensive multi‑page features that followed events like Black Thursday (1851) and Black Monday (1865) gradually gave way to more succinct coverage. Victoria endured regular and devastating fires in the late 1870s and early 1880s, with the most fatal occurring in 1879. The rapid disappearance of Black Monday from public memory — omitted entirely from the 1900 Victorian Royal Commission into Fire Protection in Country Districts — reflects the sheer scale and regularity of these disasters.
While early narratives responded directly to historical events, later stories drew on seasonal patterns, often beginning in drought under an oppressive red sun. Across the 19th century, these narratives modelled fire preparation and precaution, though with varying realism. Howitt suggested that backburning and firebreaks could save a home, while Boldrewood argued that in extreme conditions “no amount of preparation is sufficient and defence is impossible. No man living could have stood near enough to the line of fire to go through the mockery of trying to stem it.”
Just as Howitt adapted his reporting to memorialise disaster, modern journalism continues the tradition. Recent works such as Black Summer recount the 2019–2020 fires through the eyes of journalists on the ground, while the ABC’s television series Fires incorporates imagery drawn directly from widely circulated footage. These narratives counteract our tendency to forget and, unlike Black Monday, offer an opportunity to ensure the practical lessons of disaster are finally learned.
