Life when your house is always on fire
Growing up with bushfires in Australia is the norm - but what happens after?
Every summer, volunteer crews of firefighters fight to defend their homes, communities and livelihoods from fire fronts. Bushfires are just another part of public life in Australia, but they’re on the rise.
Alice Bishop’s radiant short story collection, A Constant Hum, allows readers to reflect more deeply on the devastating 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, which destroyed over 4000 homes and took 173 lives. These fires changed Australia and the community it impacted forever.
Looking at the event from three different time periods, Bishop tries to make sense of the disaster, processing the grief and trauma that so many went through and continue to go through each and every year.
The stories are all grounded in the author’s personal experience of the disaster, as well as those in her own community. Bishop depicts a fractured, recovering populace who all respond to the crisis in a myriad of different ways. Some have never returned to the ashen remains of their home, whilst others have tried to rebuild.
In three sections, all reflecting the different wind patterns that occur during bushfires — prevailing, southerly and northerly — Bishop is moving back in time, closer to Black Saturday itself. Some stories are only very brief, snippets of livestock or glimpses into loss.
Perspective is vitally important in this collection. We see women trying to hold their families together, men making sense of their choice to stay and defend their homes, children seeing their friends’ lives change.
Every story describes our turbulent, unavoidable relationship with nature. Between the bush and the people impacted by its fires, how they have used and taken from the land and how it has now returned to take from them.
Loss is woven with painful poetry into each of Bishop’s stories. Differing accounts of grief make her writing vivid and present, interspersed with moments of love and quiet.
They have used and taken from the land and it has now returned to take from them.
Reading this collection in the aftermath of the worst bushfire summer in Australia’s history is encapsulating. As the most recent fire disaster drew to a close, my home — and the world — has found itself in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Will more stories be told, or has the mainstream media already moved on from our catastrophic summer of bushfires?
I was in Taiwan for the entirety of last summer. On a daily basis, my social media and conversations with friends and family only contained messages of disbelief, horror and an inescapable sense of wondering when this would end. I felt both connected and disconnected from these experiences, whilst my friends and family could not escape.
The issues faced with smoke blanketing major cities and a struggle to find masks have only morphed into a continued sense of surrounding disaster during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The story Just a Spark shows a mother moving through both her grief and the stiff, public nature of a legal process; the Royal Commission into the Black Saturday bushfires. She is faced with Jake Holden; an arsonist responsible for multiple, devastating deaths in her family. We feel the constant pressure, how she copes with both her own grief and regret, and the complexities of the legal system.
It had been almost forty-seven degrees on the last day for Linda’s daughter. Linda’s grandson. Her son-in-law too. Elderly people had been dying from heat, and birds had been falling from the sky; this is how the prosecution lawyer sets the scene, before tracing Jake Holden’s day.
A Constant Hum by Alice Bishop
Looking at before and after the fires from the perspective of Bishop’s characters is impactful, particularly during this global pandemic.
What will our world be like once all of this is over?
How will we change and adapt to our new normal?
