This is an extract from Fire: Nature and Culture* a recently published book by Stephen “Smokechaser” Pyne of the University of Arizona.

You can read about Stephen’s work on fire—and there is a lot—at his personal website here.

For present purposes this quote from his biography says enough.

It all began when, a few days after high school, 18 years old, I joined the forest fire crew at the North Rim of Grand Canyon. I returned for 15 seasons.

Everything I’ve written, even the fact I write at all, dates from those years on the Rim.

Australia’s bushfires have been long bonded to the nation’s identity. Bushfires are as Australian as eucalyptus and koalas, and the community firefighting against them, a set-piece of Australian art and literature. Relative to population size, Australia probably has the densest proportion of high-culture fire art anywhere.

Like America there is an element of the reportorial and the celebratory, the urge to record the oddities of an Antipodean land and to identify with its more dramatic expressions. Unlike in America, where the nineteenth-century paintings have a freshness and glory that seems to come from Creation, the Australian bushfire appears more dangerous, sinister and inassimilable. If its conflagrations chronicle the major events of Australian history, the art of those fires traces a record of their meaning.

As in other new worlds, the desire to inventory was a powerful incentive to draw and paint. Australia’s natural history was so seemingly inverted – Darwin thought it appeared as though there had been a separate creation – that the bushfire joined the kangaroo and platypus as a curiosity worthy of note. Since flames could not be stored in formaldehyde or stuffed by a taxidermist, paintings and prose were the naturalist’s tools of preservation. The first visual record of an Aboriginal family shows a fire-stick in the hand of a child; few subsequent images lacked a fire-stick. Bushfires filled the background landscape.

In Victoria flames not only scampered about the scene like wallabies but were major events of history and demanded a high style. The roaring bushfire, driving society before it, became the Australian answer to the Grand Manner epics of Europe that dramatized great battles and moments of history. Eugene von Guérard (1811–1901) showed how formal art could frame the wild fury, but only when viewed from afar.

The man who brought it close – hurled the bushfire at the viewer – was William Strutt, whose Black Thursday, February 6th, 1851 (1864) became the exemplar for what came to define an Australian genre. Certainly the artist came to regard the giant canvas as his magnum opus.

Strutt had arrived in Melbourne in July 1850 on the cusp of the gold rush and six months from the first of the great conflagrations of Australian settlement. In February 1851 perhaps a quarter of Victoria burned in what came to called Black Thursday. While Strutt never saw the flames, he felt their conditions and knew their smoke, entering many notes and details into his journal and sketchbook. In 1864 he composed the vast canvas Black Thursday, which he exhibited in London but always intended for a public collection. Although a sensation, the painting didn’t sell.

For the next century Black Thursday undertook a complex walkabout between Britain and various Australian colonies in search of a suitable venue. In 1883 it alighted in South Australia. Over the coming decades it remained in private hands, although shuttled between galleries in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, and at least once threatened with relocation to Perth.

In 1954 the State Library of Victoria did what everyone originally thought should have happened at the beginning: it purchased the painting for AUS£150. (Strutt had asked for AUS£300 initially, and considered it a loss, but agreed to AUS£200, which one critic noted would earn him less ‘than the wages of a colour-grinder’.) When the State Library acquired its new building in 1965 Black Thursday went on permanent display, piqued the interest of art historians and gained the popular acclaim Strutt and early critics had assumed was its birthright.

In 1988 it joined a travelling exhibition for Australia’s Bicentenary, but by the time it completed the circuit the Library was undergoing reconstruction and the painting again went a-droving, this time to the National Gallery of Australia and the art galleries of South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia, before coming to final rest back in the State Library’s La Trobe Library in 2004. By now angry, real bush fires were reclaiming their place as a theme of Australian life and politics. Black Thursday had acquired the force of a talisman.

Major Australian artists continued to include bushfires, both as conflagrations and as rural burning-off, as a staple theme. The boldest bid to match Strutt was John Longstaff’s Gippsland, Sunday Night, February 20th, 1898 that depicts the bushfires of Red Tuesday. But what really distinguishes the Australian scene is not the persistence of bushfire as a set-piece but the transition to modernism. Almost alone, Australian artists succeeded in reincarnating bushfire into the dominant visual idiom of twentieth-century art. Elsewhere fire paintings survive as popular or folk art but disappear from the avant-garde or high-culture media. In Australia the bushfire as serious painting persists just as the bushfire does on the land.

An astonishing roster of major twentieth-century Australian artists painted fires. Arthur Boyd, Fred Williams, Russell Drysdale, Clifton Pugh, even Sidney Nolan – all created major works, often several, on bushfires and burning-off, managing to convey the traditional sense of the bushfire as both implacably Australian and ineffably alien. Bushfires did not simply illuminate the landscape like the bonfire of a corroboree, they were the landscape.

Flame and char were as much an expression of the bush as sunbaked soils and blistering winds. In no other part of the industrial world has art managed to keep fire in the modernist oeuvre. But then no other industrialized country has so much vernacular fire and such spasms of wildfire that rage through the margins of its cities and can even invade its capital.

Excepting Australia, the great lack in fire art is the absence, in most, of some genuine gravitas beyond the immediate sense of crash and crisis. Whether in painting, literature or film, most works speak to adventure or disaster or a flash of natural sublime, but not to cultural identity or moral drama. It’s not the imagery that packs a punch: it’s how it makes visible the unseen yearnings, fears and felt reality of a people.

After all, contemporary life is awash with fire imagery. Almost any piece of journalism or propaganda will include flame to catch the eye and animate interest. Some renewed interest has come by an association with environmentalism. Even realist paintings – to say nothing of photographs – abound; but they have become a visual chatter and achieve the unlikely effect of making burning almost banal.

Most viewers see those images not on walls or in museums but on screens and monitors. Some of the most gripping don’t show flames at all but only remotely sensed hotspots from orbiting satellites like MODIS. They show earth abstractly pocked with fires, like a sweater eaten by moths. For most inhabitants of industrialized societies, that is the fire they know.

The virtual is replacing the vernacular.

Paintings

John Longstaff. Gippsland, Sunday Night, February 20th, 1898. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

William Strutt. Black Thursday, February 6th, 1851. State Library of Victoria.

Clifton Pugh. After the Bushfire, 1962.

Tim Storrier. Waterline (Reflection).

*  Fire: Nature and Culture. Stephen J Pyne. REAKTION BOOKS | 9781780230467. 224pp AUD$34.99.