Cirrus@Austlit

'Fire is an element deeply embedded in the Australian consciousness. In recent times it has been associated with natural disasters such as Ash Wednesday and Black Saturday, terrifying and deadly bushfires with biblical monikers. The danger of fire has been always been present in our literature, too, from the works of Dorothy Mackellar to Judith Wright to Les Murray. It tears through communities with devastating consequences, but in the bush it also has the capacity to renew and regenerate – that is, after all, how Indigenous Australians have applied fire to the land for thousands of years. But as Andrew McGahan’s extraordinary novel The White Earth (Allen & Unwin, 2004) reveals, some blights on the national conscience can never be scorched clean.' (Introduction)