'The Arsonist takes readers inside the hunt for a fire-lighter. After Black Saturday, a February 2009 day marked by 47 degree heat and firestorms, arson squad detectives arrived at a plantation on the edge of a 26,000-hectare burn site. Eleven people had just been killed and hundreds made homeless. Here, in the Latrobe Valley, where Victoria’s electricity is generated, and the rates of unemployment, crime and domestic abuse are the highest in the state, more than thirty people were known to police as firebugs. But the detectives soon found themselves on the trail of a man they didn’t know.
'The Arsonist tells a remarkable detective story, as the police close in on someone they believe to be a cunning offender; and a puzzling psychological story, as defence lawyers seek to understand the motives of a man who, they claimed, was a naïf that had accidentally dropped a cigarette.
'It is the story not only of this fire - how it happened, the people who died, the aftermath for the community - but of fire in this country. What it has done, what it has meant, what it might yet do. Bushfire is one of Australia’s deepest anxieties, never more so than when deliberately lit. Arson, wrote Henry Lawson, expresses a malice ‘terrifying to those who have seen what it is capable of. You never know when you are safe.‘
'As she did in The Tall Man, Chloe Hooper takes us to a part of the country seldom explored, and reveals something buried but essential in our national psyche. The bush, summertime, a smouldering cigarette - none of these will feel the same again.' (Publication summary)
Dedication: For Don
A brief review of this work appeared in The New York Times 1 November 2020
'This essay consider the active legacies of Australia's colonial extractivist imaginaries in the context of the nation's refusal to adequately acknowledge the current climate crisis. It explores these legacies through two recent works of Australian narrative non-fiction writing, Chloe Hooper's The Arsonist (2018) and Tom Doig's Hazelwood (2020), both of which address major fire events in the Latrobe Valley, a region in south-eastern Australia profoundly shaped by mining and other extractivist practices. While histories of genocide and dispossession are commonly disconnected from the discourse of Australia's current environmental crisis, Hooper's and Doig's texts connect climate crisis to manifestations of colonial-capitalist violence and examine the contemporary experiences of a community living in the midst of extractivism's material realities. Hooper and Doig present the fires and their consequences as true crime accounts of extraordinary events in which the site of culpability seems initially apparent. Through narrative strategies that bring the reader close to what happened, however, Hooper and Doig suggest that, in the face of extractivist colonial legacies, the answer to "who did it?" becomes much less clear. These texts ultimately ask us to consider our complicity in these crimes and the environmental imaginaries that inform them, while pointing to the possibility of alternative imaginaries that co-exist in the shadows of extractivism's continued dominance.' (Publication abstract)
'Chloe Hooper shares her insights into the sort of person who might perpetrate the crime of arson.'
'On 7 February 2009, the Black Saturday bushfires ravaged Victoria and ended the lives of 173 people. At the site of the fire that started in Churchill, a town in the Latrobe Valley, detectives found evidence suggesting it was intentionally ignited. Not far from the site, they discovered ‘a sky-blue sedan parked at an odd angle by the grass verge of Glendowald Road. The car looked to have stopped suddenly’. As the detectives gathered witness reports, they heard that during the bushfire, an unusual man was spotted wandering through the blaze, carrying in his arms a tiny dog. The results from the sedan’s plates return, and they discover it is owned by Brendan Sokaluk, a LaTrobe Valley local. From there, The Arsonist, by Chloe Hooper, proceeds in three parts—The Detectives, The Lawyers, and The Courtroom—and ends with the conviction of Brendan Sokaluk.' (Introduction)
'Chloe Hooper shares her insights into the sort of person who might perpetrate the crime of arson.'
'The language we use to describe fire, Chloe Hooper points out, gives it a creaturely shape: it has flanks, tongues, fingers, a tail. It licks, it devours. Fascinated by its mythic force, we talk about taming a fire as we talk about taming a beast, but when it comes to vast tracts of bush, we can only contain it and wait for another natural force, the weather, to extinguish the flames.' (Introduction)
'The Tall Man author says her new book is not a polemic on climate change but a portrait of the ‘monster in our imagination’' (Introduction)
'On February 7, 2009, following 12 years of drought, and on a day when temperatures soared to 45 degrees, bushfires burned across the state of Victoria. The fires, of unprecedented ferocity, killed 173 people, injured hundreds more, and a million animals perished in the flames as well. The fires reduced 3500 buildings, 2000 of them people’s homes, to char and rubble. One of the worst-affected areas was Central Gippsland, where the fire began in a eucalypt plantation outside the town of Churchill and burned through 26,000 hectares.' (Introduction)
'On 7 February 2009, the Black Saturday bushfires ravaged Victoria and ended the lives of 173 people. At the site of the fire that started in Churchill, a town in the Latrobe Valley, detectives found evidence suggesting it was intentionally ignited. Not far from the site, they discovered ‘a sky-blue sedan parked at an odd angle by the grass verge of Glendowald Road. The car looked to have stopped suddenly’. As the detectives gathered witness reports, they heard that during the bushfire, an unusual man was spotted wandering through the blaze, carrying in his arms a tiny dog. The results from the sedan’s plates return, and they discover it is owned by Brendan Sokaluk, a LaTrobe Valley local. From there, The Arsonist, by Chloe Hooper, proceeds in three parts—The Detectives, The Lawyers, and The Courtroom—and ends with the conviction of Brendan Sokaluk.' (Introduction)
