Burning books

Two recent books offer important contributions to the bushfire discussion, but by very different authors and from quite different perspectives.

Currowan: The story of a fire and a community during Australia’s worst summer, by distinguished journo Bronwyn Adcock, is very much based on her personal community experiences in the giant fire of that name on the NSW South Coast. She has researched and talked to many other residents, firefighters and fire managers to pull together a gripping account, trying to understand what happened in the fire and to affected communities. Admirably, Adcock doesn’t flinch from examining serious issues, not only around this fire, but how we as a nation can deal with a more dangerous bushfire future.

One review of Currowan can be read here, and see here for IBG analysis of some events of the Currowan fire, which helped to inform Adcock’s book.

Meanwhile, Greg Mullins is on the inside looking out. He has written Firestorm – battling super-charged natural disasters. Mullins is the former head of Fire and Rescue NSW and a volunteer firefighter with the NSW Rural Fire Service. But he is best known to the public in his activist role with Emergency Leaders for Climate Action (ELCA), the eminent group who tried to warn governments, and notably the Prime Minister, about the threat of the 2019-2020 summer, a threat that was so sadly realised.

In the book, Mullins applies his long personal experience, especially of the Black Summer fires, to the challenge of bushfires driven by climate change. He argues that the most important thing we can do to avoid ongoing disasters is to rapidly reduce carbon emissions. He also suggests ways to strengthen our fire management capacity and adapt to worse fires in the future, which are already inevitable.

Mullins can be viewed talking about Firestorm to Kerry O’Brien in this Climate Council podcast and to The Guardian in this article.

By reaching a mass audience, these two books may well have a greater influence on public understanding than processes like the NSW Independent Bushfire Inquiry. We can be grateful they have each been written by professionals (of different kinds) with a keen eye on the truth and evidence.