Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction: Victorian Domestic Fiction Down Under
- 1 Retracing Domestic Space: English National Identity in Harriet Martineau's Homes Abroad
- 2 ‘Hasten to the Land of Promise’: The Influence of Emigrant Letters on Dickens's Life and Literature
- 3 ‘Ever so Many Partings Welded Together’: Serial Settlement and Great Expectations
- 4 ‘The Heavens were on Fire’: Incendiarism and the Defence of the Settler Home
- 5 The ‘Australian Girl’ and the Domestic Ideal in Colonial Women's Fiction
- 6 Fugitive Homes: Multiple Migrations in Ethel Turner's Fiction
- 7 Devout Domesticity and Extreme Evangelicalism: The Unsettled Australian Domestic of Maud Jean Franc
- 8 ‘That's what Children are – Nought but Leg-Ropes’: Motherhood in Rosa Praed's Mrs Tregaskiss
- 9 The Antipodal House Beautiful: Louisa Alice Baker's Colonial Aesthetic
- 10 Antipodal Home Economics: International Debt and Settler Domesticity in Clara Cheeseman's A Rolling Stone
- 11 ‘What is in the Blood will Come Out’: Belonging, Expulsion and the New Zealand Settler Home in Jessie Weston's Ko Méri
- Notes
- Index
4 - ‘The Heavens were on Fire’: Incendiarism and the Defence of the Settler Home
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction: Victorian Domestic Fiction Down Under
- 1 Retracing Domestic Space: English National Identity in Harriet Martineau's Homes Abroad
- 2 ‘Hasten to the Land of Promise’: The Influence of Emigrant Letters on Dickens's Life and Literature
- 3 ‘Ever so Many Partings Welded Together’: Serial Settlement and Great Expectations
- 4 ‘The Heavens were on Fire’: Incendiarism and the Defence of the Settler Home
- 5 The ‘Australian Girl’ and the Domestic Ideal in Colonial Women's Fiction
- 6 Fugitive Homes: Multiple Migrations in Ethel Turner's Fiction
- 7 Devout Domesticity and Extreme Evangelicalism: The Unsettled Australian Domestic of Maud Jean Franc
- 8 ‘That's what Children are – Nought but Leg-Ropes’: Motherhood in Rosa Praed's Mrs Tregaskiss
- 9 The Antipodal House Beautiful: Louisa Alice Baker's Colonial Aesthetic
- 10 Antipodal Home Economics: International Debt and Settler Domesticity in Clara Cheeseman's A Rolling Stone
- 11 ‘What is in the Blood will Come Out’: Belonging, Expulsion and the New Zealand Settler Home in Jessie Weston's Ko Méri
- Notes
- Index
Summary
This chapter examines the vulnerability of the settler home in the face of summer bushfires, particularly those that were deliberately set. The bushfire represented an annual source of terror to Australian settlers and at a time when insurance policies were rare, fire could ruin a family overnight. The arsonist inspired fear within settler communities, not least because it was impossible to know who he was or when he might strike. It is estimated that at last half of all bushfires with known origins are intentionally lit and, as Danielle Clode has commented, ‘Fires are a weapon even the most disenfranchised can wield with great effect’. Deliberately lit fires were not all, of course, acts of arson. Prescribed burns to clear land were frequently originators of catastrophic bushfires, yet even though arson posed a very real threat to the homestead, the fear of malicious fire-setting greatly outweighed its reality.
Drawing on Anthony Trollope's novella Harry Heathcote of Gangoil (1874), alongside more neglected material including Mary Fortune's ‘Waif Wanderer’ articles for the Australian Journal and J. S. Borlase's ‘Twelve Miles Broad’ (1885), this chapter analyses the threat posed to the home by the arsonist and the ways in which literary representations demonized the ‘fire bug’. This piece also considers how fiction mediates emotional responses to fire, such as trauma and hatred, while exploring how literary representations of arsonists channelled deeprooted anxieties about the precariousness of settler life and the vulnerability of the bush homestead.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand , pp. 63 - 74Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014