Illuminations: This Is Bigger than Us

This chapter explores how alliances between people, plants and fire encompass new but recurrent cycles of life. It begins with considerations of the long histories of fire, plants and people in Australia and circles out to narratives drawn from the Canberra firestorm of 2003. It employs a methodology of connecting narratives of bushfire survivors with the stories explored within artworks. We unpack the ways storying and world-making are expressed over time and in different modalities. We think about how Australian photographer Harold Cazneaux’s iconic image of resilience and photographer Rosemary Laing’s photographic constructed image of a domesticated forest environment linger alongside descriptions of devastation and acceptance. The narratives and artworks extend our understanding of human relationships within ecosystems of forests and fires. We look at parallel relationships of humans to fire to plants to other species like fungi and beetles, and consider the ways in which humans coexist with plants within environments that are changing at rates sometimes difficult to comprehend.