Black Thursday and Other Lost Australian Bushfire Stories

In these stories of a quintessential Australian phenomenon, bushfires reveal a conflagration of human drama. They deepen the pain of a tragic love triangle, bring justice to a false mate, and push a young drover and his horse to the limits of their endurance. A priest and wedding guests find themselves fighting fires instead of toasting the happy couple. A woman capable of saving her farm from fire cannot save herself from the proprietary rage of men. And a good horse and a faithful dog prove themselves the best allies in a dangerous situation.

Fiannuala Morgan is PhD candidate at the Australian National University with a particular interest in geospatial analysis of nineteenth century Australian literature and the author of Aboriginal Writers and Popular Fiction: The Literature of Anita Heiss from Cambridge University Press.

To Be Continued is an Australian Research Council funded project, led by Associate Professor Katherine Bode, that has unearthed an astonishing bibliographic index and full-text archive of fiction in Australian newspapers from 1803 to 1955.