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.