Dorothea Mackellar famously declared ‘I love a sunburnt country’ in her 1908 poem celebrating Australia's parched landscapes and intense heat. For many nineteenth-century settlers, though, the Australian environment was a source of terror and hostility, with its curious and often dangerous wildlife and its baking hot summers. From their earliest incursions into Australia, European settlers learned to fear the sun's effects upon the land and while indigenous Australians had used burning as a means of forest management, the colonists’ relationship with fire was much more fraught. The sheer scale and speed with which a bushfire could consume the landscape posed unprecedented dangers to settlers who were accustomed to much damper and hence more manageable climes. Through an examination of a range of literary, journalistic and epistolary responses to bush-fires, I shall examine how the devastation of a bushfire challenged the claims of emigration advocates that it was possible simply to pack up one's life and begin again on the other side of the world. I shall also consider how fictional accounts of bushfires oppose themselves to newspaper stories of destruction and horror to create a legend of heroism and survival.

While in the early nineteenth century Australia was still perceived as a land fit only for convicts and outcasts, there was a gradual shift in perceptions of the colony as social reformers saw its potential as a destination for the deserving poor.