For a brief moment, the element of fire, through its play of
images and dance of visions, is able to kindle the walking corpse
of the Emperor.¹

Sergei Eisenstein

The paintings of the Sistine Chapel are a small-scale model, in spite of their imposing dimensions, since the theme which they depict is the End of Time.²

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Fire's Habit:

Elemental media and the politics of apprehension

Daniel Fisher

Introduction: A pyro-mediatic prologue

This multi-modal ethnographic experiment asks what fire is becoming in northern Australia as its everyday, urban manifestations are tethered to, and made differently present by, the diacritics of catastrophic bush fire, on one hand, and the redemptive promise of Indigenous expertise and cultural fire, on the other. Darwin, capital city of Australia’s Northern Territory, is a place where, for about one half of the calendar year, fire is a frequent, everyday companion. Over the course of the mid-year dry season, fire can be found throughout the city, burning in stretches of unkempt terrain, exploding overhead as fireworks, or quietly smouldering in campfires to warm a cup of tea. In Darwin, that is, fire is an everyday companion, and for many of the city’s residents, it has long existed just outside of awareness; kept at its edges by forms of practiced inattention.

This situation is changing, however, in an era when catastrophic fires burn across Australia with increasing regularity, and where such fires are tethered to the threat of climate disaster and the rhetorics of carbon exchange. This threat has solicited renewed interest in forms of Indigenous expertise related to what is now termed 'cultural burning,' in the hopes that this might help mitigate climate’s catastrophic effects by allowing a more measured, less explosive relationship between humans and fire—and in this a more just relation between Indigenous and settler Australia. Darwin’s distinctive fire ecology offers a singular location from which to re-scale these emergent efforts to reckon with climate change and cultural fire.

The essay can also be read as approaching fire ethnographically both in and as media. Placing media and mediatisation at the centre of my thinking about fire has offered a way to grapple with the new kinds of assemblage, forms of complexity,³ or varieties of hyperobject⁴ that acquire life under the threat of climate crisis and to ask: What kinds of events and assemblages does fire afford as fire’s science and government newly apprehend its vitality, its Indigeneity, and its historicity? Pursuing such questions in northern Australia can make sensible what I term a politics of apprehension, charting how fire has come to remediate contemporary Indigenous relationships to country and through this remediation to refashion the significance of both fire and Indigenous Australians to a broader (settler) Australian future.⁵

By politics of apprehension I mean to suggest the ironies and ellipses involved when Aboriginal people and their endeavours are apprehended by, or recruited into, Australian and transnational modes of apprehension and anxiety, and into projects to resolve or reconcile Indigenous and settler Australia.⁶ I also mean to better understand the ways that fire is reimagined as it is apprehended as at once a political medium and a fungible asset. In part this is to ask how newer anxieties about fire and climate have come to reshape older modes of reckoning Indigeneity, even as they seem to offer new ways to remediate and reassemble relations between settler and Indigenous Australians.⁷ Such modes of apprehension—of climate change’s threat, of colonial history, and of Indigeneity itself—are key to assembling fire as this takes shape in contemporary Australia, both in how it solicits potentially diverging forms of expertise and recruits differently concerned publics.

I have pursued these questions from the ethnographic ground of long-term research on intra-Indigenous relations and political experimentation with Aboriginal people living in bush camps, government housing, and city parks and laneways of Darwin, capital of Australia’s Northern Territory.⁸ Many of these people are locally called ‘long-grassers’ and themselves describe the practice of socializing and sleeping rough in the bush around Darwin as ‘long-grassing’. In this, they bring a range of engagements with fire into the heart of the city and a singular perspective on the political ecology of fire in this northern Australian place. But while the fieldwork takes place on Larrakia Country, and with fire ecologists, long-grassers, and other Indigenous people and institutions, this is not an account that centres cultural fire or claims a sovereign vision or systematic survey of a specifically Indigenous practice. Instead, I am concerned with the fires that burn in the interstices of discourse and practice and that can go unremarked, but which nonetheless shape life in northern Australia as part of the relational production of difference that continues to animate sociality in Darwin and beyond.⁹

The textual exposition unfolds over three distinct passages. The first turns to conversations with fire scientists and landscape ecologists to better understand how fire’s fungibility is apprehended instrumentally and reflexively in the service of remediating a broken ecology, and a broken relation between Indigenous and settler Australians. The second passage builds on this broad, bird’s-eye view of Australian fires and their remediation as culture and carbon to ask what fire might be as an image, describing the rhetorics of fire photography and exploring what some kinds of imaging practices might tell us about some kinds of thinking. The third passage builds on long-term ethnographic work in Darwin’s Indigenous town camps and communities in order to consider fire in its most intimate registers: as hearth, warmth, and signifying absence.

In moving across the essay it will be clear that the exposition is shifting scales. On the one hand I move from the most expansive to the most intimate kinds of encounter with fire—from continent wide catastrophe to the whispering flame of a small campfire. On the other, I hope that such directionality might emerge as less clear, in that this shift from seemingly expansive to intimate might be a way of drawing attention to the practice of scaling itself.¹⁰ The re-scaling of fire either as catastrophe or as culture is itself a central interest of this project: to explore something of the ways that fire’s remediation through climate science or through culture may also institutionalize particular scalar optics. This is in part to underscore a particular aesthetic, as Marilyn Strathern might put it, to think both with and against its forms of encompassment (as environment, atmosphere, carbon, or culture) in order to see what kinds of things, relations, or events might escape such logics.¹¹ As Summerson Carr and Michael Lempert write, ‘some scalar logics claim a sovereign vision.’¹² And, as they also argue, ‘the study of scale requires an openness, a pragmatic sensibility that allows us to track and narrate, rather than capture and catalogue, the many ways that social life is scaled.’¹³ The passages that follow aspire to something of this openness.

These passages also traverse a set of photographic and video images and recorded sounds that I hope will allow readers to reflect on their own practices of association, and to apprehend some of the resonances and relations that might escape the text. There is real experiment here in that I hope to raise questions about the contiguity of different domains by querying fire’s emergent media ecology, an ecology which depends at once on images, narratives, and social media circulation; on smoke and the atmospheric travel of cinders and ash; on new institutionalized understandings of and markets for carbon; and on roman candles and bottle rockets, among other things. This is to register fire’s multiple iterations as they take shape in relation to the specificities of a particular place.

The images and sounds are intended to be more than illustrative. Recording fireworks over the course of an annual celebration to which they are central, making photographs of different sorts of urban bushfires (some of which are caused by these fireworks), and walking with friends and fellow travellers through a city that is increasingly grasped through its ecology, as an environment, have all offered means to track changes to the city brought by a growing attunement to Darwin as a place under duress.¹⁴ Over the course of the research these were also key modes for letting country present itself to ears, eyes, and body, and to attend to my own and others’ shifting apprehension of country and its multiple constituents. Multimodality as a method offered a means to become attuned to Larrakia country and its contemporary predicaments.

The audio recordings I share here were produced in 2018 over the course of one long evening and merit additional comment. I pursued these recordings for a reason, aiming to make use of the recorder’s transducer to differently attend to what in the Territory is called ‘cracker night,’ an annual celebration of the Northern Territory’s independence, to see what might become audible amidst the boom and crackle of its explosions. I tethered a stereo pair of microphones together at the end of a boom pole, shielding them from wind with an enormous audio blimp, and routed the signal to a small digital recorder that could combine each mic’s signal into a shared stereo rendering. I began by walking across a well-travelled footbridge between Darwin’s middle-class suburb of Nightcliff and the Casuarina coastal reserve, my ears covered in headphones. Voices blossomed outwards, echoing the energies of the explosions, as though they rose to meet the fireworks’ outward expanding force. Like electricity rising from the earth to greet lightning as it strikes, these voices rushed to meet the cascade of sound breaking across the foreshore, sparked by the light that arrived milliseconds ahead and encouraged by the voluminous sound that quickly followed. That din also overwhelmed the dynamic range of the microphone, and my hearing, I found it hard to hear much between the loud pops and bangs and the ringing of my ears as they exceeded their limits.

This loud public spectacle also brought a kind of quiet. Between pops and bangs a silence took hold, as these explosions displaced other sounds one might normally expect. I heard no birds, no bats. As you listen, consider that the place resounding in the audio rendering’s echoes is usually one densely populated by flying foxes and a wealth of birds and other creatures. Their absence offers a kind of critical counterpoint to the essay’s audio-visual materials. The sensitivities of non-human audition and the flammable character of the grass and bush throughout the city elicit concern, and the fireworks that populate this essay’s platform can be heard as fire’s eco-acoustic media, as making the city-as-environment newly sensible, a way of hearing Larrakia country as it catches fire. Fireworks explode from their celebratory containers to reshape my own and many of my interlocutors’ senses of how, where, and to whom fire comes to matter.

Passage I: Fire’s science

It is hard to overstate the distinctive significance of fire in contemporary Australia, for the ways it occupies the smallest corners of Australian Indigenous lives, the ways it looms in the imaginations of many settler Australians as existential threat, and the ways some invest in its powers, aspiring to remediate relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia through a redemptive elemental praxis. Across the continent fire is used and understood by different Indigenous Australians as a means of purification, a way to clean country, to purify a camp or home after a death. In north-east Arnhem Land, Howard Morphy has shown how fire is integral to the ‘brilliance’ underwriting Yolŋu visual aesthetics, how it gives life to the flicker on a painted body, and to the shimmering effect of a bark painting’s cross-hatching—a practice that complicates how one might reckon figure and ground. The brilliance of a design takes on both aspects in a play with figuration and abstraction.¹⁵ The ground here, that is, is the figure.

In Australia’s western deserts, fire offers a means to reckon time’s passage through the colour of a landscape, the fuel load it bears after a year or two unburned providing a register of known, historical fires.¹⁶ Such marks on the landscape also animate Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri’s masterful artwork Warlugulong (1977). Tjapaltjarri’s painting is esteemed as one of the foundational works of the Western Desert painting movement as it found an international market, and is held to be an apotheosis, of sorts, of the movement’s aesthetic explorations of a landscape resonant with ancestral power.¹⁷ Warlugulong depicts country and is centrally concerned with showing the story of Lungkata the Blue-Tongue Lizard Man creating the first bushfire—a fire of extraordinary power that burned Lungkata’s young nephews after they refused to share a kangaroo. Fire in all of the above instances is law-like. It is foundational in a discursive sense, as story or figure, and also in an ontological sense, as ground.

Ecological scholarship has come to apprehend the multiple lives that fire leads in Australia by placing such Indigenous understandings in conversation with the concept of pyrodiversity.¹⁸Pyrodiversity refers to the hypothesis that small-scale, patchwork burning over time has a beneficial effect on biodiversity. The argument is that the creation of a heterogenous landscape of early, mid, and late-successional habitats can support species diversity by amplifying habitat diversity.¹⁹ This concept derives initially from studies of the homogenization of California’s fire regime following the suppression of heterogeneous regimes abetted by Indigenous small-scale burning practices. In effect, researchers hypothesized that a fine-grained fire mosaic, with frequent, small-scale, low intensity burns was displaced by large-scale, low frequency, but high intensity fires following colonial settlement.²⁰ Similar findings in northern Australia from widely circulating histories of Indigenous fire regimes,²¹ and a series of institutional experiments, have led Indigenous burning practices to be apprehended as a cornerstone of Australian pyrodiversity. Such practices are apprehended as integral to Australian biodiversity, a key resource in achieving a healthy, productive, carbon neutral landscape.²² In this logic, fire is not something to be feared and suppressed, but instead a productive force to be valued and cultivated. One consequence of this shift in thinking is that the component ingredients of pyrodiverse fire regimes have been expanded to include a range of practices, beliefs, biota, avian species, and climate itself—allowing for the valorisation and valuation of cultural fire by a broader Australian non-Indigenous public.

Efforts to leverage pyrodiverse fire regimes for capital accumulation have been pursued in support of Indigenous environmental management, aiming to bring meaningful forms of employment and to re-establish historically rich relations between Aboriginal people, fire, and country. With the advent of an Australian national carbon trading scheme in the late 2000s, fire ecologists, Aboriginal ranger groups, and environmental policymakers turned to industrial scale seasonal burning as a means to sequester carbon. Burning country earlier in the monsoonal dry season can avoid the build-up of large fuel loads and catastrophic later-season fires. Quantifying these differing outcomes and monetizing ranger activity and Aboriginal burning vis-à-vis a national carbon credit market has proven remarkably successful. But this success belies a situation in which fires grow increasingly powerful as their fuels come to include an invasive species, locally known as gamba grass (Andropogon gayanus), a more explosive fuel that upends a détente between trees and burning grasslands. Such accelerated transformations and accompanying instability trouble efforts to manage this relation.²³

The Western Arnhem Land Fire Abatement project (WALFA) is perhaps one of the better known organisations endeavouring to bring Aboriginal fire management and ecological knowledge to projects of carbon abatement.²⁴ The project took off with the initial support of global gas and petroleum company ConocoPhillips, who sought a carbon offset project to mitigate the projected damages of a proposed (now built) Liquid Natural Gas depot in Darwin Harbour, built to liquify natural gas piped in from the Bayu-Undan gas fields some 500 kms to the northwest of Darwin in the Timor Sea. An agreement was struck with traditional owners in central Arnhem Land, the Northern Land Council, and the Northern Territory Government for ConocoPhillips to financially support the research and help establish Indigenous ranger groups and fund infrastructural investments including troop carriers and helicopters.

Today, for several months at the beginning of each dry season, ranger groups, relying in part on the colour-coded visual images provided by Northern Australian Fire Information Service’s (NAFI) satellite imaging, launch incendiary devices from helicopters, racing to ignite as many hectares as possible before a mid-season deadline. The more country burned, the greater the carbon savings that can be registered, and the more dividends from the sale of carbon credits that might flow to the ranger group’s different projects (credits purchased in part by resource extractors such as ConocoPhillips). Locally, this industry is at times called ‘carbon farming’ or ‘carbon mining’, ironically bringing to mind its resource extractive conditions of possibility.

This story is complicated, however, by a situation in which fires grow increasingly powerful as their fuels come to include gamba grass.^⁠ Although introduced to Australia as early as the 1930s, its use in the Northern Territory really took off in the early 1990s with the support of the Northern Territory Government in the interests of creating a hardy food source for livestock. Gamba grass has long since escaped the enclosure of cattle stations and now moves north and west along the Territory’s roadways—a pastoral technology run amok. The ferocity with which gamba grass burns, and the speed of its regrowth, means it kills trees and displaces native grasses. Like rabbits, foxes, cane toads, and feral cats, gamba grass threatens to refashion the Top End’s monsoonal savanna in its own image. As it spreads it also reduces those areas that might be burned in the larger pursuit of carbon capture, insofar as areas with gamba grass are legally excluded from carbon mining efforts.²⁵

The contradiction and contest unfolding between Indigenous fire management, invasive and explosive grasses, and climate change are accompanied by debate around the merits of scaling Indigenous expertise, incentivizing large-scale burning, and tethering the exercise to the fiscal calendar of Commonwealth bureaucracy.²⁶ The images of fire that emerge from these practices are of continental scope, rendered from satellite derived data, and from fiscal abstractions that come alive in the account ledgers of an emergent carbon exchange—as carbon itself. This is necessary, some argue, in that the scaling of this expertise may stabilise carbon’s fungibility, critical for the success of this project. But if, as many have now demonstrated, scale is not absolute but a domain of metapragmatic regimentation, an ‘ideological project’ as Judith Irvine puts it, how and with what risk might its diverse mechanisms be repurposed, put to work in the context of a multi-modal ethnographic project?²⁷ And what are their implications for fire’s emergent ontology, for its constitution or consolidation as a political subject?

Passage II: Fire’s image

The contrast between the continental scaling of carbon capture and catastrophic fire and what I find in my work in Darwin is remarkable. Here, fire’s proximity, its frequent presence in everyday life, can make it almost invisible, a taken-for-granted facet of the city’s dry season landscape. One large, inner-city bush fire, raging on a large plot of Larrakia land at the heart of Darwin’s northern suburbs in 2018 is exemplary. This fire burned a large stretch of land adjacent to the wealthy suburbs of Nightcliff and Coconut Grove, a historically significant stretch of recognized Aboriginal land from which the first protests and land rights claims on Darwin were staged. Firefighters attended the blaze and put out the fire, using fire itself as their instrument. While this is a common practice in the control of bushfires, creating a fire break as a means of containment, we were then standing in the midst of a small but nonetheless decidedly urban space along a busy roadway. A young Irish firefighter at the scene told me, while nodding to the drip torch she held at the ready, that when possible, fire is the preferred tool for addressing such blazes even in town. In this case, the Larrakia land in question backed onto a stretch of muddy mangroves, then the Beagle Gulf and the Timor Sea beyond, allowing the judicious use of this technique. So the firefighters lit their own blaze, clearing a section of land that would stop the bush fire’s advance by starving it of fuel. The mundane character of this event was signaled further in that the many cars driving past on Darwin’s Dick Ward Drive barely slowed to look.

After speaking to the firefighters, I photographed their work and this inner-city fire. Not only was this inner-city blaze consuming the grass and pandanus palms of a storied stretch of Larrakia coastal country, but the sight of birds wheeling in and out of the smoke, looking for snakes, lizards and other prey fleeing the burning grass made for a remarkable visual spectacle. I made this effort under a blazing sun, and the flames disappeared in my camera’s sensor as I confronted the extent to which practice, skill, and possibly talent are required to capture, or perhaps better, to transduce the energies of smoke and flame and screaming birds. I am colour blind, and perhaps more severely so than I have tended to think. In the intense sunlight of Darwin’s early afternoon hours, my camera’s LED screen was dark and opaque. Back in the shade of my house some images looked serviceable, but very few showed any flame, and fewer still captured the tumult in the sky above or imparted the feeling of dense heat that radiated across the smouldering grass. I was left with the silhouettes of kites scouting whatever food they could find fleeing that heat.

In these images, the smoke and the sky were both tinged in an unnatural blue, though this was not apparent to my eyes at first. Once this was pointed out, I could see nothing else but the blue filter introduced by my camera’s poorly calibrated white balance. Instead of heat, energy and an interspecies tornado of birds, lizards, and humans coalescing around this burning land, I found I had interpolated my camera’s digital sieve and my own colour-blind body into the image itself. This was a striking instance of a relatively common frustration faced by digital photographers who forget or struggle to set the digital parameters of a camera’s white balance. The blue tint also forced a series of questions: What work is involved in the production of fire’s image? What relations are animated by this work, and what occluded? What might such images afford or impede?

On another afternoon in Darwin, in July of 2017, I was driving along Bagot Road, a six-lane thoroughfare connecting the city with its northern suburbs. Pulling up to a stop light I looked to my right. In the midst of concrete lanes and traffic signals near the airport sits a triangular traffic island. A scrubby bush occupied its surface and, on most days, would have looked a sorry, decorative gesture. On this day, however, the bush was engulfed in fire like a candle’s wick—the ten-foot-tall bulb of its flame sitting directly on the cement with its pointed end towering above. My attention was drawn to this image and I wanted to take a picture, but then the traffic light changed to green. I could see no one paying any mind to this spectacle and could not see a way to get free of traffic to take the photograph, so I too continued on my way.

In retrospect, as with the blue-rinsed images of Larrakia land, it is clear I have learned that cameras miniaturize or misapprehend these events more often than not. This fire as a digital still photograph would be nothing without narrativizing juxtapositions to lend it scale, without some means to reckon its intensities against the casual indifference of Darwin’s afternoon traffic. How might that image capture the particular ‘techniques of inattention’²⁸ employed by those around me, and what would it require to register my vague recollections of the Book of Exodus, and the bush that would not be consumed by the flame? Not only are fire’s flames diminished in the images I have taken, but the broader horizons which such fire illuminates and from which it draws its form can easily slip away. It is a particular skill to make a picture or create a narrative around fire. Through my efforts, I have been impressed by how fire so resolutely requires such contrast to acquire life as an image or become apparent within a photograph. That is, what might matter about a specific fire, or form of fire, depends on how it is rendered, and where that rendering takes a viewer.²⁹

Take the work of wildfire photography specialists such as Oakland-based photojournalist Noah Berger. Berger’s work takes him across California each fire season, shadowing firefighting crews and building an archive of astonishing images that increasingly receive recognition for their capacity to evoke the ferocity of his subjects.³⁰ These photographs offer striking juxtapositions. In one such image, fire illuminates the interior of a burned-out van, surrounded by silhouettes of trees and the sunset-like glow of wildfire at night. In another, the sparks of burning trees brush across the foreground, leaving long thin tracers on the camera’s image sensor to register the movement of fire-driven winds. These pictures offer up fire with a photojournalist’s attention to the narrative potentials of figure-ground relations, asking viewers to grasp movement, heat, and mass in their relation to the human forms (and trees, cars, and houses) they overwhelm.

The work of such photography is more than simple narrative. It entails oscillating between perspectives, working to make something figure in relation to a ground. This oscillation can be accomplished by privileging some isolable thing, possibly using a narrow depth of field to bring our attention to an object by blurring out background and foreground into a set of coloured circles known as ‘bokeh’. This can restrict context as a frame of reference. Using a short focal length lens and broad depth of field can accomplish the opposite—creating the deep clarity of focus privileged in landscape photography, where it is quite literally the ground that is made a figure.

It has been something of a truism that anthropologists might productively use short focal length lenses and wide-angle perspectives that most clearly, 1) approximate the human eye; 2) situate us and viewers within the subject matter and mise-en-scène; and 3) show as much of the social situation as possible—getting a lot of ‘the world’ in with our subject. Similar effects can be accomplished in other ways too, for example the use of long focal length to compress the sense of distance between foreground and background. A zoom lens applied from a distance might do more in an urban setting to place people in the cityscape, to suggest the ways they are relating to it. On the other hand, photographs taken with a focal length of 28mm (a celebrated lens following the art world success of street photographer Garry Winogrand) can equally make it hard to unify a photograph’s composition, abetting caricature or confusion and leaving the ground itself under-determined.³¹

When one seeks to ground a flame, to relate it to its conditions of possibility or its frameworks of interpretation, it may gain power from the narrative that ensues. It can also disappear into the relations that give it that life. Like Winogrand’s street scenes, these images can sometimes appear to be all ground and no figure. In rendering fire as an image, an image-maker is always depicting something else as well: digital photographic images of fire offer both a flame and its ground or offer the flame itself as a ground against which something else might figure. Strathern suggests that this way of viewing images is itself a historical practice, a distinctly modern mode of interpretation and rendering from which we can glimpse the constitution of scale as a technique, and the relationship of scaling to the iterative character of contextualization.³²

Clearly, figure-ground relations are but one dimension involved in the production of fire’s image. How might I apprehend fire’s imaging and imagining in Darwin, and its relationship to other, ‘larger’ fires, in other terms? What should one make of the resonances that I and other colleagues find between multiple, quite disparate images, the way for instance that one image of a firework might bring to mind another image of a tree engulfed in smoke? At the very least, fire readily becomes other things in this transit from one image to another, and in habits of apprehension that might be embraced, or interrupted, as one set of images begins to resonate with another.³³

Passage III: Fire’s habit

Between charting the mutual imbrication of fire’s capacity to afford a more promising future via the marketisation of carbon, and fire’s enclosure in forms of institutional and ecological experimentation, I spend time on Darwin’s northern edge. As I pursue the tensions taking shape in stories that gather around fire, one of my interlocutors is a particular stretch of country, an old landscape that is also brand new. Casuarina Coastal Reserve is Larrakia country, running north of Darwin’s downtown and central suburbs. It offers a home to riparian forest and kilometres of sandy beaches between the estuaries of Rapid Creek at its southern end, and Buffalo Creek to the north, with these beaches opening to the Beagle Gulf and then the Timor Sea.

Like the fires that interest me here, this landscape is itself mutable. The reserve was swept almost entirely clear of trees and mangroves by Cyclone Tracy on Christmas Eve of 1974. Later, casuarina trees were planted to forestall dune erosion. Under their shade, grasses grow (including gamba), nudists congregate in an approved clothes-optional area, and locals and tourists take coffee on the manicured lawns of a small surf club. A number of Aboriginal visitors also camp under the shade of casuarinas towards Rapid Creek, nearer to town. Further up the beach are crocodile traps, prime fishing spots, and more camp sites and cloisters—places where long-grassers might find some seclusion and respite from surveillance. Many bring lives lived with fire with them to this and other such spaces in and around town. Their comfort with fire is profound and revered by the fire ecologists and practitioners I have spoken with. It is at times embodied as habitus, even as this comfort may be stretched when camps or even lives are threatened by the unexpected eruption of a gamba-fuelled fire.

And yet where I have been looking to understand emergent forms of urban pyrodiversity, my access to this, and to this stretch of country, is largely through movement across its distinctive landscape and in associated talk. But engaging with people in overt, predicative talk about fire has proven more difficult. Instead fire seems just always there, as habit. Traversing the Casuarina Coastal Reserve at night, for instance, means passing numerous fires burning on the foreshore as people settle in for the evening, talking around small fires whose light is visible miles away. This sight is one that also preoccupied colonial settlers, their journals describing a populated continent in terms of the fires apparent from the sea.³⁴

Looking for people and their camps at the edges of Darwin means also looking for small fires or their tidy remains. Small, grey circles dot the beach-side clearings and shady groves of the coastal reserve, ashen traces of habitation. Early mornings along the foreshore witness people awakening around whispering flames, adults and children sitting up, shrouded in blankets, rubbing sleep from eyes, and tending makeshift kettles for tea, just steps away from the condominium developments and middle class lots of suburban Nightcliff. Through the evening at Rapid Creek, or along the shoreline of the reserve, Yolŋu visitors to town spend time around fires that are so small and well-tended that they rarely attract the attention of passers-by or interrupt the practiced avoidance of Darwin’s housed population.

In the middle of the 2017 dry season, two grey circles also marked the seaside grove of casuarina trees where a celebrated musician, a Yolŋu man of national stature, made his final camp with family and friends. He was very ill, and this beach may have offered escape from the difficulties and loneliness of regular dialysis and hospital care. The coastal reserve is indeed a place where people go when they do not want to be seen. I do not know for sure. But this became one widespread interpretation following his death: that he came to this beach to die amidst family, under the shade of trees and amidst the soft sands and soft winds the beach affords. His subsequent journey from fireside to a hospital’s emergency room and then its dialysis wing did indeed end in his death. His relatives then broke camp, following local norms of place-avoidance that accompany mourning, leaving it unoccupied but marked by these two circles for weeks after.

These ashen camp remains, soft and small, speak to the surveillance that Aboriginal people experience in Darwin. Keep close and small and you will not attract negative attention. These remains also remind me of the loss of this man and what feels to me like a lack of good choices left to him as his illness progressed. Many of his family and other fellow travellers in Darwin read it the same way. When a reporter visited the camp on the day following his death, taken there by a non-Aboriginal friend who was angry and grieving, they found only these ashes. And the latter remained for at least another month undisturbed; a legible mark of this man’s last camp.

My research in Darwin has taken me to many such places, where fires are made from habit, to heat water for tea, or for talk; fires that draw bodies to their edges and cast light along the Casuarina foreshore for miles. These fires leave traces, grey circles on dirt or sand, that may remain visible for weeks in the relative stillness of the monsoonal dry season. To become attuned to such traces is to attend to the architecture of an urban Aboriginal sociality. Fires lend habitable shape to a camp. They enframe Indigenous skill and occupation, even as they trace routes of surveillance and evasion. And they also register mourning and its distinctive Australian forms of erasure. This urban architecture, I suggest, might rescale fire in important ways. Such traces might seem small, ‘contained’ by the broader cityscape of Darwin and the industrial ecology of carbon mining, yet they can also be apprehended otherwise, evoking a different horizon of events and relations.³⁵

In spending time with people in Darwin, fire is always at hand, as flame, as ash, or as traces of habitual sociality and habitation—a smell on the bodies of oneself and one’s companions. In my experience, however, fire rarely comes to the fore, even in self-reflexive talk. Instead, fire literally provides the ground of such talk: first build a fire, then talk. When I talk to older people in housing commission units or aged care facilities in Darwin, this habit can lead to some almost comic ellipses. When I first asked my Yolŋu neighbour Charlene about practices of urban burning and if people ever light fires in town, she seemed puzzled. ‘There’s no fire here,’ she replied, against the manifest evidence of past fires all around us. Burned out stretches of grass scrub and pandanus palm abound throughout the city, some mere steps away from her house. ‘We can go to East Point. We’ll light a fire and I’ll teach you. Maybe we can cook a fish.’ The fire itself seemed an opportunity, a framing device or structure for talk, for teaching, or perhaps for Charlene to make some money. It may also be a manifestation of law in and of itself, something to be taught. In retrospect this may have been evidence of a category error, of the ways in which ‘fire’ was too capacious a subject for the specifics of that situation. Perhaps her response—‘there is no fire’—was then a kind of deferral. Perhaps it was a suggestion that the fire she took me to be asking about might not easily be addressed in the terms in which I raised it, without some kind of exchange or further demonstration of my commitment to the formalised participation structures of the transmission of knowledge.

As manifestation of Law, registering or materializing its significance and power, fire in this latter proposition is not readily apprehended in light conversation on Charlene’s front patio. It demands a certain care. In this way fire seems more than an ‘interscalar vehicle,’³⁶ something amenable to the pragmatics of interpretive movement, and rather something like ground itself, as foundational elemental matter.³⁷ But this interpretation feels forced amidst all these iterations of fire’s image. At the time of these conversations Charlene was herself on dialysis and quite infirm, unable in fact to visit the beach with the ease she once did. I understand Charlene’s deferral through the ways that living with fire proceeds as a kind of bodily unconscious, a practical or habitual relation that was interrupted in her last years.

Conclusion

In the context of increasingly damaging bushfire seasons across Australia, advocacy, reporting and public discourse often scale fire up, emphasizing powers and possibilities that rest on its massive size: the figure of catastrophic fire indexes the profundity of climate catastrophe, while cultural fire carries the potential for redemption and industrial or commercial intervention. Nonetheless, the distressing images that populate news outlets and social media may also make fire’s threat distant—their grand scale as seen from an omniscient outside further entailing a kind of ironic miniaturisation.³⁸ This is crucial to what I have come to understand as the challenge of scale in fire’s contemporary politics as it engages Indigenous-settler relations. Some fire ecologists note that personalised discomfort, threat or inconvenience may allow the convening of a proper constituency for climate action. The smoke in our lungs in cities and the ashes that float onto patios or sports fields offer a different mode of apprehension—the destruction of forests made palpable, proximate, even intimate. Fires that become tethered to the body are also, from this perspective, political media.

The apprehension of something out of place, ill-fitting or even invisible at this embodied register provides a further, fitting diacritic for some Aboriginal encounters with fire, and what many of my Indigenous interlocutors and those producing contemporary fire science find themselves confronting as elements of their object, and their own lives, are transformed by climate, by invasive species, and by new modes of governmental attunement to and investment in fire’s futures. One way to understand the anxiously politicised prolepsis this can involve is as an untrained, un-habitual relation to a process—a clumsy, fumbling, missing-the-mark or out-of-tune-ness. As disturbed habit, fire becomes hard to reckon, hard to know, and hard to live with.³⁹ And this might also allow consideration of how the politics of apprehension might rescale the senses themselves, making some things newly available for consideration as others become more difficult to grasp.⁴⁰

Confronted with the peopled character of this city’s margins, with the more-than-human relations implicated in the echoes of explosive celebration, and with the ways that the different ashen circles dotting the landscape offer the potential for story and memory and practiced erasure, I find myself wanting to repurpose the fire ecological concept of ‘pyrodiversity’; to take its implicit reference to an ecosystemic vitality grounded in floral and faunal divergence and stretch it to fit the different modes of apprehending and rendering fire that I encounter in Darwin. Considering these different fires in relation to those lit to restore country and mine carbon credits might then qualify the figure of pyrodiversity with a more pointed incommensurability. This might make the difference this figure suggests more capacious, allowing the inclusion of the fire rendered on a digital screen or an accountant’s ledger; the fire lit to force a long-grasser from his bush camp; the fire sparked on cracker night by a wayward bottle rocket; the camp fire pin-pricks of light sparkling from the beaches at night; and include as well their enduring, quiet remains.