Burn: The Epic Story Of Bushfire In Australia

In the state of Victoria, the month of January of the year 1939 came towards the end of a long drought which had been aggravated by a severe hot, dry summer season... Dry heat and hot, dry winds worked upon a land already dry, to suck from it the last, least drop of moisture. Men who had lived their lives in the bush went their ways in the shadow of dread expectancy. But though they felt the imminence of danger they could not tell that it was to be far greater than they could imagine. They had not lived long enough.(Report of the Royal Commission into the Bush Fires of January 1939)

Drawing on accounts of the most devastating conflagrations in Australia's European history - from the 1851 'Black Thursday' fire (which burnt out one quarter of Victoria) to the 1939 'Black Friday' fires (in which many lives were lost and thousands of hectares destroyed in Victoria, NSW, Canberra, South Australia and even Tasmania), 1983's 'Ash Wednesday' and the Canberra inferno in January 2003 - historian Paul Collins tells the epic story of bushfire in Australia. Frightening, compelling, vivid and highly controversial, Burn reveals stories of heroism, stupidity, political incompetence and environmental vandalism. This is the grand narrative of bushfire in Australia, the most fire-prone land on earth.