Gardens of Fire: An Investigative Memoir
August 2013
Robert Kenny / UWAP
In the aftermath of the destruction of his Redesdale home in the Black Saturday fires of 2009, historian Robert Kenny’s life was consumed by a chain of experiences and emotions that left him struggling to find a place to settle physically, emotionally and intellectually. Gardens of Fire is Kenny’s response to his loss. It is in turns critical, provocative and sometimes just plain bitter.
While the perspective of Kenny’s personal narrative is fairly narrow, limiting itself in the main to his own dramatic experience of the fire through to the quotidian turmoil of the months and years that followed, his historical and cultural sweep is broad. Kenny’s account of Black Saturday takes on a certain slow-motion quality, as he reaches into an exploration of Western civilisation’s understanding of fire from its Promethean mythology through to Gaston Bachelard’s psychoanalytics, its practical agricultural use in pre-colonial Australia, its symbolic place in the colonial experience and the mundane place of building materials and codes. Fire to Kenny is the thing that makes us human.
Through the narrative, Kenny picks especially hard at the way the binary of the natural versus the human has been deployed to present fire as an unstoppable force. He finds a particularly insidious, if sometimes unconscious, seam in ecological discourse that views pre-colonial Australia as ‘pristine’. The effect of this, he argues, has been to place ‘Aboriginal Australians in the category nature, and thus deny them humanity.’ Kenny traces a connection through early evolutionary theory about the Aboriginal as ‘primitive’ to settler/migrant myths about the natural elements that have had to be overcome to properly colonise the land.
Themes familiar to the public record emerge over and again, particularly around the overly-bland Teague Royal Commission and the lack of leadership shown by State authorities. What surfaces most strikingly through Kenny’s bitterness and his sharp critical analysis of events around the willingness of some to claim trauma when they suffered none, and the glib psycho-babble of art-therapy, is his clear-eyed conclusion that what the fire revealed was a distinct lack of depth in his own community. ‘I was witnessing how fluid a thing community can be, particularly in the aftermath of an event like the fire – and particularly as time went on. For those of us who had lost much, the fire was a continuing present, for those who had not but had been engaged in it, it was part of a past, alive as that might be. For still others, less engaged on the day, the experience of the day could become an odd object of desire.’
In Gardens of Fire Kenny wants to reset something of our relationship to fire, to go beyond the historical and contemporary mythologising that is done about it, and to recognise the very real human agency involved in its making and, afterwards, in the rebuilding of the places we inhabit.