![]() Gaston Bachelard has written of the dreaming and remembering which occur in front of the fire, connecting repose with ‘reverie’ and the recollection of a sense of well-being ( The Psychoanalysis of Fire,14). The campfire was, as the comment from Griffiths suggests, also connected with nostalgia. I want to consider how-and whether-the campfire was deployed to tame the environment and, interpreting the lighting of a campfire as an act of (attempted) domestication, I will argue that it offered colonists an illusion of mastery over their surroundings-a mastery that was often both temporary and tenuous. Following Richard White’s argument that Australian national culture was founded in a ‘city-dweller’s image of the bush’ I shall examine the anxieties that settlers projected onto the uncanny landscape and the role played by the campfire in either exacerbating or diminishing their concerns. According to this logic, the lighting of a campfire is an act of what Janet Myers calls ‘portable domesticity’, albeit a temporary one and, in this paper, I’m going to examine representations of the campfire and its perceived role in drawing settlers closer to their new environment. Luis Fernandez-Galiano carries this idea further in his study Fire and Memory (2000), arguing that the combination of fire for warmth and fire for cooking creates a home. They inspire stories, disturb dreams and evoke memories’ ( Forests of Ash, 183). Tom Griffiths has noted that, ‘Fires are strangely historical. European colonists have had a fraught relationship with fire in Australia, not least because of imported ideas about the meaning and management of burning. As I work this paper up into an article over the coming weeks, I’ll be aiming to broaden my own understanding of the Australian sublime, seeking to theorize the emotions projected onto the outback and to understand how fires were used to assuage threats from the bush, both real and imaginary.įires have long been associated with story-telling as well as warmth, and while narratives such as Henry Lawson’s ‘A Camp-Fire Yarn’ celebrate the ‘mateship’ fostered around the fire, they also elide its potential for danger and destruction. It’s part of an attempt to understand how nineteenth-century European settlers imported northern hemisphere ideas of fire to the antipodes, as well as an examination of how they were forced to re-evaluate their understanding of burning. The work I’m doing at the moment examines the somewhat romantic place that the campfire occupies in Australian settler culture. Alice Manfield Collection, State Library of Victoria. ![]()
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