Sophie Cunningham (Ed.) – Fire Flood Plague (Literature Review)

When Australia was faced with a disasters like fire and flood that ultimately culminated in the global pandemic that is COVID-19 – the effects of which are still felt around the world – it was clear that 2020 was going to be a year like no other.

Fire Flood Plague is a book which attempts to do what many Australians have struggled to do since the beginning of the year – make sense of the never-ending crises we have been faced with and how to adjust to the “new normal”.

Edited by Sophie Cunningham AM and backed by the Copyright Agency, Fire Flood Plague  has a remarkable cross-section of essays as Australian writers and artists – from Tim Flannery and Kim Scott to Melissa Lucaschenko and Jess Hill – discuss the crises from a myriad of different perspectives.

There’s a lot of heart in Fire Flood Plague as we read how the bushfires could have been potentially prevented if Indigenous Australians were heard when they spoke of backburning and their approach to natural disasters of the past – as discussed by writers such as Billy Griffiths and Kim Scott in their respective essays, ‘This Place of Sickness’ and ‘One Voice’.

In the latter, Scott laments the lack of leadership and how unity and acceptance of how the world is changing from an environmental perspective may have prevented, or at least reduced the level of crises we are now faced with.

Politically charged and angry though the statement might be, Scott’s essay is not without hope. “It’s tempting to think of 2020’s floods and fires and pandemic as retribution … Despite the quibbling and distractions, we know that climate change contributes to environmental disasters like fires and diseases such as COVID-19 … but I’d like to think that good may be yet to come,” he writes.

And there’s a truth in that. For all the heartache that features in this book – family members dying in far off states or countries without the support of their loved ones, or millions of native animals lost and their habitats destroyed within a few short weeks – there is a sense of hope. This is something that we have to get through and if we band together, and start listening to each other, we may just be able to.

I can’t say that I enjoyed reading this book; I don’t think that was the point. Fire Flood Plague acts as something of a time capsule, which we can read in the future as a way of capturing the events of 2020 and fully realising their impact. To read it now, during such crises and global devastation, it reads as something of an emotional rollercoaster. It’s a lot to take in, regardless of how you’ve been affected by the events of 2020.

Fire Flood Plague is an important book, and over time, will become something of a historical document that we look back on in the future to remember, learn and improve how we as a society can band together, to do better, and hopefully one day, make our mark on the world.

This book is published by Penguin Randomhouse/Vintage Australia. To find out more about the book and the authors, visit the website.

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This review features as part of my Spotlight on Australian Authors series. To read interviews and reviews you may have missed, click the image below.

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