Safe as Houses: Climate change & the Australian Dream

In the flurry of reflection and commentary prompted by summer’s catastrophic bushfires, it was suggested that climate change had finally become brutally real, that it had hit home, so to speak. While the realities of climate change – extreme weather, increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, global warming and the steady, incremental rise in sea temperatures – have been a worldwide phenomenon for some time, the scale and ferocity of the bushfire crisis seemed an unkind reminder of the dimensions of ecological change we now face as well as the violent consequences of a broken world. Indeed, recent research shows that those either directly or indirectly affected by the fires now feel that climate change and the environment are the most pressing issues that the Government must address.

Dr Fiona Allon, University of Sydney

The enormity of the damage the fires wreaked upon the land is difficult to comprehend but nonetheless we still try, with new calculations of the number of animals killed or impacted by the bushfires, the hectares burnt, the houses destroyed, emerging almost daily. Yet notwithstanding the terrible loss of human and animal life, as well as the destruction of whole townships and habitats, the fires also struck at something less tangible, less material. The great outdoors The fires have profoundly unsettled the cultural identity of white Australia and the intimate attachments – to places, to particular customs and rituals, to certain lifestyles, to house and home – that make that identity real and meaningful. In other words, Australia’s bushfire crisis has deeply disturbed many of the most dominant and taken-for-granted elements of Australian culture: ideas of home and belonging, along with the natural assumption that one can be safe and secure there; the beach and the kind of everyday pleasures that are usually associated with summer holidays on the coast; our expectations of wildlife and nature and, in particular, the bush that has long been mythologised as the great outdoors. As sociologist Danielle Celermajer has put it, 'The very idea of being "safe" … is one of the many casualties of the climate catastrophe'. Bushfires, of course, are an annual event in Australia, and most people who live in or near the bush have long known of the need to live with the risk of fire and to take the necessary measures to avoid danger. But not only were these the worst bushfires the settler-nation has experienced, they were on a scale previously unimaginable, affecting people in a range of settings that were strikingly ordinary, and associated with domestic summer life, like camping, holidays and beachgoing, rather than natural disasters or apocalyptic conflagration. The archive of images that was slowly built up as the disaster relentlessly unfolded day-by-day over the Christmas-New Year holiday period, images that were broadcast around the world and then shared over and over again, featured scenes that were uncanny precisely because they turned the familiar into something very strange: holidaymakers and tourists huddled together on beaches, waiting to be evacuated, when only metres away the bush was ablaze and flames inched on to the sand; campers that had been chased from their camping sites and who now sat in a long line of slow-moving cars snaking its way up the coast and back to the relative safeness of urban areas. In these images the Australian bush was no longer a tamed space of leisure and pleasure but an unpredictable and dangerous, even malevolent, natural environment where a firestorm raged. These were scenes vaguely reminiscent of the 1978 Australian horror film Weekend, where the wilfully destructive white man, played by John Hargreaves, must eventually contend with an unforgiving, vengeful Nature.

On the beach But perhaps some of the most unsettling images emerged from communities up and down coastal NSW and Victoria where large numbers of residents and tourists sheltered on beaches and on foreshores waiting to be rescued by emergency services. In some places, summer holiday makers, wrapped in blankets and wearing smoke-masks, gathered on wharves and boat ramps under eerily red, smoked filled skies. And in scenes that at times seemed like a mundane Australian version of Dunkirk, families recruited small boats and runabouts – tinnies – to rescue family members and domestic pets. One iconic image showed a small boy wearing a smoke-mask and steering an aluminium powerboat, which carried his mother, brother and the family dog, away from the fire-ravaged Victorian seaside town of Mallacoota. In Australian history, the beach, the bush and the home are mythologised spaces that have been integral to settler-colonial nation-building and the kinds of narratives that settler societies inevitably produce as stories of occupation and legitimation. But as with all mythologies, they are also contested sites whose self-evident truth often masks an inherent fragility. The beach, for example, is one of those quintessentially Australian spaces associated with a natural healthy lifestyle (the bronzed Aussie) and with the masculinity and heroism of lifesavers, with the bravery and sacrifice of Gallipoli and with the egalitarianism of the surfing and sunbathing body. But the beach is also simultaneously the place of first contact and the violence of invasion, and the threshold which delivered smallpox and other diseases that annihilated Indigenous communities. The castle The domestic home, likewise, is the cornerstone of what has become known

as the Australian Dream. And, unsurprisingly, Australians have long had a thing about their houses. Clearing the land, developing a solid foundation and building a home has functioned importantly as both a material and symbolic technology of occupation in white Australia. The domestication of land and bush that the single-family dwelling required was a manifestation of, in a concrete, material sense as much as metaphorically, ideas of modernity and progress, and with building, quite literally, a civilised existence in a land that appeared (to European eyes) as bereft of civilisation, as terra nullius. Land grabbing, land clearing, removing bush, along with the construction of private housing and the development of suburban settlement, was an essential component of colonisation, representing moreover not just a conquest of land and territory but also a conquest of nature. The domestic home on a cleared block of land brought nature under control, establishing the proper hierarchy of man and nature. The developed house with its cultivated garden and clearly defined boundaries was not only a marker of occupation and civilisation, then, it was also, as Katrina Schlunke puts it, a place 'where the modern defeats the natural.' The Australian Dream and its fetish of private ownership, individual home ownership, is very much premised on this simultaneous dream of controlling nature, of bringing it under human possession and control, of claiming it as personal property and putting one’s stamp on it. As Robert Menzies famously put it, the Australian dream of home ownership was all about claiming 'one little piece of earth with a house and a garden which is ours: to which we can withdraw … into which no stranger may come against our will.' In Menzies’ terms, the home not only provided shelter from the weather and the harshness of the Australian climate, it was also a refuge from all kinds of strangers and strangeness, a retreat into which one could withdraw. The phrase 'Safe as Houses' has come to epitomise this idea of the safety, solidity and stability of bricks and mortar, and not just financially but also socially and materially. Although many people may no longer remember Robert Menzies, the Australian Dream still retains much of the appeal that he ascribed to it. From this point of view, ownership of the domestic home would provide autonomy and security, an important asset with

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