Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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Summer’s Tempo: Bushfires, Water, and Time
By Ruth Morgan For me, the Savage Summer was televised, unfolding in my family’s living room in Perth and then a hotel room in Ooty in southern India. I’d expected locals there to ask me about cricket, but all they wanted to talk about were the bushfires that had seemingly engulfed the entire continent.
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The Fire Knows No Boundaries
By Rob Waters: Listen to a spoken-word poem about the fires and their impact on the land.
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Gifts and Ghosts
By Kate Wright I’m seven years old dancing to Buddy Holly on a red rug. The warm crackle of the stylus on the vinyl rhymes with the burning wood hissing on the open fire. Carbon, once captured and condensed into living forests, is rapidly escaping its cellulose confines.
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Between Here and There
By Anna Pilz I have never set foot on the continent called Australia. I am unfamiliar with its beaches, bushlands, deserts, and cityscapes, with their sounds and smells, colours and textures. It is a place far away that I encountered mostly in my studies on nineteenth-century Ireland. I have travelled there in my imagination alongside…
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Smoke, Black Cockatoos, and Banksias
By Jessica White In November 2019, before I flew to Munich, I stayed with my parents in Armidale, New South Wales. National parks, farms, and properties between the town and the coast were on fire and, depending on the wind, the grey-brown miasma of smoke blocked out the blue sky. The town was on level…
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Watch and Act, Summer
By Susan Ballard At first, there are only a couple of photos. The usual places: the Guardian, Instagram, Facebook. I trace the fire as it creeps down and across the Southern Highlands, through the deep gullies of the Blue Mountains, and suddenly flares across the South Coast. I keep half an eye on the glistening…
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Matter of Degrees
*Featured image: Australian bushfires from space, 2019 (CC BY SA 3.0) By Anna Pilz and Kate Wright In early January 2020, we began discussing the possibility of curating a collection of creative and intellectual work about the bushfire crisis devastating unceded Aboriginal countries in the continent that is now commonly called “Australia”. Now, only three…
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Annotated Bibliography
By Jayne Regan The destructive scale of the 2019-2020 Australian fire season was reported around the world. This multilingual bibliography—collated with the help of RCC associates—offers a sample of online material relating to the fires, published within Australia and without.
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Mosquitopia? Could We or Should We Eradicate Mosquitos: A Short Film
In this short film created by the Mosquitopia team following the Rachel Carson Legacy Symposium “Mosquitopia? The Place of Pests in a Healthy World,€ 21 experts give their opinions and insights on this critical question.