How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent

This past summer, wildfires again washed across southeast Australian landscapes, affecting over 500,000 hectares. Many of the forests that have carried these combustive tides are regrowth of native forests industrially cleared for mining and then recleared for timber. Many of the grasslands that were blackened with ash are littered with grasses and weedy grains intentionally refined and released by government agencies in the name of productivism. This is Country that has been comprehensively reshaped by projects of resource control, reterritorialised by almost two centuries of settler colonial and postcolonial dispossession and resource extraction, nourished by a climate deranged by fossil capital endeavours of resource capture and exploitation. Even La Niña patterns, most often associated with quiet bushfire seasons, can underpin a landmark season. Meanwhile, another system of control now intervenes in these increasingly flammable terrains, telling us on emergency broadcasts that the fires are “out of control.” We are all told to watch and act. “The incident is escalating. Take action immediately to protect your life.” Between the warnings and health advisory messages about smoke pollution, media commentators suggest that we might be safer if only our multibillion-dollar technoscientific systems of control were better equipped. In this presentation, I will think with Landecker’s (2025) prompt to attend to modernity’s “aftermath,” considering how the impossible dreams of control persist both within and without the institutions of Australian fire management.

Timothy Neale is Associate Professor in Anthropology at Deakin University in Narrm/Melbourne. His research addresses two overlapping fields of inquiry. The first focuses on the politics of settler and Indigenous relations to lands and waters, and the second examines natural hazards and disasters with a particular interest in the social and cultural life of their technical infrastructures. He is the author of two books - Wild Articulations: Environmentalism and Indigeneity in Northern Australia (University of Hawaii Press, 2017) and How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent (Duke University Press, 2026) - and editor (with Courtney Addison and Thao Phan) of the book An Anthropogenic Table of Elements: Experiments in the Fundamental (University of Toronto Press, 2022). He is also an Editor of the journal Science, Technology, & Human Values and Secretary of the AusSTS Network.

In-person: Room TBC

Zoom link: https://anu.zoom.us/j/82431454032?pwd=owA39nWqTYm2TGOcC0sWa9bEDVangD.1