The shredding ribbon bark unfurls streamers of fire that travel kilometres on the wind. Flames release gases that act like propellant, sending fireballs rolling across treetops. ‘Gasoline trees’, the Americans call the globulus. No plant on the planet craves fire like the eucalypt: to live it needs to burn. Every summer they drop their bark and branches and leaves, and each year without fire the piles grew higher, and they released toxins to ward off new growth that would compromise their fuel beds. The arsonist had had no need to set kindling amongst the blue gums. Hooper skilfully builds the tension (significant given that I knew what happened from the outset), and manages to include the necessary factual information without slipping into pure journalistic reporting – The gum leaves, pliable up to a certain temperature, were like thousands of fingers pointing the way the fire had gone…īurning birds fell from the sky, igniting the ground where they landed…The aluminium tray of a ute ‘ran in rivulets on the ground’. The detail in her writing is both poetic and terrifyingly clear – True crime, by its very nature, provides a compelling narrative but Hooper goes further than simply retelling events in The Arsonist. Hooper gives a detailed account of the fires, the arson investigation, the arrest of a socially vulnerable man who had not previously been known to police, and his trial. Some of the fires were deliberately lit and the man responsible for starting the Central Gippsland fires is the topic of Chloe Hooper’s enthralling book, The Arsonist. The total area burnt was approximately half a million square kilomentres – to put that in perspective, the size of Spain.

Across Victoria, 173 people died more than one million animals (pets, wildlife and stock) perished over 2,000 houses and 3,500 structures were completely destroyed and whole towns were razed (Kinglake, Marysville, Narbethong, Strathewen, and Flowerdale).

Extreme heat, high winds, low humidity, and severe drought combined to create the worst bushfire conditions in Australia’s recorded history (the heat from the fires was equivalent to 500 atomic bombs exploding).īlack Saturday resulted in Australia’s highest ever loss of life from a bush-fire event. On Febru– a day that would become known as Black Saturday – bushfires burned vast areas of Victoria (my home state).

Chloe hooper the arsonist