NiTRO + Creative Matters

Perspectives on creative arts in higher education

Art and Australia’s Climate Disaster

GUEST EDITOR JANE W. DAVIDSON — Extreme weather events have been experienced in so-called Australia for millennia. This settler painting shows the terror and chaos captured by William Strutt in a depiction of Black Thursday, February 6th 1851 (painted in 1864 and now part of the State Library of Victoria’s Pictures Collection). From records of the time, around five million hectares burnt, which amounts to a staggering quarter of Victoria, and on the same day, with temperatures over 43 degrees Celsius in the shade, large swathes of western Tasmania also burnt.

Today, climate change is an exponential crisis challenging us all. Cataclysmic fires, floods, and storms have been experienced across the continent, and as global temperatures continue to rise, we will face further severe, unpredictable and more frequent weather events into the future. 

Without doubt, creative and performing arts occupy a major role in many peoples’ lives, across cultures and generations. The various contexts of artistic experience can be deeply affecting, offering powerful aesthetic experiences that in turn trigger mechanisms which simultaneously afford benefits in terms of psychosocial and behavioural outcomes.

Recent specialised applications of arts in a range of challenging circumstances have demonstrated the educational, therapeutic and communicative benefits that are also found to be effective in the context of climate disaster. 

In this issue, we review some of the arts approaches set in  broader Australian encounters with extreme weather. We see how they have offered solace, mourning and hope in the ‘Response and Recovery’ to events such as the Black Saturday Fires of 2009, the Black Summer of 2019-20 and the Lismore Floods of 2022. The articles survey the existing research in the field, exploring ‘Creative Recovery’ for individuals and communities, referencing work critically important to the field. In addition to recovery, the need for proactive planning, scenario modelling and disaster training to ensure readiness for unforeseen events is explored within the framework of ‘Creative Preparedness’.   

As we ponder the challenges of climate change, we also need to reflect on the respectful relationships Aboriginal people have developed between flora, fauna and land over many generations. These approaches illustrate so clearly how arts and culture can offer crucial routes to protecting the amazing natural assets of this country, and support survival and flourishing of us all. 

Jane W. Davidson is a Fellow of the Australian Academy for the Humanities, undertaking research in performance, musical development, intercultural engagement and music for wellbeing outcomes. She was Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (2011–18), and is currently Head of Performing Arts and University of Melbourne’s Creativity and Wellbeing Initiative’s Chair. Jane is also an internationally award-winning opera singer and director.

Main image credit: Detail from William Strutt Black Thursday, February 6th 1851, 1864.

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