Edition 6
Art and Australia's Climate Disaster
Sep 2024
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
BY CLAIRE HOOKER and ANNA KENNEDY-BORISSOW — It is well recognised that one of the hallmarks of climate change is an increase in the frequency and severity of disasters (IPCC, 2023). The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR, 2007) defines disasters as a ‘serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society,’ and these disruptions result from interactions between hazards and human systems (Peek et al., 2021; Perry, 2018).
BY SUSANNE THUROW, HELENA GREHAN AND JANE W. DAVIDSON — In this short paper, we aim to explore the potential role creative arts might play in fostering community preparedness in view of the increasing extreme weather scenarios playing out across the globe.
BY PETA TAIT — This article outlines ARC funded research about the representation of ecological damage and climate change in Australian drama, theatre and contemporary performance. The project summary is followed by a brief discussion of artistic depictions of fire and disaster that refers to a community-based play based on the lived experience of its audience, and a performative work in which participants rehearse for a future disaster.
BY SARAH WOODLAND AND LINDA HASSALL — The escalation of ecological crises and climate-related disasters is impacting individual health and community wellbeing globally. The World Health Organization has highlighted that 3.6 billion people now live in regions highly susceptible to climate change, and the health impacts will cost economies US$2-4 billion per year by 2030 (WHO 2023).
BY BELINDA SMAILL — This essay explores how screen aesthetics have been deployed in our new era of fire. In Australia this era is marked by Black Saturday in 2007 and the Black Summer fires of 219/20. As both public knowledge and fire events have evolved the filmmaking community has responded with a largely documentary focused body of work. Examining this new turn in film and television’s narrative and visual interest in fire, I couch this study within Australia’s cinematic
BY JANE W. DAVIDSON, SARAH WOODLAND AND GILLIAN HOWELL — This short paper investigates the potential use of opera for enabling sharing and recovery from extreme weather events. Opera, which might be conceived of as storytelling using a combination of words, music, acting, costumes, and set, has a European origin dating back to 1600 (Davidson, Halliwell & Rocke, 2021).
BY DENNIS DEL FAVERO, SUSANNE THUROW, MAURICE PAGNUCCO, URSULA FROHNE — The climate emergency presents an existential global crisis resulting from the combined processes of global warming, atmospheric, hydrospheric, biospheric and pedospheric degradation. The IPCC report of 2023 found that extreme climate events are rapidly increasing around the globe, with projections indicating that they will become more frequent and severe, with impacts intensifying and interacting.
