Fire's habit: Elemental media and the politics of apprehension

Abstract

This article weaves together text, photography, and audio recordings drawn from long-term ethnographic research in northern Australia to ask what fire is becoming as its everyday, urban manifestations are tethered to the diacritics of catastrophic bushfire, on the one hand, and Indigenous expertise and cultural fire, on the other. In exploring both menacing and mundane facets of urban fire in northern Australia, the article and accompanying exegesis offer ways to see and hear fire's capacities spilling beyond these enduring axes of public concern to differently animate and illuminate a city's eco-acoustic vitality, complexity, and Indigeneity.