Quantitative Geographic Analysis: A Cultural History of Australian Bushfire Narratives

Abstract

In colonial Australia, newspapers frequently published serialised fiction and journalistic accounts of bushfires side by side. Across the 19th century, fictional depictions of settler endurance and survival were increasingly tempered by journalistic portrayals of destruction. By the century's end, these narratives framed fire as a force that overcame social divisions, unifying settlers in a collective struggle against nature that exemplified the distinctively nationalistic value of "mateship." At least, that is how the story has been told...

In Australian literary studies, such nationalist narratives have been the subject of growing critique for their narrow and exclusionary constructions of Australian identity, highlighting the need for a critical reassessment of cultural representations of bushfires and their associated national values. This task, however, is complicated by the limited historical research on 19th-century bushfires. While major fire disasters such as Black Thursday (1851) and Red Tuesday (1898) have received some scholarly attention, the intervening years remain largely unexplored. This thesis addresses this gap, employing computational techniques to extract, geolocate, and map geographic information about historic Australian bushfires from 19th-century journalism and serialised fiction. Reading fiction in dialogue with bushfire reporting offers a critical lens through which to examine the cultural values and beliefs associated with fire, shedding light on evolving perceptions of colonial disaster and the ways in which Australian bushfires have been mythologised, commemorated, or forgotten.

This thesis not only offers insights into the spatial dimensions of colonial Australian writing but also critically examines the role of digital mapping technologies in literary analysis. While these technologies are often presented as transformative tools, discourses of technological novelty tend to obscure the need for a more critical engagement with how they both enable and constrain scholarship. Adopting an affordance-based heuristic framework, this study foregrounds two under-theorised technologies that underpin digital mapping practices-Named Entity Recognition (NER) and geocoding algorithms (GAs)-to explore how they actively shape knowledge production. This perspective challenges reductive cartographic approaches that treat literature as a direct representation of geographic space, instead advancing an alternative position that frames literary realism as a record of environmental decline. Drawing on a corpus of over 42,754 newspaper articles and 247 serialised novels and short stories, this extended fire history compels a reconsideration of historical bushfires as "disasters," demonstrating how colonial journalism and fiction documented and responded to ecological transformations throughout the 19th century.