Reading Crisis: The politics of fire in Amanda Lohrey’s the Reading Group and Vertigo

Abstract

When Parliament returned from its break during what we are now calling the ‘Black Summer’ of 2019–20, Prime Minister Scott Morrison rose to give a condolence speech for the victims of the fires. As leaders often do during a crisis, he reached for language that was grand, grave, even poetic, in his description of the catastrophic fires that continued to burn across south-eastern Australia as he spoke. Show more