Frontline heroes: Bush fires, the Coronavirus (COVID-19) and the Queensland Press

Abstract

During the catastrophic 2019 and 2020 bushfire season and the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in 2020, Queensland’s Courier Mail regularly celebrated firefighters and health workers as national archetypes. By positioning them as the ‘new Anzacs’, the Courier Mail was able to communicate an understanding of the crises using a rhetoric that was familiar, unthreatening and reassuring. The firefighters, both professional and volunteer, were easily subsumed into the mythology’s celebration of national identity. As Queensland’s health workers were predominantly female, urban-based and educated, the article used a more modern iteration of the Anzac mythology better suited to this different context. The emergence of a ‘kinder, gentler Anzac’ in the 1970s and its focus on trauma, suffering and empathy proved equally useful as a rhetorical tool. Both approaches were underpinned by a move away from a narrow military context to the Anzac mythology’s standing as a civic religion that celebrates more universal values such as courage, endurance, sacrifice and comradeship.