Home Was Where the Hearth Is: Fire, Destruction, and Displacement in Nineteenth-Century Settler Narratives

Abstract

w. s. calvert's wood enGravinG morninG aFter the Fire aPPeared in the Illustrated Australian News and Musical Times on 1 April 1890. With flames apparently continuing to burn in the background, Calvert's haunting image of destruction shows a fireplace, standing amidst the burnt remains of damaged gum trees, the only surviving aspect of the homestead that has clearly been destroyed. dark skies and a hint of smoke, billowing to the left of the image, hint that the danger is not yet over. A discarded bucket signals an attempt to defend the dwelling, while the absence of human or animal life in the picture leaves the viewer pondering the fate of the house's inhabitants, both human and otherwise. standing tall, yet detached from the home of which it was an integral part, the houseless hearth is an uncanny reminder of the difficulties involved in transplanting european domesticity to the Australian landscape.1on one level, the hearth becomes a synecdoche for the that once surrounded it. it is rendered abject through its forced disconnection from the domestic, a condition that is emphasized in one of Calvert's earlier engravings, track of the Bushfire (1880), which shows a dog (another signifier of domesticity), standing before the remains of his fireplace in some distress, presumably grieving for the home that is no longer standing and the family who have vanished without a trace. the dog gravitates to the fireplace, partly because it is the sole remnant of his home, but partly because it is the central meeting point of the household. For this dog, the hearth's significance persists even when all that surrounds it has gone. Yet the dog also points to an important question as to whether a hearth remains a hearth when it stands alone in the wilderness, with neither a family nor a roof to define it.this essay will consider what it means when the f lame jumps out of the hearth- figuratively speaking-to threaten the home, and it will pay particular attention to how old associations between and domesticity were challenged and (forcibly) re-fashioned by life in the Bush. it will build on some of my previous work to address the challenges that the bushfire posed to european settlers' sense of stability in new environment and to address what happens when the hearth is exposed to public attention through the effacement of the home. Finally, the essay will show how offered writers from settler communities a means of considering relations to and cultural distance from the land they had left behind, while also compelling them to re-evaluate narrative conventions that placed the hearth at the center of the house, and of the story.2Alan Krell has outlined a fascinating reading of as a marker of civilization and domestication. He argues that, as the discovery of and human acquisition of language developed in tandem, they jointly led to building and the idea of home. Following Vitruvius's assertion of humans that their meeting and living together [. . .] thus came into being because of the discovery of fire (qtd. in Krell 98), Krell argues for the centrality of to the development of Western architecture. the domesticated and carefully controlled in the hearth constituted a significant gathering place in households, regardless of owners' class, to the extent that almost equated to sociability. drawing on cultural meanings of that date back to ancient Greece and Rome, Luis Fernandez-Galiano argues for the as animating spirit for the body of the house (13). Furthermore, he points to the cross-cultural centrality of to foundation rites, noting its ceremonial importance in both building and fertility customs across the globe.3 Martin Heidegger's lecture on the dialogue between Antigone and ismene (1942) also offers unexpected insights into Western perceptions of fire, through a classical lens. the Heideggerian hearth is site of everything homely (107) and the source of a good flame that is quintessentially domestic: lighting, illuminating, warming, nourishing, purifying, refining, glowing (105). …