ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the devastation of a bushfire in 1851 in Australia challenged the claims of emigration advocates that it was possible simply to pack up one's life and begin again on the other side of the world through an examination of a range of literary, journalistic and epistolary responses to bushfires. It also explains how fictional accounts of bushfires oppose themselves to newspaper stories of destruction. One of the more terrifying blazes to challenge nineteenth-century settler society was the sequence of fires that took place on what came to be known as 'Black Thursday'. Writing in Cassell's Illustrated Family Paper in 1854, William Howitt emphasized the disaster's impact on settler society by comparing it to events like the English Revolution of 1688. The main purpose of the poem by George Wright and entitled 'Black Thursday' was to encourage those who had been spared the worst effects of the inferno to provide assistance to its victims.
