ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the vulnerability of the settler home in the face of summer bushfires, particularly those that were deliberately set. R. Gray's comments point to the struggles many settlers faced during the tinder-dry summer months. Anthony Trollope captures vividly the trepidation with which the eponymous hero waits for a malicious blaze-setter to attack his farm and conveys a number of settler anxieties about the vulnerability of families living in the bush, where the support of the police and fire fighters might be several days' ride away. The literary fire bug became the indistinct embodiment of a set of semi-articulated fears that collectively pointed to the unspoken pressures of adapting to life in the bush. Despite Matthew's daughter quarrel with Robert Denning on the night of the fire, Jessie Denning is spirited in her defence of her fiance in its aftermath. The arrival of Europeans in Australia saw a radical reconfiguration of the use of fire, with devastating consequences.
