ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of the media in gendering and nationalizing the extreme heat crisis event. It shows that British media forms, notably television, make use of Australia as a site for teaching heat wave preparedness. A survey of schedules of the national channels, Channel 4, ITV, and the BBC, indicates that Australian weather events attracted considerable attention on British television in this period, in addition to the predictable inclusion of Australia in the continuum of nonlocal news events. The range of texts analyzed by the author cumulatively presents people with a frightening vision: the landscape of managed disaster and a concept of summer in the new manmade climate. Hence people have the outdoors figured as the blighted landscape of bushfire-prone suburbia and the heritage landscape as the fryingpan concrete modernity of the city, where only the hyper-masculine entrepreneur is expected to survive and recreate.
