ABSTRACT
Australian governments responded to the megafires with a spate of State inquiries, a Senate inquiry and a Royal Commission. The question of who, or what, was responsible for the Black Summer fires was largely avoided in such fora. By way of contrast, a number of popular narratives of culpability circulated during and after Black Summer. This chapter examines these narratives: the narrative of the arsonist as destructive, troubled youth; the narrative of ineffectual, State government departments and misguided ecologists; the narrative of a federal government in denial, obstinately refusing to listen to warnings; the even more damning narrative of the federal government as climate villain; and, finally, the narrative of maleficent fossil fuel producers and their media co-conspirators. It considers how these narratives manifested in lawsuits throughout 2020 and analyses Australian climate lawsuits as part of a global movement of climate litigation. It acknowledges the different scalar framings at work in climate narratives of culpability and lawfulness, and the conceptual difficulties in representing the gamut of scalar framings within existing legal systems.
