Domus, Dream, Domicide: Home as Limit Point in the Pyrocene Lessons from the ‘Black Summer’ Australian Bushfires

ABSTRACT

This article explores the way in which bushfires challenge our theoretical frameworks for comprehending both ‘home’ and ‘home destruction’. Disaster scholarship has long argued that the very idea of ‘natural disaster’ remains inadequate as a term of description for the entanglements of the human and natural – acutely so for the entanglements that are at the heart of a changing climate and its consequences. The article proposes a new conception of ‘home’ as an intimately affective space where there is more at-stake than human-centeredness; rather, it is suggested here that ‘home’ is better reconceptualised as a site of multispecies connection that reframes the conventional understanding of the individual free-standing dwelling as a place where Australian modernity triumphs over the natural environment. The destruction wrought by catastrophic bushfires in turn also needs to be reconceptualised beyond a narrow focus on human-centred loss of life and property. When homes are destroyed the ecological entanglements that comprise the lived experience of the human home are also painfully severed.

KEYWORDS:

• home
• home loss
• domicide
• climate change
• bushfires
• natural disaster
• more-than-human

Domicide – the ‘deliberate destruction of home’ (Porteous and Smith 2001, 12) – is a fundamental feature of Australia’s colonial history and present. Even the site of the most iconic of Sydney landmarks, the Sydney Opera House, is intrinsically tied to it. Well before those world-famous ‘sails’, indeed well before Federation, it was the site of a modest dwelling: Bennelong’s hut. Governor Arthur Phillip ordered it built in 1790 for his captive-cum-friend, Bennelong, a Wangal man who served as mediator between the nascent Sydney colony and the local Aboriginal peoples. Bennelong’s hut did not last; it had been torn down by the time of Bennelong’s return from London in 1795. The only clue of what once stood there can be found in the modern place-name – Bennelong Point – which replaces the original Aboriginal placename of Djubuguli (Hinkson and Harris 2010, 27).

Bennelong’s hut is not typical of the domicide Indigenous Australians endured as British colonies encroached further inland over the next two centuries. The building adhered to European notions of domestic space, not Indigenous ones, and was situated within the heart of the first colony. It was one feature among many that transformed Sydney Cove’s waterfront from a seemingly ‘untamed’ coastline into a supposedly ‘ordered’ space. In its own small but significant way, domestic space contributed to realising a ‘civilised’ presence on a land that appeared (to European eyes) as bereft of civilisation, as terra nullius. In the process, ideas of dwelling as domestication – of nature, of animals, of unruly bush and wildlife – eroded existing Indigenous cultural landscapes and contributed to further Aboriginal dispossession. The individual free-standing home performed a key role within this civilising settler-colonial project, one which has persisted into the present, popularly re-imagined as ‘the Australian Dream’.

This colonising role was laid bare in the reactions against the restitution of Native Title following the Mabo and Wik court rulings in 1992 and 1996 respectively. Prime Minister John Howard (1997) claimed that Indigenous Australians would have ‘the potential right of veto’ over development on land in excess of three-quarters of Australia’s total land mass. Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett (as quoted in Harvey and Coffey 1993) warned that ‘every property in Australia could be at risk’. Pauline Hanson (2019), leader of the far-right One Nation party, extended these themes erroneously claiming that ‘a lot of people have been dispossessed of their lands in Australia because of it [Native Title]’.

Central to this apparent reversal of terra nullius was the perceived threat to the dominant Australian concept of ‘home’ – the near birthright expectation of one day owning ‘the suburban ideal of a freestanding house on a quarter-acre block’ (Allon 2008, 17). Robert Menzies, Australia’s longest serving Prime Minister (1939–1941 and 1949–1966), declared that the Australian aspiration for home ownership was all about claiming ‘one little piece of earth with a house and a garden which is ours: to which we can withdraw … into which no stranger may come against our will’ (Warhaft 2004, 157). Howard (2007) invoked Menzies throughout his own term in office (1996–1907), repeatedly characterising Australia as ‘a great home-owning society … where the dream of home ownership remains at the heart of the Australian experience’ (our emphasis; see Allon [2008, 84–109]). In these articulations, home was explicitly conceived as a place ‘where the modern defeats the natural’ (Schlunke 2016, 219), a concrete manifestation of still resonant colonial ideas of modernity and progress. For Menzies, moreover, the Australian home was also a refuge from all kinds of strangers and strangeness. But what of the stranger that now appears as ‘strange weather’ – the volatile and extreme weather events that punctuate this era of climate emergency?

The 2019–2020 bushfire catastrophe, now known as ‘Black Summer’, profoundly unsettled such national mythologies and the predominantly white Australian lifestyles they underpin: house and home; domesticity and nature; bush and beach. Among the wreckage were 3,500 homes lost primarily across New South Wales (2448), Victoria (396) and South Australia (151) (AIDR n.d.; Gourlay et al. 2020). Small coastal towns – Mallacoota, Rosedale, Malua Bay – made international headlines as locals sought refuge on beaches under blood-red skies and amidst thick haze. ‘Sacred’ Australian symbols of distinctly native species, such as kangaroos and koalas, were similarly profaned in widely circulated images of their burned bodies. The Australian bush, normally ‘a tamed space of leisure and pleasure’, became host to an uncontrollable and monstrous firestorm (Allon 2020, 29). The certainties of modern living, including all its appurtenances in the form of safely dwelling in a domesticated natural landscape, came undone. As Danielle Celermajer (2021, 2–3) puts it, ‘the very idea of being “safe” … is one of the many casualties of the climate catastrophe’.

Australians have been told by the latest in a long line of bushfire inquiries to ‘expect fire seasons like 2019–2020 or potentially worse to happen again’ (NSW Bushfire Inquiry 2020, iv). This is the ‘new normal’, according to Ken Pimlott (as quoted in O’Malley 2019), who in 2018 commanded the response to California’s devastating fires. Fire historian Stephen Pyne (2019, 3–6) has dubbed this dramatically inflamed epoch the ‘Pyrocene’, calling for a ‘fire-centric perspective’ within ongoing debates over geological epochs dominated by anthropogenic influences. Katrina Schlunke (2016, 223) argues that, with the home ravaged by bushfire, ‘one can see the ruination of a Western (and a very Australian) ideal of conquering space with location’. Our argument in this article is situated within a feminist tradition that has long advocated for critical scrutiny of home and dwelling practices with an explicit purpose of reconfiguring them differently. Our contribution to this body of work suggests that these perspectives can also be brought to bear fruitfully on more recent understandings of home and domicide, especially within the context of the destabilising conditions of global warming. With the Black Summer bushfires, the human home – metaphysically loaded as a site of risk insulation against various threatening strangers from ‘outside’ – is both materially and figuratively turned inside-out. With it, so too is domicide as a theoretical framework for comprehending home destruction, entangled as it is within dominant cultural narratives invested in the human home. Their undoing, we argue, bears the potential for transformed imaginaries that better attend to more-than-human dimensions.

Feminist Conditions of Possibility

Neimanis, Åsberg, and Hedrén (2015) argue that feminist concepts are central to the emerging scholarly field ‘environmental humanities’ but rarely acknowledged. One consequence of this omission, they suggest, is that it effectively neutralises ‘feminist politics and undermines the potential for environmental humanities to build alternative worlds’ (Hamilton and Neimanis 2018, 510). It also enables assumptions that environmental and social causes are disconnected, which in turn obfuscates how environmental and social issues are deeply entwined.

The risk of a neutralised social politics within environmental concerns is highlighted in the very idea of the ‘Anthropocene’, a term that etymologically embeds a universalised humanity to name a geological epoch dominated by human influences (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Crutzen 2002; Lewis and Maslin 2015, 171).¹ As feminist, anticolonial and antiracist critiques have argued, complicity in and responsibility for climate change is not equal nor will its impacts be evenly faced (Probyn 2016, 12; Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt 2019, S188; Yusoff 2018; Verlie 2022).

Anthropocentrism refers to taken-for-granted notions that humans are separate from and prioritised over what is conventionally understood as ‘nature’. Val Plumwood (2003, 42) observes that the nature-culture dualism, in which humans are perceived as separate from nature, exists alongside other ‘mutually reinforcing dualisms’ (see also Ortner [1972]). These hierarchised oppositions – man/woman, mind/body, reason/emotion, human or culture/nature – underpin multiple, imbricated power structures. As such, they reify the category of human and ‘the unique benefits afforded’ it, which are not afforded to the ‘groups of humans and beings other than humans associated with the devalued side’ (Celermajer et al. 2021, 124).

The possession of consciousness and other connotations of rational intelligence and agency figure as distinguishing characteristics that underpin such human exceptionalism. Rather than human-centred ways of being in and perceiving the world, researchers within environmental humanities generally foster relational and ecological approaches that are attentive to how other-than-human beings experience and know the world (Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt 2019, S188). In terms expressly conceived as a continuation of feminism’s critical denaturalisation of conventional kinship ties, Donna Haraway (2016, 102–103) proposes ‘to make kin mean something other/more than entities tied by ancestry or genealogy’. This recasting of the common-sense bonds between kinship, same-species, genealogy and ancestry invites ethical considerations ‘like to whom one is actually responsible’ (Haraway 2016, 2; Franklin 2017, 60).²

Home, Domesticity and the Everyday

Feminists have long argued for serious critical scrutiny of home and its affective investments. Dominant ideals casting home as a place of warmth, safety, belonging and freedom have been thoroughly critiqued as universalising claims that conceal sexist oppression and exploitation (de Beauvoir 1952; Friedan 1963). The demystification of dominant cultural narratives on home extends to their anchorage in anthropocentrism. The home, frequently represented as bounded, impermeable and secure, unsurprisingly entails the conquest of ‘nature’ as an esteemed value. It is therefore no coincidence that anthropological and archaeological interest had fixated on the search for the ‘first hut’, the moment when humanity ‘stepped out of nature’ (Ingold 2022, 226–227). A clear distinction is drawn between the building activities of humans – assumed to be conscious and intentional – and those of nonhuman animals – assumed to be actions of instinct (Rapoport 1994, 488; Rolston 2001, 267; Rykwert 1991, 54). Thus, the home as a physical manifestation of intent was and remains central to a division between human and nature.

Iris Marion Young (Young 2020), drawing on Martin Heidegger’s (1971) notions of ‘dwelling’ and ‘building’ as complementary aspects of ‘the way of being that is human’, explores how home is reified as a site of patriarchal ascendency through its anthropocentric investment. Building, in Heidegger’s sense, is underpinned by a duality of construction and preservation: the making of place that materially re-orders the environment into ‘a meaningful presence’ and the remaining in-place that cultivates and cares for that meaningfulness respectively. However, despite Heidegger (1971, 149) claiming that preservation is ‘the fundamental character of dwelling’, Young observes that construction seems to be prioritised within his framework. Noting that male dominance persists within the practices and industries that entail construction, Young surmises that ‘if building is the means by which a person emerges as a subject who dwells in that world, then not to build is a deprivation’ (137). This conforms to patriarchal delineations that gender the active, intentional and rational re-ordering of natural space as the domain of men and masculinity.

Feminist critiques are not limited to wholesale rejections of the home-as-haven ideal but are nonetheless concerned with radically reinventing ways of being at-home. Young argues for home’s ‘liberating potential’ through re-configuring and re-valuing Heidegger’s notion of preservation with particular focus on women’s meaning-making activities within domestic work:

Is it possible to retain an idea of home as supporting the individual subjectivity of the person, where the subject is understood as fluid, partial, shifting, and in relations of reciprocal support with others? (141)

This remains a pertinent question, not only in deconstructing home as a patriarchal idea and institution, but also as a key site that upholds and materially extends anthropocentric and colonial power structures. In this sense, its invocation of relationality and reciprocity should extend to the ecological array of multispecies and more-than-human entanglements that comprise the lived experience of the home and home loss.

Domicide Inside-Out

On 8 November 2019, the first day of ‘Black Summer’, Fiona Lee’s family home on the New South Wales coast burned to the ground (Singhal 2019). After hearing politicians repeatedly say that ‘now is not the time to talk about climate change’, Lee staged a protest by depositing the ashes of her house outside the NSW Parliament building (Singhal 2019). Home destruction and climate change became entwined in the view of this woman made homeless by the bushfire crisis: ‘for me, there has never been a better time to talk about climate change’ (quoted in School Strike 4 Climate 2019). If a house’s ashes can become the symbolic remains of life and dwelling, does this mean that the home destroyed by bushfire is also a representative site of ‘domicide’, the deliberate destruction of home?

Porteous and Smith (2001, 12) define ‘domicide’ as ‘the deliberate destruction of home by human agency, in pursuit of specified goals, which causes suffering to the victims’. Importantly, domicide is both meaningful and common. It is meaningful in the sense that home resonates, for a variety of reasons, and having that attachment ruptured can be affective in personally intimate ways beyond economic hardship and compromised safety. Home destruction is common insofar as it is not limited to the extreme scenario of war. Porteous and Smith (2001) identify its role within the mundane processes of infrastructure projects, economic development and urban redevelopment strategies (among other examples) underpinned by narratives of ‘the greater good’ and ‘progress’. In this everyday domicide, the destructive consequences for homes ‘in the way’ become acceptable if not disguised entirely – except, of course, for its victims. Intent is central to Porteous and Smith’s definition: deliberate, by human agency, pursuing specified goals. It relies upon the rational and bounded, self-knowing ‘I’ as perpetrator, defined by consciousness and conscious action; in other words, it is tied to the actions of the Western liberal subject in humanism and philosophy, a figure that has been thoroughly challenged as a heteropatriarchal and anthropocentric construct within feminist, queer, antiracist and postcolonial critiques.

When placed in the context of the entangled reality of human-induced climate change, ‘intent’ becomes significantly more complicated, and certainly more difficult to locate in one easily identifiable source. ‘Natural disasters’ are necessarily (and explicitly) excluded from domicide’s original scope: ‘the loss of home is deliberately engineered: somewhere, someone is to blame’ (Porteous and Smith 2001, 19). Without clear human intention and subsequent causality (i.e. fires for land clearing), involuntary home loss cannot be held as domicide. In other words, ‘victims can normally blame only nature or God’ (Porteous and Smith 2001, 17). That is clearly not the case for Fiona Lee and, as will be explored in this section, her protest was not an isolated act either. The emotions generated by Black Summer among bushfire survivors and other community perspectives certainly emphasised distinct human responsibilities. Indeed, it seems that somewhere, someone is to blame.

Furthermore, the very idea of a ‘natural disaster’ is woefully inadequate as a term of description given the deep entanglements of the human-made and the natural at the heart of climate change. While long-term shifts in weather patterns are intrinsic to the nonlinear fluctuations of all climactic systems, theories of anthropogenic climate change have presented overwhelming evidence that the global warming currently accelerating the frequency of extreme weather events such as droughts, bushfires and floods is directly caused by human activities, and primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels. The conventional explanatory frameworks employed in much disaster scholarship, notably that disasters occur when physical phenomena originating in natural systems have sudden, nonroutine catastrophic impacts on social systems, are unable to respond satisfactorily to such transformed environmental conditions. More recent scholarship on the social construction of ‘natural disaster’ has challenged such ‘naively realist’ approaches (Tierney 2018, 81) arguing convincingly that disasters are discursively framed, produced through cultural and institutional processes, and inseparable from power dynamics, ideological norms, and the actions of elite social groups (see Tierney 2018; Button and Schuller 2016; Gorman-Murray et al. 2014).³

Mike Davis (1998), for example, examines the way in which flood, fire and earthquake tragedies in California that were largely avoidable have been coopted by religious and pseudoscientific discourses as well as by elite interests promoting real-estate development and presented as evidence of a hostile nature that requires further acquiescence through market-driven urbanisation. As a result, the essential land use issue – the rampant, uncontrolled proliferation of firebelt suburbs – [is] camouflaged in a neutral discourse about natural hazards and public safety (146). Given the greater frequency of climate-change induced ‘natural disasters’, it has become imperative to examine both their social construction and their social consequences. Nancy Tuana (2008) argues that living through disasters can be a potent means of confrontation with our enmeshed states, exposing both the illusion and fragility of a presumed nature/culture divide. In addition, the Australian bushfire catastrophe belies any simplistic divide between ‘extreme’ and ‘everyday’. In his role as Deputy Prime Minister, Michael McCormack (2019), said as much: ‘Yes, these fires are severe. Yes, in some cases, they are unprecedented but in other cases, they are what happens in Australia’.

Climate Inaction, ‘Coal-o-Phobia’ and Incendiary ‘Others’

The location of Lee’s protest – outside the NSW Parliament – purposefully drew attention to political decision-making and inaction on climate change. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott who lost his seat in 2019 to an Independent candidate running on a climate policy agenda, argued during Black Summer that the world ‘was in the grip of a climate cult’ (quoted in Readfearn 2020). Scott Morrison (2017), Abbott’s successor, coined the phrase ‘coal-o-phobia’ while mockingly brandishing a lump of coal in Parliament, extolling the virtues of coal mining for delivering ‘prosperity’ and ‘jobs’ for ‘generations of Australians’. Such approaches to climate change policy (or a lack thereof) resonates with the ‘greater good’ discourse of everyday domicide; the ‘prosperity’ and ‘jobs’ offered by fossil fuel mining industries, alongside lower costs-of-living, held favourably against the need to act on climate change.

Mike Davis (1998, 130) observes that ‘incendiary “Others”’ are consistently constructed along ideological lines to assign speculative blame for wildfires which conversely distracts from scientific accounts of causes. Climate change activists, arsonists, and Islamic State were among the ‘incendiary Others’ posited during Black Summer (Knaus 2020). The positioning of environmentalists, and by extension environmental protections and the other-than-human beings they protect, as incendiary Others sees further resonance between Australian and Californian contexts. Davis (1998, 133–134) notes how the protected habitats of endangered species – Stephens’s kangaroo rat and the California gnatcatcher – were subject to attacks that opposed them to property rights and development interests. This discourse witnessed ‘a bizarre syllogism that equated any undeveloped landscape or protected habitat with an ipso facto fire hazard’ (134). In Australia, blame centred on so-called ‘green tape’ obstructions that hinder hazard reduction. Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce (quoted in Goodall 2020), for example, attacked the ‘green caveats that impede people’s capacity to fight fires’: ‘[f]uel reduction, access to water [dams], keeping roads clear, making sure we don’t have tree clearing guidelines which basically make it impossible for people to take the protective action they need to’.

Pyromanic Suburbanisation and a ‘Big Cultural Shift’

Commissioned in the wake of the devastation left behind by Black Summer, the final report of the NSW Bushfire Inquiry (2020, vi), notes that future property losses are inevitable as a consequence of both historic and ongoing settlement patterns. The report calls for a ‘big cultural shift’ in ‘accepting what can be defended’ during extreme fire seasons (NSW Bushfire Inquiry 2020, vi).

Meanwhile, suburbanisation and settlement fundamentally alters the conditions for hazard reduction and firefighting. As Davis (1998, 107–108, 143) argues, suburbanisation of fire-prone regions has ‘magnified the natural fire danger while creating new perils for firefighters’. It has also significantly shifted firefighting practices, with prescribed burns becoming more difficult to perform due to the proximity (and sometimes opposition) of nearby residences, as well as firefighting efforts ‘dispersed into house-by-house defenses’ which entail ‘a dramatically increased risk of firefighters’ being trapped by erratic and rapidly moving fire fronts’ (143). The ‘greater good’ of feeding an insatiable real-estate market by developing fire-prone regions – what Davis (134) terms ‘pyromanic suburbanisation’ – justifies the consequent domicide of homes built in the inevitable path of fires as well as other homes elsewhere through the flow-on effects of stretched resources, obstructed disaster preparation and drastically altered firefighting conditions. Unlike Shane Stone (quoted in Karp and Murphy 2022), the former coordinator-general of the National Disaster Response and Recovery Agency who sought to victim blame those ‘who want to live among the gum trees’ for the loss of their homes in disaster-prone areas, Davis’ argument recognises the power structures and capital interests that animate those compelling domestic imaginaries (such as the Australian Dream) for profit.

In this sense, we argue that the original exclusion of ‘natural disasters’ from the framework of domicide must be rethought to account for the ideological drivers of human-induced climate change and their legitimating narratives – economic prosperity, urban development, human progress and so on. The ‘big cultural shift’ the Inquiry calls for requires a rethinking of where and how we build ‘homes’; indeed, this shift must echo demands within pyrogeography (Pyne 2007; Roos et al. 2014) to seriously consider the cultural dimensions of fire regimes which, in an Australian context, certainly includes the material effects of cultural narratives like the ‘Australian Dream’ of home ownership on the settlement patterns at the urban/bushland interface on the outskirts of major cities.

Domus Inside-Out: ‘Techno Fixes’ and More-Than-Human Homemaking

In 2021, Suncorp Insurance (2021) launched a marketing campaign entitled ‘One House to Save Many’. It introduces a collaborative project with the CSIRO, James Cook University and Room 11 Architects which aimed ‘to design, build and test a home resilient to fire, flood, storm and cyclone’ (Suncorp 2021a). The resulting prototype – the titular ‘One House’ – is presented as a three-bedroom suburban family home which appropriates and modernises the ‘Queenslander’ architectural style. The Queenslander’s key features – a wraparound verandah, central staircase to the front door, ground level carport and elevated living area with natural ventilation – are combined with already-standard and cost-effective technologies to produce a building more capable of withstanding extreme weather events (Suncorp 2021b). The advertisement depicts this house undergoing intense ‘stress-testing’ as machines replicate catastrophic weather conditions in a controlled environment. Concerned (predominantly white and heteronormative) families and couples observe from a viewing gallery as debris and gale-force winds, surging flood waters, sparks and flames pound the structure. However, despite the elemental forces thrown at it, ‘One House’ emerges from the smoke seemingly unscathed and ready to be lived in.

‘One House’ stages a dramatic and defiant return to Menzian themes of home (and thus humanity) as mastering and repelling nature. Close-ups of machinery – a wall of high-powered fans; manually turned release valves, pressed buttons and flicked switches; pressure metres and temperature scales; gas pipes, water pumps and furnaces – accompany the introduction of extreme weather scenarios. It draws attention to itself as a simulation and, in so doing, labours the point that humans can control, predict and reproduce these conditions. The pursuit of climate-adaptive technologies and practices in construction and architecture is, no doubt, vital and necessary.

In appropriating the Queenslander style, the project reveals how a distinctly Australian style of home was seriously ‘maladapted’ to its environment, with conventional decorative flourishes and close-hugging door and window meshing providing entry-points for fire and limited protection from debris projectiles (Suncorp 2021b). It demonstrates how lifestyle(s) can and should adapt to their surroundings without having to fully retreat. As Kate Phillips of Room 11 Architects states in the campaign’s documentary, ‘anyone can build a concrete or steel bunker – but nobody wants to live in that’ (Suncorp 2021b).

In its exaggerated commercial framing, however, ‘One House’ leans into a particular narrative about house and home that reifies the metaphysical divisions that underpinned the now maladapted lifestyles. The advertisement closes with a montage of families smiling in front of their suburban homes, underscoring the way in which the marketing and design of homes often reinforces not only gender norms but also hegemonic heterosexuality (Gorman-Murray 2008). The documentary reveals that these families are not actors but are, in fact, ‘real’ families that were displaced by different extreme weather events, invoking the Australian Dream with its imagery, and once again binding ‘One House’ to restoring (and thus reaffirming) the national mythos and the cultural narratives that sustain it.

The mutually imbricated dualisms central to anthropocentrism are also on display. Justin Leonard, CSIRO’s research leader in bushfire adaptation, claims that ‘One House’ would alter how we relate to nature: ‘We would feel closer to nature because we would be in awe of it rather than in fear of it’ (Suncorp 2021b). This, however, is not a new relationship. ‘One House’, shown to be bounded, secure and impermeable, restores a status quo in which nature can be admired and enjoyed at a distance, now that (once more) humanity can carve out a place that reveres it but ‘holds it back’. In other words, it restores us to a relationship with nature that is strictly on our terms, and which assumes it can always be strictly on our terms, as opposed to seeing an opportunity to reconfigure that relationship as one of being in and of nature.

‘One House to Save Many’ echoes the NSW Bushfire Inquiry in calling for a cultural shift – ‘a change in mindset’ – that centres individuals and households. John Doolan, Director of James Cook University’s Cyclone Testing Station, casts this as a move from ‘someone else is looking after it’ to ‘I must be aware of my own situation’ (Suncorp 2021b). This shift is nestled within the auspices of collective responsibility with Cath Stewart, Suncorp’s Head of Disaster Response, maintaining ‘it’s not the government, it’s not the industry, it’s not the community; together, we need to come up with what the longer term solution is’ (Suncorp 2021b). This follows the move toward a model of ‘shared responsibility’ in emergency management policy in Australia which has been critiqued for generating confusion over where responsibilities lie, placing disproportionate burden on individuals without recognition of structural and material disadvantage, and creating grounds for politicisation between levels of government and other actors during disaster response and recovery (Maguire et al. 2022; Rawsthorne, Howard, and Joseph 2021). ‘Shared responsibility’ is nebulous, contested and difficult to put into practice as repeatedly witnessed with the 2022 floods in Queensland and NSW as well as the previously covered responses of Black Summer bushfire survivors.

Interestingly, ‘One House’ avoids explicit references to Black Summer (‘fires so fierce the whole world took notice’), and climate change itself is re-framed as ‘weather becoming increasingly extreme’. This allows the campaign to carefully straddle a line between implicitly acknowledging a changing climate, but without its human-induced connotations which invite notions of responsibility and blame, while also situating Australia as a land of natural extremes: ‘Australia is no stranger to extreme weather – and it’s only getting worse’ (Suncorp 2021b). This ambiguity is key for the campaign’s central theme of ‘resilience’ which is upheld as innate within Australia’s national spirit (‘we Australians are a resilient bunch’) (Suncorp 2021a). ‘One House’ is bound to this national character in achieving its counterpart in home design (‘now as our weather becomes more extreme, we need homes as resilient as us’) (Suncorp 2021a). Or, put another way, ‘One House’ makes for a more Australian Australian Dream. It certainly demonstrates the resiliency of Australian cultural narratives on home and the anthropocentric norms they reify. But in doing so, and while eschewing direct reference to climate change, any discussion of broader actions is abandoned in order to simply reaffirm the question of the human home as a ‘techno fix’ for living in the climate crisis.

The longstanding Australian mythology of ‘a home among the gum trees’ is one of but many examples of what Gillon and Gibbs (2019, 107) describe as ‘the successful performance of idealised home cultures’. The marketing of ‘One House’ and real-estate developments in desirable natural locales share an obfuscation of the labour involved in dwelling there. However, such homemaking is always more-than-human, ‘a shared process: between humans, nonhumans, materials, elements, and cultures’ (109).

Habitat-as-Home

Koalas have a contemporary salience that is entangled with the 2019–2020 catastrophic fires. They form part of Black Summer’s emblematic imagery with widely circulated footage of rescues, sometimes as co-survivors of bushfires, which has been followed by reports of their extinction threat by 2050 in NSW, Queensland and the ACT due to habitat loss accelerated by the bushfires (Portfolio Committee No. 7 – Planning and Environment 2020), public tensions within the NSW Government over proposed protections (Nguyen 2020) and the Federal Government officially listing the native marsupial as endangered in February 2022 (Ley 2022). NRMA Insurance’s ‘Every Home is Worth Protecting’ campaign is situated within this context. This conservation campaign was launched in August 2019, in partnership with Conservation Volunteers Australia and as part of ‘The Lion’s Share’ initiative,⁴ and initially ran until January 2020, effectively coinciding with Black Summer (NRMA Insurance 2019a). It included a series of advertisements which tell the story of a young boy, Ranger Sammy, who one day notices a koala (Arlo) atop a power-line pole in the middle of town (see NRMA Insurance 2019b, 2021). He helps relocate the marsupial to more suitable habitat but encounters a bulldozer in a field of cleared trees on the way. The sequel series sees Sammy join forces with a girl called Ruby. Together, they discover that Arlo’s eucalyptus trees have been marked for clearing and set out to prevent this by establishing a makeshift koala sanctuary. Ultimately, their efforts are shown to be successful with the construction workers departing with the trees left standing and intact.

The campaign leverages the affective resonance of ‘home’ – as fixed, comforting and secure – as a means to promote the conservation of koala habitats. Each ad closes with a shot of Arlo, sitting in the bow of a tree, with the campaign’s slogan ‘Every home is worth protecting’ imposed over the image. In this way, the series seemingly undercuts how we tend to understand ‘habitat’. Thom Van Dooren (2014, 79) writes that habitat is underpinned by assumptions of interchangeability; so long as a space provides the ideal living conditions for a specific non-human species then any such space will suffice for that species. By enfolding habitat-as-home, ‘Every Home’ suggests a different relationality with place. In fact, studies have observed philopatric (philopatry, ‘love for one’s home’) behaviours among koalas under different conditions (Mitchell 1990; Phillips 2016). As such, it is worth being cautious about too readily accepting this framing simply as strategic anthropomorphism or, rather, with assuming that humans alone develop affective relationships with place. Might recognition of a shared ‘love for one’s home’ unlock meaningful common ground in site fidelities across species?

The enfolding of home and habitat prompts another question: if we can affectively re-cast habitat as ‘home’ for koalas, then, is the deliberate destruction of koala habitat-homes also domicide? Koala habitats are situated within intersecting concerns anchored in ‘the greater good’ with tree clearing being necessary for various infrastructure and development projects, including the construction of human homes, as well as ‘incendiary Others’ within arguments for bushfire risk mitigation. In other words, koalas’ ‘homes’ are destroyed through purposeful human actions to achieve specified goals for the ‘common good’. ‘Every Home’ reveals its everydayness. Human actions, not the recent fires, are positioned as the causes of Arlo’s habitat loss and, importantly, these actions are not embellished as especially villainous either. There is nothing to suggest that these actions are out-of-the-ordinary. The perpetrators are anonymous (as is their purpose; any construction project could be inserted into the scenario), glimpsed at-a-distance and depart without resisting Sammy and Ruby’s efforts.

‘Ecocide’ seems the appropriate term to account for and intervene upon such ecological damage and, if so, ‘Every Home’ presents how it, like domicide, must account for everyday modalities (Burke and Celermajer 2021). However, home is ‘a multidimensional concept of which the physical dwelling is only one aspect’ (Reid and Beilin 2015, 96); it bears ‘a cluster of meanings’ across multiple scales, as Porteous and Smith (2001, 32) note. Fundamentally, what underpins both concepts is recognition of connection to place. Perhaps, then, domicide could be extended to other-than-human beings as potential victims at a time where continuing to separate and disentangle human and non-human is increasingly being questioned?

This proposed extension of domicide might draw concerns about anthropomorphism as well as the collapsing of clear conceptual scopes for itself and ecocide. After all, the etymologies of domicide and philopatry are informed by a particular human notion of home as opposed to a broader range of place-based connections that might not all be suitably labelled as ‘home’. In this sense, extending domicide to other-than-human beings might risk ascribing human ways of knowing a certain connection to place (home) that overrides other non-human ways of knowing and being. For example, must non-human connection to place be philopatric – as a set of particular, observable and routine behaviours – to be recognised as domicidal destruction when ruptured? Does this risk creating division between non-humans where those that are not philopatric remain vulnerable to the potential violences underpinning notions of habitat interchangeability?

What is clear, however, is that ‘Every Home’ highlights how domicide and ecocide are deeply entwined. The story of Bennelong’s hut that opened this essay also presents how intrinsically knotted these '-cides' can be, while also including other modes of killing like cultural genocide and memoricide (‘the killing of memory’), especially within settler colonial contexts. Further, Bhiamie Williamson, Jessica Weir and Vanessa Cavanagh (2020) explain that ‘the experience of Aboriginal peoples in the fire crisis … is vastly different to non-Indigenous peoples’. Lorena Allam (2020), descendant of the Gamilaraay and Yawalaraay Nations, writes that the fires are ‘taking everything with it – lives, homes, animals, trees – but for First Nations people it is also burning up our memories, our sacred places, all the things which make us who we are’. The fires entail the ongoingness of colonisation’s immeasurable destruction as they compound its ecocide, domicide, memoricide and cultural genocide; the undoing of connection to place, to Country, particular to First Nations peoples.

Celermajer (2021, 185) proposes ‘omnicide’ to name the limitless and boundless killing that characterises this age. The killing ‘cannot be delimited’, it subsumes all human and non-human beings as well as ways of being, such as living safely in connection to place. In this sense, omnicide enfolds all killing – genocide (including its cultural guises) and ecocide, domicide and memoricide – in recognition of their interconnectedness especially through the shared forces and legitimising narratives that underpin them. This does not mean that omnicide overrides these other terms (nor is this suggested in Celermajer’s work); these ‘-cides’ are modalities through which omnicide occurs. Moreover, in specifically addressing connection to place, omnicide may also accommodate the manifold ways of being and knowing connected to place that domicide would perhaps flatten if applied to other-than-human beings.

To return to ‘Every Home’, then, and pose a related question: if we can speak in terms of habitats-as-home then perhaps we can also contemplate the inverse: homes-as-habitats? Menzies may have conceived of the Australian home as keeping strangers at-bay. But our homes are always already full of strangers – and they are all non-human. They are habitats for ‘many and diverse animal inhabitants – more, perhaps, than we are inclined to recognise’ (Ingold 2022, 223).⁵

Home’s more-than-human dimensions include other multispecies entanglements with non-human co-dwellers: the welcome, the tolerated, the unnoticed and the intrusive. These beings dwell in liminal spaces – the walls, the ceilings, beneath the floorboards – as well as the air above, the soil below and everything in-between (Power 2009). They may not even come near the home but contribute to its atmosphere through other senses (Sou and Webber 2021).

The human home then is best conceived as an interface for multispecies life-worlds. These relations, however, do not only entail what Emma Power (2009, 50) describes as ‘the necessarily more-than-human character of home’. As emphasised earlier, it includes materials as well as the materiality of elements, including the materiality of the climate itself. All these multi-sensory relations – human, other-than-human beings, materials and elements – are generative for our senses of home. Their absence, then, might also be significant within the experience of home or home loss post-disaster, in the sense of why a home rebuilt or returned to may feel uncanny. Sou and Webber (2021) observe how such sensations can be produced when disasters disrupt the routinised smell, taste- and soundscapes that comprise home. Van Dooren (2020) speaks of ‘the presence of an absence, the silence of birds’ following the bushfires, highlighting how the sensory home can incorporate multispecies connection and conversely signal its loss. Celermajer (2021, 66) reflects that, when evacuating from a bushfire, ‘you cannot take the trees, the native animals, the grass, the soil, the river and the relationships that sustain us all’. Nor can these necessarily be rebuilt with the restored home. This recognises that there is more at-stake than human-centric conceptions of home; rather, a (not always harmonious) overlapping of multispecies and more-than-human relations can bear upon (even co-constitute) human senses of home and home loss, a consciousness of which might mark the ‘liberating potential’ (Young 2020, 134) for transformed homemaking in climate changed futures.

Conclusion

During the 2019–2020 bushfires in Australia, the human home – the material reordering of natural space that confirms humans (some more so than others) as separate from and above ‘nature’ – was turned inside-out. Bushfires are traumatic events, whose repercussions extend far beyond the material debris of individual houses left in their wake. Here we suggest that the embers of homes lost to bushfires might yet serve as kindling for reconceptualising both domus (home) and domicide (the destruction of home) as deeply entwined with the more-than-human. Although ‘natural disasters’ were originally excluded from the theoretical framework for understanding domicide, global warming and the increasing frequency of environmental hazards such as bushfires prompt a reassessment of how both ‘risk’ and its commonsense corollary ‘responsibility’ should be addressed, especially within the context of anthropogenic climate change and the spectre of climate catastrophe. It also necessitates questioning the very notion of ‘responsibility’, asking not only who is responsible but to whom and to what we are responsible.

The inquiry that was conducted in the aftermath of the bushfires calls for ‘a big cultural shift’ in where and how Australians live. In other words, it invites a reconceptualisation of the Australian ‘home’, extending from settlement patterns and building practices to dominant cultural imaginaries. The ‘pyromanic suburbanisation’ that Mike Davis (1998) has identified, is underpinned by an assemblage of powerful vested interests, real estate boosterism, environmental amnesia, planning ideals, land supply mechanisms, economic conceits, asset inequality, and dominant cultural narratives. It is this assemblage that continues to animate the Australian desire for ‘a home among the gum trees’, while simultaneously working to disavow the power structures and elite groups that maintain and benefit from it and instead reify the solitary individual responsible for arbitrary hazard reduction. Feminism’s unmasking of longstanding androcentric discourses about home reveals the dynamics of power and oppression they naturalise. As we have demonstrated here, the insights of feminism can, yet again, be usefully employed to deconstruct the anthropocentric basis of the human home and, in its place, position home as a place of multispecies connection. These insights can also provide much-needed responses to the various anthropocentric techno-fix scenarios that offer nothing more than an intensified restoration of the settler-colonial Australian Dream.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Anthropos meaning ‘human’ in ancient Greek (Franklin 2017, 54).

2 Importantly, as Vanessa Cavanagh (2020) notes, ‘Indigenous people have shared this story [of more-than-human kinship] for millennia.’ In grieving a grandmother tree that was part of her childhood home, a casualty of Black Summer, she explains that ‘she, like me, is part of human and non-human kinship networks that connect us to Country.’

3 In this article, the authors bring the concept of domicide into conversation with ‘natural disasters’ as socially constructed phenomena. They focus on how constructed marginalisation can be compounded through disasters and recovery efforts to produce what they call ‘queer domicide’.

4 ‘The Lion’s Share’ is an initiative endorsed by the UN whereby advertisers designate 0.5% of their overall media spend on a campaign featuring an animal for conservation purposes (NRMA Insurance 2019a). By partnering with Conservation Volunteers Australia, NRMA Insurance pledged to plant a new tree for every new home insurance policy purchased between the initial 2019–2020 campaign period (NRMA Insurance 2019a).

5 ‘Pets’, while non-human, are not strangers; we consciously and intentionally bring them in to become part of home. We can also extend this to forms of plant-life that we, again intentionally, bring into our domestic spaces and attend to for various meaningful reasons.