Charles Harpur’s ‘The Bushfire’ (1851) is one of the earliest literary representations of bushfire in settler Australian writing, appearing just months after the devastating Black Thursday fires. The poem conveys the scale and terror of a crown fire through an extended oceanic metaphor, transforming flames into surging waves and the firefront’s advance into a rolling tide. This imagery serves both an aesthetic and conceptual function, rendering an unfamiliar and chaotic natural disaster into a recognisable yet equally fearsome form. However, it also reflects a broader tendency in Australian literary studies to centre settler anxiety as the dominant framework for interpreting environmental catastrophe, thereby reinscribing colonial narratives of vulnerability and estrangement from the land.
This paper critically examines Harpur’s representation of bushfire alongside AI-generated visualisations using CLIP-driven BigGAN, revealing how both literary and computational representations reinforce inherited conceptual tropes. The AI’s oceanic depictions of flames closely mirror Harpur’s metaphoric framing, demonstrating how technological mediation, like literary scholarship, reproduces rather than challenges settler-colonial conceptions of environmental crisis.
By integrating literary analysis with a critical interrogation of AI-generated imagery, this paper argues for a more historically situated and critically engaged approach to literary history. This dual examination highlights the limitations of both literary and technological frameworks in shaping how fire is represented and understood in Australian cultural history.
Fiannuala Morgan is a Lecturer in Publishing and Communications in the School of Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne. Her research explores the possibilities that artificial intelligence yields for the analysis of digitalised cultural collections with a particular interest in the Australian colonial press. She is the developer of ‘Historical Fires Near Me’, an online application that reveals the fire history of the Australian continent, derived from digitised newspaper records. She is the author of Aboriginal Writers and Popular Fiction (CUP, 2021), and the editor of the anthology Black Thursday and Other Lost Australian Bushfire Stories (Orbiter, 2021).