I've recently (well, not very recently) read a book and watched a movie that both came out of Canberra/Queanbeyan. Both feature bushfire as a striking backdrop to the trials and dramas of the main characters. The movie is Rhys Graham's Galore, which I saw in June. This beautifully paced and shot film perfectly captures the mostly trivial and sometimes shockingly serious experiences of adolescence, within Canberra's broad and mundane suburban fringe and bushy outskirts. The book is Omar Musa's debut novel, Here Come the Dogs, which features three main characters from the Town (Queanbeyan, I imagine), and is also partly set in the City (Canberra, I reckon). Solomon, Jimmy and Aleks are old friends (and two of them half-brothers), all on different paths and dealing with different personal demons.
I don't usually write much about books or movies, but the local scenery was totally captivating, and the preoccupation with bushfire, fascinating. Something has changed in the ten years I've been living in Canberra. The ash settled from the Canberra bush fires of 2003; a clearer sense of what Canberra is and a strong civic pride emerged; and we were left with a greater appreciation of the dangers as well as the beauty of the idyllic bush landscape that overlaps Canberra's boundaries. There is a greater sense now that bushfire is part of who we are. Part of living in this place. Galore's main character, Billie, says at the end of the movie that she wants to stare it (the fire) in the face, unblinking. That is what Rhys Graham and Omar Musa's works allow us to do- to see bushfire as part of our culture, now and in this place; to acknowledge its fearsome presence but also our ability to face it.
A transformative event over which we have little control, bushfire is a powerful companion to the great upheavals of life: turbulent teenage years in Galore; and the realisations of adulthood in Here Come the Dogs, reconciling who you have become with who you thought you would be. In both plots, the heat is palpable, but the danger doesn't seem real to the characters; they barely notice the fire until the final scenes when change is upon them. In Galore, Billie stares down the flames, defiant in the face of devastation, her life as she knew it gone but her best friend's words kindling her soul. In Here Come the Dogs, the south-east of Australia is ablaze, Jimmy is an inferno, Aleks is out the other side, and Solomon is the calm just after the storm, acknowledging and welcoming change in the ash floating down from the sky. Musa's description of the fires as the book almost reaches its end gives a magnificent context for its conclusion: "A cardiogram of the nation is written into the rumbling flames. From the Eyre Peninsula to Gippsland to the Blue Mountains, horizons shimmer and bend. The needle on the fire-danger sign points to catastrophic and code red. Life and Death are both staunch in their will to survive. The large and small clash against one another - wind, land, water, fire and man embroiled in a tussle with no resolution except that it must happen again." (p326)
Aside from the fascination that bushfire affords in these Canberra/Queanbeyan based works, they are stylistically beautiful and leave you with a deep understanding of the lives and experiences of their characters. While Here Come the Dogs drew me into lives that were not much like my own in many ways (and, hey, what is culture for?), Galore presented me with an experience that overlapped somewhat with my own. I hadn't moved to Canberra quite yet, but I was the same age at the same time as the kids in Galore. The main characters' style and music are very familiar (even if my own teenage experience encompassed a lot less trouble and freedom) and the gorgeous cinematography by Stefan Duscio made me fall in love with Canberra again, as I did when I moved here as an eighteen year old - the open space, the dry bush, the crisp light, the languor of summer, the concrete buildings and backstreets which look much as they did in the 1960s and 70s; hanging out in parks and on top of Mount Ainslie, and house parties in the sad outer suburbs, dawn's rolling fog and early orange sunlight on bare hills. One year after the fires, the landscape was still marred but slowly regenerating- which now seems like a nice metaphor for the next act, in my own post-high-school life and also the glowing sense of hope I felt for the characters at the end of both Galore and Here Come The Dogs.
You can watch the trailer for Galore here and it came out on DVD etc this week. And you can buy Here Come the Dogs at many book retailers.
