Fires dramatised the 2019 bushfires before the country had finished processing them

There is a thing that happens in Australia after a disaster. The immediate response is coverage, wall to wall, for as long as the event demands. Then the coverage recedes and what replaces it is a kind of agreed-upon silence, not enforced but understood, where the country moves on to the next thing and the people who were affected continue being affected without an audience. Then, at some undefined later point, someone makes a drama about it. The drama is reviewed. People say “too soon” or “not soon enough” or “is this the right way to tell this story.” The people who were affected watch or do not watch. The country processes a thing it had already stopped thinking about.

Fires arrived in that cycle faster than usual. The ABC miniseries premiered in September 2021, less than two years after the Black Summer bushfire season that burned through more than 46 million acres, killed 34 people directly, destroyed over 3,000 homes, and produced a smoke haze that blanketed Sydney for weeks. I remember that smoke. Everyone who lived on the east coast remembers that smoke. You could taste it in your kitchen with the windows closed. The sky was the colour of something that skies should not be.

The speed of the production is worth noting because it shapes everything about the show. Fires does not have the benefit of distance. It cannot stand back and frame the disaster within a larger historical narrative, the way a drama about the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires might. It is working within the raw material of recent memory, and the audience it is speaking to is an audience that was there, that breathed the air, that watched the sky turn orange on their drive home from work.

The structure

The show is an anthology, six episodes, each following a different set of characters affected by the fires. There are volunteer firefighters. There are families evacuating. There is a wildlife carer trying to save animals while the world around her burns. There is a federal politician (and if you cannot guess which real-world figure this character is modelled on, you were not paying attention in January 2020). The stories are loosely connected but mostly standalone, each one a self-contained examination of what the fires did to specific people in specific places.

This structure is smart, and it is also limiting. The anthology format means Fires can cover breadth, can show the disaster from multiple angles, can demonstrate that the fires touched every kind of Australian life. But it also means the show cannot go deep. You get fifty minutes with each set of characters, which is enough to establish their situation and follow them through a crisis but not enough to fully inhabit their lives before or after. The emotional impact is cumulative rather than immersive. By the final episode, the weight of all those stories presses down, but individually, some of them feel like sketches for a longer work.

The comparison I keep making (and look, this comparison is not perfect, but stay with me) is to The Slap, the 2011 ABC series based on Christos Tsiolkas’s novel. The Slap also used an anthology structure to refract a single event through multiple perspectives. But The Slap had a source novel to draw from, had years of development, and was dealing with a domestic incident rather than a national catastrophe. Fires is attempting something structurally similar with material that is orders of magnitude larger and more painful.

What it gets right

The best episodes are the ones that trust the small details. A volunteer firie arguing with his wife about whether he should go out again. A family in a car, on a road that may or may not be open, listening to the ABC radio broadcast for information that may or may not be current. The wildlife carer wrapping a koala in a towel. These moments are specific and true and they carry more weight than any wide shot of burning hillside, because they are the parts of the disaster that official narratives tend to compress or skip.

The performances are uniformly strong. The cast includes Sam Worthington (against type, playing a local volunteer rather than a Hollywood hero), Eliza Scanlen, Sullivan Stapleton, Miranda Otto, and Hunter Page-Lochard, among others. Nobody grandstands. The acting is pitched at the same register as the show itself: grounded, restrained, occasionally allowing a flash of something raw before pulling back. Scanlen, in particular, is remarkable in her episode, doing more with silence than most performers manage with a monologue.

The show is also honest about the politics without being polemical. The episode featuring the politician character does not name names, but it does not need to. The image of a prime minister figure attempting to shake hands with a fire victim who does not want to shake hands is drawn directly from footage that most Australians have already seen. Fires replays it not as satire but as documentary, which is more devastating.

The question of timing

So was it too soon? I do not think so, though I understand why some people felt that way. The argument for waiting is that distance allows perspective, allows the artists to understand the full shape of what happened, allows the audience to be ready for dramatisation rather than re-traumatisation. This is a reasonable argument. It is also, in the Australian context, a convenient one, because the agreed-upon silence I mentioned earlier tends to extend indefinitely if nobody interrupts it. The fires burn. The coverage fades. The government promises reviews. The reviews are published and not acted on. Another fire season comes. The cycle continues.

Fires interrupts the cycle by dramatising the experience while it is still uncomfortable, while the insurance claims are still being processed, while the rebuilding is still underway. The ABC was the only broadcaster that would have attempted this, not because commercial networks lack the talent, but because the ABC is the only Australian network that can justify making a show whose primary purpose is civic rather than commercial. The show exists to make people remember what they were already starting to forget, and that is a public-service function regardless of whether the ratings justify it.

Whether it was enough

The honest answer is no. Not because the show fails, but because no single six-episode miniseries can contain what the Black Summer fires were. The ecological devastation alone, three billion animals affected, whole species pushed closer to extinction, would require its own series. The long-term mental health impacts on firefighters and survivors are still unfolding. The policy failures that made the fires worse are still being debated, or more accurately, still being ignored. Fires captures a fraction of the experience with skill and sensitivity, and a fraction is all it was ever going to capture.

But a fraction matters. It matters that someone made this, and made it quickly, and put it on the national broadcaster where anyone could watch it for free. It matters that the stories are specific rather than generic, that the characters feel like people rather than representatives. It matters that the show does not editorialise, does not tell you who to blame, does not wrap the disaster in a redemptive narrative where the community comes together and everything is okay. Things are not okay. The show knows this. The country, when it is willing to look, knows this too.

Honestly, the bravest thing about Fires is not that it was made too soon. It is that it was made at all.