The aluminium tray of a ute ran in rivulets to the ground.’ Sunglasses melted. ‘Burning birds fell from trees, igniting the ground where they landed. ‘ Trees ignited from the ground up in one blast,’ Hooper writes. Not all are easily answered.įrom the opening pages of The Arsonist, the fire and its intense, incendiary power bursts onto the page: There’s a man who saw his beehives combust from the sheer heat. The result, her book The Arsonist, is an enthralling and deeply fascinating story about a huge tragedy that befell a small community, one that not only conveys the horror of a fire that cremated all before it, but asks questions about guilt, remorse and responsibility. Hooper had arrived in town shortly after the fire, the smell of burnt eucalypt still in the air, to begin her own investigation into the events that unfolded that scorching February day in 2009 and into the man accused of lighting the fire, regarded by some as one of Australia’s worst mass murderers. After a deadly fire roared through 26,000 hectares of plantation, state forest and private property in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley on Black Saturday, Chloe Hooper felt the way investigating scientists talked of it – ‘flank, head, back, tongue, tail’ – made the fire sound like a beast.
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