![]() ![]() ‘Black Saturday was such an extreme day…it’s left a national scar in our cultural imagination,’ Hooper says, when I ask her why she was drawn to write a book about these events. The Arsonist is the story of the man, the community he came from, the fire he lit and the people who were killed. ![]() In 2012, he was found guilty of 10 counts of arson causing death in the Victorian Supreme Court. Near the small Gippsland town of Churchill, a man named Brendan Sokaluk deliberately lit two fires, then sat on the roof of his house and watched the flames. The Black Saturday bushfires that swept across Victoria on 7 February 2009 were the worst ever recorded in Australia, with 180 fatalities and 414 people injured as a result of the nearly 400 individual fires recorded. The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire (Hamish Hamilton) is Hooper’s first non-fiction book since then (she published a novel, The Engagement in 2012) and displays all the sensitivity, nuance and lyricism that readers found in The Tall Man. It was a compelling and confronting book about the worst of colonial Australia: police brutality, racial and judicial injustice, dispossession and the enduring trauma of colonialism. When Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man was published in 2008 it became an instant Australian classic. Image: Penguin Random House (digitally altered) ![]()
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