This talk looks at how we confront fire today, how people confronted it in 1788, and what we might learn from the contrast.

Bill Gammage, AM, is Adjunct Professor and Senior Research Fellow in the HRC, mainly researching 1788 land management. He is the author of The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War (1974), The Story of Gallipoli (with David Williamson, 1981), Crown or Country: The Traditions of Australian Republicanism (with David Headon and James Warden, 1994) and is perhaps best known for his Prime Minister's Award-winning The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia  (2011). His latest work (September 2020) is as co-editor and co-writer of Dunera Lives: profiles of people transported to Australia on the  Dunera or the Queen Mary and interned during World War 2 .