Golfball, Shadows and Dust.

In January 2020, I drove across southeastern Australia, recording the devastation of the Black Summer fires. When I arrived in Mallacoota about two weeks after the firestorm, I could still feel the weight of what had happened in the landscape around me.

Earlier that month, an out-of-control blaze (part of the Black Summer Megafire complex) forced around 4,000 people to seek refuge by the coastline, cut off from evacuation routes, and made them unable to escape. With Country Fire Authority members shielding them, residents listened to gas bottles exploding in the distance and sirens signalling them to enter the water as flames closed in onshore. By midday, the fire had reached the water’s edge, and homes were burning on the town’s outskirts, with flames towering as high as 20 meters.

Walking through the aftermath, I was struck by an eerie scene on the town’s golf course—hundreds of burnt golf balls scattered under the remains of shrubs that had become ash. This unsettling image of familiar objects reduced to embers captured how the fire had violated boundaries we often take for granted as safe and secure. The blackened golf balls were a stark reminder of how deeply fire had crossed into human spaces.

The scene held an unmistakable tension between human habitation and the raw force of nature— A.M.

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Available as 210cm x 297mm & 100cm x 120cm Prints

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All images © Alan McFetridge