Steve Womersley, A Black Summer (DOCO 2021)

The 2019/20 Black Summer bush fires spawned hundreds of images of fire fighters dwarfed by the scale and ferocity of the fires. But for many fire fighters, like myself, these images bore little resemblance to our experiences that summer. We attended to the smaller fires, or arrived on the scene after the main fire front had passed through. And for much of the time we were mere observers. We patrolled the fire edge, squinted through the smoke for breakaways and spot fires, blacked out, or back burned to draw in fires trickling through inaccessible high country. I’ve been a volunteer firefighter for over a decade. And I’ve never used so little water over the course of a summer. The scale of the fires was so great, only the seasonal change in weather would ultimately bring them under control. The damage to the environment was unlike anything I’ve seen before. Days would pass in the bush without hearing bird song or spotting so much as a wallaby. Yet the airwaves were alive with the chatter of conservative politicians and columnists repudiating human-induced climate change or suggesting it was not the right time to discuss it. Over the summer I turned out to several fires in Central Victoria and was deployed with strike teams to NSW and elsewhere in Victoria. I was there as a firefighter, not a photographer, but when the opportunity arose, I tried to capture an incredible fire season’s light and darker moments. They aren’t moments of high drama, but what Irving Penn would have called ‘the lulls, the lags, the quiet interims and backwaters.’

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.