ABSTRACT

In Australia, a country ravaged by bushfire, stories of widespread destruction are shared every summer. The 2019–2020 bushfire season in Australia, for example, received global news coverage with heartbreaking stories of lives lost, heroic firefighters killed on duty, over a thousand homes and businesses destroyed, and millions of native animals and their habitats wiped out. In this paper we present a case study of one of Australia’s past catastrophic bushfire events, the Canberra Firestorm of 2003, in which four people lost their lives, nearly 500 families lost their homes, and Australian infrastructure and historic sites, like the Mount Stromlo observatory, were damaged or destroyed. This paper examines how the bushfire survivors drew upon embodied memories and sensory metaphors to make sense of and narrate their experiences, providing vivid imagery that reflected the multiple sensory inputs people saw, felt, heard, and smelled during the firestorm. We argue that oral history is an essential methodology to explore how sensemaking theory can be used in studies of traumatic experiences.

摘要

在澳大利亚，这个森林大火肆虐，每年夏天都会分享大面积破坏的故事。例如，在澳大利亚的2019–2020年丛林大火季节，全球新闻报道了令人心碎的丧命故事，英勇的消防员在值班时丧生，超过一千所房屋和企业被毁，以及数以百万计的本土动物及其栖息地被摧毁。在本文中，我们以澳大利亚过去发生的一场灾难性大火事件为例，即2003年的堪培拉大风暴，其中有4人丧生，近500个家庭失去了家园，以及澳大利亚的基础设施和历史遗迹，例如斯特罗姆洛山天文台，已损坏或毁坏。本文研究了丛林大火幸存者如何利用内在的记忆和感官隐喻来理解和叙述他们的经历，提供生动的图像，以反映人们在飓风期间看到，感觉，听到和闻到的多种感觉输入。我们认为口述历史是探索如何在创伤经历研究中运用感官理论的重要方法。