Air

Rachel Mounsey Born 1975, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia Lives and works in Mallacoota, Victoria In the early hours of New Year’s Eve 2019, red skies enveloped the Victorian coastal town of Mallacoota. By the morning, thousands of residents and tourists sheltered on the shore, waiting to evacuate by sea — the only way out of the town hemmed in by raging fire. This would become one of the defining events of Australia’s catastrophic bushfire season from December 2019 to February 2020, now known as the nation’s ‘Black Summer’. The ferocious spread of these fires across the south-eastern seaboard saw the Australian landscape ignite like never before, with the flames eventually consuming more than 24 million hectares of forest. These fires are now confirmed to be an anomalous extreme weather event caused by global heating. 1 Mallacoota-based photojournalist Rachel Mounsey experienced the crisis firsthand. Her photographs document the town on that first morning, with its streets suddenly lit by an ominous red haze. Soon, the volume of smoke in the air blocked out the Sun, cloaking the town in total darkness by 9am, and making it incredibly difficult to breathe. This would be the first of two daytime ‘nightfalls’ experienced by the town in the week that followed. In one image, Mounsey captures the phenomenon with an incredibly soft focus, resulting in an almost abstract composition of horizontal bands of burgundy and umber. Here, we can just make out a young boy playing with his dog on the shore of Bastion Point. 1 Garry Cook and others, ‘Australia’s Black Summer of fire was not normal — and we can prove it’, The Conversation , 26 November 2021, <theconversation.com/australias- black-summer-of-fire-was-not- normal-and-we-can-prove- it-172506>, viewed May 2022. Rachel Mounsey / Mallacoota fires in the sky 3 (from ‘Mallacoota fires in the sky’ series) 2020 155 Invisible