Reading the real thing: Flame Tip, by Karenlee Thompson

It’s only three weeks since I posted about my reading of Karenlee Thompson’s new book, Flame Tip, a collection of short fictions loosely themed around the catastrophic Black Tuesday Bushfires in Tasmania in 1967.  The 50th anniversary of those fires was February 7th 2017 but already this fire season has claimed its victims, making me wonder why more Australian authors haven’t tackled this theme.  Fellow Tasmanian Amanda Lohrey did, in her novella Vertigo (see my review), Roger McDonald wrote about a young arsonist in The Slap (see my review) and Delys Bird edited a collection called Fire (see Karenlee’s guest review).  But for a natural disaster which looms so large in our national consciousness, it’s strange that I don’t know of any others except a brilliant children’s story called Ash Road by Ivan Southall.

Anyway…

In my previous post about this book, I explained that I’d only read four…