Timothy Neale - How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent

Name: Timothy Neale - How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent
Start: 2026-09-01T18:00:00+10:00
End: 2026-09-01T18:00:00+10:00
Location: Upstairs at Gleebooks

About

6pm for 6.30pm Tuesday 1 September

Timothy Neale in conversation with Tess Lea

Join us for this launch of “How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent” (Duke University Press) by Timothy Neale. A critical and ethnographic exploration of wildfire management in Australia, one of Earth’s most fire-prone countries, the book critiques the colonial logics of control deployed to manage unruly environments and explores alternative forms of environmental stewardship.

Each year, Australia faces increasingly unprecedented wildfires, marked both by their scale and by the intense public disagreements about their political, cultural, and ecological causes. How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent is a critical and ethnographic exploration of wildfire management in Australia and the technoscientific systems of control that shape its current and future possibilities. Timothy Neale observes how two seemingly opposing forces—an entrenched sense of crisis and widespread normalization—combine to form an apparatus of institutional fire management that increasingly centers technical control and militarization.

While sympathetic to the double binds many fire management professionals find themselves in, Neale ties contemporary wildfire problems to ongoing colonization and Indigenous dispossession, exploring Indigenous-led land management and cultural burning as a practical assertion of sovereignty.

Through dialogue and collaboration with professional fire managers and Indigenous environmental stewards, Neale calls for a collective movement beyond control thinking by fostering new alliances and modes of coping with, rather than commanding, our flammable world.

Timothy Neale is a pakeha (settler) anthropologist from Aotearoa New Zealand living and working in Melbourne Naarm, Australia. He is the author of two books - Wild Articulations: Environmentalism and Indigeneity in Northern Australia (University of Hawaii Press, 2017) and How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent (Duke University Press, 2026) - and editor (with Courtney Addison and Thao Phan) of the book An Anthropogenic Table of Elements: Experiments in the Fundamental (University of Toronto Press, 2022). He is also an Editor of the journal Science, Technology, & Human Values.

Tess Lea is an anthropologist who is interested in organisational ethnography, the study of policy and bureaucracy, and Indigenous endurance under ongoing settler occupation. These concerns are angles to also understand conditions of the present and future challenges, such as global boiling. She is the author of several books including Wild Policy: Indigeneity and the Unruly Logics of Intervention (Stanford University Press, 2020) and Darwin (NewSouth, 2014/2020).