Fire Country

I read this for my Read Around the World Challenge as my Australian pick! Fire Country started off with a lot more memoir-ish writing, talking about how Steffensen got involved in learning fire management from Elders of the Awu-Laya people (the author himself is a descendant of the Tagalaka peoples).

A few chapters I skimmed because it was so dry and repetitive telling us in excruciating detail the different ecosystems and how to burn them (which I know is kind of the point of the book but the writing style made it tough to get through).

The writing style made this a very difficult book to read despite being so short in length. It was Repetitive, dry, and stilted. And by Repetitive I mean that he’s saying the same thing multiple times in a single paragraph, just slightly reworded each time but essentially each sentence has the same message/underlying meaning 🫣

It’s an important topic but the book probably could’ve covered the same amount of info in like 100 pages. Due to the writing style, it felt hard to absorb the information with all the repeated phrasing and felt very much like someone trying to reach the minimum word limit of an essay.

I’d say this is more for people who want an Introductory how-to guide and would be involved in doing the actual work more than a casual reader simply interested in the topic because of the amount of detailed info about how to know exactly when and where to burn. It’s not at all what I was expecting from this book and think it would’ve worked better as a documentary.