Works from Rachel Mounsey’s ‘Mallacoota fires in the sky’ series, installed at GOMA for ‘Air’, November 2022 / Photograph: C Callistemon, QAGOMA

These confronting scenes 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 fires enveloped the town in the early hours of New Year’s Eve 2019. By the morning, thousands of residents and tourists had taken shelter on the shore, waiting to evacuate by sea. 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. The super-fires are widely considered to be part of increasing extreme weather events caused by global heating.

Mounsey’s dramatic images of her own community were widely circulated as photojournalism at the time. As an artist, she also recorded more quietly surreal moments; for example, where a young boy plays with his dog on the shore of Bastion Point, amid the ash-thickened air.