Firing the imagination? A visual analysis of bushfire preparedness videos from Australian fire agencies, 2015–2022

This study examines videos about bushfire preparedness published on YouTube by Australian state and territory fire services over the period 2015–2022. Through visual analysis, we investigate the explicit and implicit messages of videos by fire agencies about public bushfire risk in Australia.

Highlights:

• Public bushfire preparedness video campaigns predominantly portray bushfire risk as affecting middle-class families of European ancestry in low-density residential landscapes.
• Women are more often represented as caregivers and men as firefighters.
• Bushfire campaigns focused heavily on individual preparedness, centring responsibility within the private home rather than neighbourhood scale or collective preparedness.
• Overall, campaigns reflect colonial, national and neoliberal imaginaries, overlooking both actual diversity in Australian society and Indigenous perspectives for bushfire readiness.