4 Melancholy and the continent of fire Tom Bristow and Andrea Witcomb We live in the most fire prone landscape on Earth.Victoria has been shaped by fire over millennia. It is a natural and essential part of Australia’s ecosystem and eucalypt landscape. As climate is becoming more variable and more people are living closer to bushland, fire will continue to impact our lives. Department of Sustainability and Environment Forest Gallery, Melbourne The anonymous words that we have chosen for our epigraph invoke climate change in a gallery largely aimed at recreating the experience of human immersion within a vast living ecosystem. Their impersonality mirrors the elusive emotions of this gallery that we examine in this chapter. The tension between the scale and pace of evolutionary agency and the practices of human culture over time, are both named in this statement despite its flat affect. The words are located on the first informa- tion panel that visitors read as they access ‘The Clearing’, the memorial space at the end of the multi-layered Forest Gallery in the Museum of Melbourne,Victoria, Australia. The gallery is housed in an open-air, mesh enclosed area: 1,485 square metres, 27m wide and 55m long; the roof is 15m high at the lowest point and 35m high at the highest. This space is divided into three distinct zones: the subter- ranean entrance is dominated by a river and its amphibious life; the forest proper, of over-towering mountain ash, follows; then ‘The Clearing’ – perhaps inviting a Heideggerean rereading of the other two zones, as visitors exit, walking back down the hill through the forest and the river. Visitors read this first information panel as they cross a threshold taking them out of an experience of seven indigenous seasons (indexed as ‘climate’ by the signage), stepping over a warning sign on the ground – a metal plate embossed with the words ‘climate’ and ‘fire’ – into an alluring and melancholic space that is a testament to fire. Here, a conflation of time and space that conjoins references to climate change and landscape clearing, the physiological ecology of forest production, fire ecology and succession. When visitors walk towards the edge of the forest, the gallery appears to be an organism shaped by environmental forces driven by human hands; an emergent museal amalgam of life forms and historical memory compresses relations between indigenous knowledge, settler A_Cultural_History_of_Climate_Change_Ch04_3pp.indd 72 04/03/16 9:58 PM