Rhetoric, Culture, and Climate Wars: A Discursive Analysis of Australian Political Leaders’ Responses to the Black Summer Bushfire Crisis

Tensions in talking about disasters: Habitual versus climate-informed – The case of bushfire vocabulary in Australia

“…Other linguistic tactics to extreme weather and climate have been taken through approaches that fall under the moniker of ecolinguistics (e.g. Fill & Penz, 2018;Stibbe, 2015), Critical Discourse Analysis (Bromfield et al, 2021) and corpus-based discourse analysis (Baker, 2006;Bednarek et al, 2022;Partington et al, 2013), which have valuable contributions.…”

“…12 (2) "This is the black summer of 19/20," he told Parliament during his condolence motion. (Gailberger & Gredley, 2020) As identified by Bromfield et al (2021), in this speech he used traditional 'bush' tropes based on a rural, colonial ideal and sought to play down climate change as a factor in the fires. 13 The label is attributed to him in these articles, although obviously it had been circulating previously and fits the existing pattern.…”