Flames Study Guide

Robbie Arnott was born in northern Tasmania in 1989. After graduating from college, he studied advertising in Melbourne, on Australia’s mainland, before taking up a job offer at a small advertising firm in Tasmania’s capital city of Hobart. His first novel, Flames, was published in 2018 and won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award and a Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Award. After Flames, Arnott published two other novels: The Rain Heron and Limberlost. His work takes much of its inspiration from the natural Tasmanian landscape, particularly its coasts and rivers.

Before the British colonization of Tasmania in the early 1800s, Aboriginal nations made up the island’s entire human population. Within the first few decades after the British settlers arrived, the Aboriginal Tasmanian population, which numbered in the thousands, was reduced to 47 through a combination of violence, introduced illnesses, and social policy. This decimation of the indigenous people, which many historians consider to be an act of genocide, features in the novel’s account of the fire spirit’s origins. Meanwhile, Flames’s Esk God’s observations about the disappearance of other gods—who each represent a different element of nature—align with the fact that many of Tasmania’s native and endemic species, including the Tasmanian devil, the bronze whaler shark, and the Huon pine, are endangered, with some on the brink of extinction.

Limberlost, Arnott’s third novel, deals with some of the same themes that Flames does, particularly familial grief and the interaction between humans and the natural world. Other novels that share Flames’s rural setting and magical realist style include Erin Hortle’s The Octopus and I, which explores a woman’s fascination with octopuses on the Tasmanian coast, and Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, in which a man sent to an Australian penal colony the 19th century is ordered to paint the local fish. Arnott’s work has often been categorized as “eco fiction,” a genre that includes Richard Powers’ The Overstory. Like Flames, The Overstory focuses on the perspectives of non-human natural organisms to emphasize humanity’s destructive tendencies.