The 2019-2020 Black Summer

Chapter 1: A nation in flames

The summer of 2019-2020 was one of Australia's darkest chapters in its history. What began as isolated bushfires in September 2019 escalated into an unprecedented catastrophe that consumed the nation for months.

New South Wales bore the brunt: 5.7 million hectares burned. More than all other states combined.

But fire area alone doesn't tell the complete story. The true devastation lies in what burned. In NSW, Victoria, Queensland, and the ACT, over 90% of the burned area was forested, including ancient forests and critical wildlife habitat.

South Australia and Western Australia had lower forest proportions, as their fires burned through arid landscapes and scrubland.

New South Wales lost over 5 million hectares of native forest, nearly four times Victoria's loss and ten times Western Australia's. Ancient forests reduced to ash. National parks obliterated. Cities choked by smoke.

The pattern is clear: the fires hit hardest where forests were densest. The eastern states experienced the worst ecological destruction.

Not just land burned. Entire ecosystems vanished.

Chapter 2: A Perfect Storm Six Years in the Making

To understand what happened in 2019-2020, we need to look back. Not just months, but years.

Temperature climbed steadily from 2017. Rainfall dropped below average for years. Wind speed intensified during fire months. Solar radiation remained high, baking moisture from vegetation.

Not all regions experienced the same extremes. New South Wales faced the worst combination: by late 2019, extreme heat, high solar radiation, strong winds, and severe drought all peaked simultaneously. Other states experienced some of these conditions, but NSW experienced all four at once. This explains why a single state accounted for more than half of all burned area.

Chapter 3: The Vicious Cycle

The fires released something else into the atmosphere besides smoke and ash.

In just a few months, the Black Summer bushfires released over 634 million tonnes of CO₂. The air became toxic. Glaciers in New Zealand turned brown from Australian ash.

But here's the troubling part: climate change fuels bushfires, and bushfires fuel climate change. Rising temperatures create extreme fire conditions. Those fires release massive amounts of carbon. That carbon drives temperatures even higher.

It's a feedback loop, intensifying with each turn.

Ending: The Question

Australia has always had bushfires. But 2019-2020 was different: the scale, intensity, and duration exceeded anything in living memory.

The next Black Summer isn't a question of if.

It's a question of when.

Metadata & Notes

Acknowledgement of AI

ChatGPT 5 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 were used in the preparation of this visualisation to assist with debugging and refining Vega/Vega-Lite code, explaining and identifying Vega/Vega-Lite functions and syntax, enhancing clarity, correcting grammar, and improving stylistic expression. All substantive work, including data collection, data wrangling, and chart creation, was conducted independently by the author.

Acknowledgement of Frameworks and Resources

This website uses a modified version of Tufte CSS, originally created by Dave Liepmann and contributors, under the MIT License.

Author

Hieu Trinh

Published Date

21st Oct 2025