Today, in the quiet streets of Churchill, there’s an abandoned brown brick house. On a hot day it looks unnaturally small, sun-blasted, like it’s shrivelled in the heat. On either side, the neighbours still keep neat lawns, and hedges sheared into meticulous globes, but in the front garden of this place, behind a falling-down fence, there are only weeds. Some have seeded in the guttering and between the roof tiles. From the street, it’s a few steps to the backyard, which has the brick remains of an incinerator, and a graffitied shed once used to store junk. The curtains in all the windows are drawn and signs have been pasted to the glass: PLEASE NOTE THAT ASSET CONFISCATION OPERATIONS IS IN POSSESSION OF THIS PROPERTY PURSUANT TO THE CONFISCATION ACT 1997. Those signs are faded now. The agents of asset confiscation surely found little worth seizing. The property remains vacant.

I stand for a moment, taking it in.

It is nearly a decade after Black Saturday, and I have recently written a four-sentence letter to the house’s former owner: Dear Brendan, my name is Chloe Hooper. As you may know from talking to your lawyers, I am writing a book about the 2009 Churchill fires. If you are willing, I would like to visit you. Please let me know if I can.

Brendan had left the Supreme Court after his guilty verdict and returned to the maximum-security prison unit with the garden program for intellectually disabled prisoners. He received a sentence of seventeen years and nine months, the judge taking into account his ‘impaired mental functioning’ and noting he had already served nearly three years before the trial.

Many of the victims’ families were distressed at what they perceived as extreme lenience. The sentence was appealed as ‘manifestly inadequate’ by the Office of Public Prosecutions, but upheld. There was no dedicated program tailored to arsonists in Australian prisons, although Jane Dixon, betraying no sense of irony, revealed at the appeal hearing that her client was fulfilling a long-held ambition to undertake a horticulture course.

After five and a half years Brendan was moved to a medium-security jail with another large intellectually disabled population. This is where I sent my letter. Having spoken with the detectives and his lawyers, the latter with Brendan’s and his family’s permission, it seemed fair to give him the opportunity to have his say. Although ‘his say’, I knew, would be a fraught and partial thing.

I first visited Churchill a few days after Brendan was arrested. I don’t know what I expected to see, but the Black Saturday fires had burned into my mind, and a mind that might have lit one of them seemed beyond comprehension. Blackened hills ringed the township, which, even though untouched, looked flat, luckless, in its own fever. In a crescent of near-identical houses, a group of boys rode in circles, standing wolfish on their BMX bikes, knowing something was happening, finally, in this place. They stared at the stranger who’d turned up to stare at them. At the shopping centre, too, the locals found it easy to pick the outsiders come to gawk. And there were a lot of us: the whole state was in a furore, and Churchill also heaved with emergency service workers and police.

Roads were still closed off, with barricades in every direction. I turned down one bush-lined dirt track then another. Now I didn’t know where I was driving. There were no views of fire damage here. The only wrong notes were the brown paddocks, and ribbon bark peeling off the parched gums. This dryness, and the sense in the town of claustrophobia and agoraphobia commingling, already made the blaze seem less mysterious.

Soon, though, I realised that a station wagon was following close behind me. The driver didn’t want to pass. She seemed to be a local-turned-security agent, sickened by a sightseer. She tailgated, as if I might be planning to get out and light a copycat fire myself. After a while I did a U-turn and drove back to the city.

Now, as I stand looking at Brendan’s old house, I’ve nearly finished writing this book, which came in fits and starts, after persuading people to speak, and learning of material that was hard to access, then too hard to deal with. I have spent years trying to understand this man and what he did, my own motivation sometimes as indecipherable as his. And, I wondered, what if, having asked the police and lawyers dozens of questions, then more questions, trying to get tiny details right, I essentially ended up with little more than a series of impressions? Would the result be ultimately a fiction?

Maybe, that morning, Brendan woke up inside this house and before long a dark idea took root. And maybe, by the middle of the scorching day, as he stood watching a fire truck arriving to extinguish a grassfire (the blaring siren, the flashing lights, the uniformed volunteers – a scene from the children’s shows he adored, a tableau of power, adrenaline, control) the idea had grown. If he set a fire near this place where he felt inept and invisible, he could bravely fight it, or warn others they were in danger. He could punish all those bad people who thought he was an idiot and be their saviour . . .

And there I’d go, imagining there was a reason for an act that’s senseless.

For a few weeks after sending my letter to Brendan, I checked my post office box every day in case he’d replied. Nothing. Eventually, someone who was in contact with him gave me an explanation. Brendan, who now spent his prison days making flat-pack furniture, had had trouble understanding what I’d written. He’d shown the letter to his supervisor, who told him not to write back. Even if he wished to talk, the prison would not allow it. Brendan was no longer represented by Legal Aid, but the lawyer assigned to deal with me there said she would never advise him to speak, in part due to the anxiety it could cause him. His parents apparently also wanted their son to keep his head down in jail and stay out of trouble.

I was disappointed and relieved.

If I had been granted official permission and ushered inside the prison to talk to Brendan, how close could any conversation have come to answering this book’s central question? And even if it could be answered, would understanding why Brendan lit a fire make the next deliberate inferno any more explicable? Or preventable? I now know there isn’t a standardised Arsonist. There isn’t a distinct part of the brain marked by a flame. There is only the person who feels spiteful, or lonely, or anxious, or enraged, or bored, or humiliated: all the things that can set a mind – any mind – on fire.

But from another point of view, Brendan, with his morphing qualities of innocence and guile, is archetypal. A figure from stories long, long ago. The Greek god of fire and metalworking, Hephaestus, often represented as deformed, was given the epithets, Kullopodíōn, ‘the halting’; Polúmētis, ‘shrewd and crafty’; and Amphigúeis, ‘the lame one’. Every culture has a tale about a human or an animal stealing fire, for better or for worse. In some traditions, this figure is a trickster spirit, like fire itself, a mischievous, self-absorbed, shapeshifting force both cunning and foolish, bewildered and bewildering.

In Australian Aboriginal mythology, the fire thief is often a bird. And in the Northern Territory’s tropical savannahs, the ‘fire hawks’ – the brown falcon, and black and whistling kites – really have been seen carrying smouldering sticks in their beaks or talons to reignite and extend a fire if it’s petering out. They hunt on the blaze’s flanks, ready to capture small fleeing creatures. So even the birds here are fire-setters.

The point, in these mythological tales, is that fire is a magical, threatening, separate presence searching for ways to become real. The fire-lighter himself is almost irrelevant, a mere tool the element uses in what can today be understood as an ancient but intensifying pattern.

Now, year-round, at the strangest times and in the strangest places, we have a cache of tales about fire’s power. As climate change extends the wildfire seasons in both hemispheres, ‘megafires’, blazes that burn more intensely and for longer, are occurring around the globe, and increasingly in places that rarely if ever usually burned, such as areas of the boreal zone. In July 2017, a fire in Greenland, suspected to be man-made, raged for weeks in a melted peat bog only sixty-five kilometres from the ice sheet. Europe had just had the worst fire season in memory, and by the year’s end, hundreds of fires had also broken out across northern then southern California, even burning deep into Los Angeles.

In his essay ‘The Fire Age’, the ecologist and master chronicler of flame Stephen Pyne writes: ‘Our pact with fire made us what we are.’ It cooked our food and changed our physiology; we gathered around it for warmth and communion, we formed larger communities. We used fire to hunt, to manage the landscape, to practise agriculture. ‘We hold fire as a species monopoly . . . It’s our ecological signature,’ claims Pyne, who continues: ‘If people wanted more firepower – and it seems that most of us always do – we would have to find another source of fuel. We found it by reaching into the deep past and exhuming lithic landscapes, the fossil fallow of an industrial society.’

We started burning coal. A ‘pyric transition’, Pyne calls it, ‘as disruptive as the coming of the aboriginal firestick . . . but it was more massive, much faster, and far more damaging’:

The new energy is rewiring the ecological circuitry of the Earth. It has scrambled ecosystems and is replacing biodiversity with a pyrodiversity – a bestiary of machines run directly or indirectly from industrial combustion. The velocity and volume of change is so great that observers have begun to speak of a new geological epoch, a successor to the Pleistocene, that they call the Anthropocene. It might equally be called the Pyrocene. The Earth is shedding its cycle of ice ages for a fire age.

Standing on Sheoke Grove, it’s hot for an October day, and it’s a weird heat. The sun often feels different now. It has a sharper bite. The concrete driveway here is cracked, the whole place scoured, really, by ultraviolet. I get back in my car.

At the top of the street, the tips of Hazelwood’s chimneystacks visible, I turn into Acacia Way and then Monash Way. I pass the petrol station where Brendan Sokaluk bought a pack of cigarettes before setting the fire.

‘Do you know how you light a fire and get away, you know, get right away?’ he asked a neighbour in the days before his arrest.

She didn’t want to know, she later told police.

He told her anyway: you put a cigarette near the fuel you want to light and escape while it’s burning down to it, like a fuse.

The petrol station is shuttered now, abandoned like the brown brick house.

I drive past Eel Hole Creek, not much of a creek if it’s still there at all, then I come to eucalypts in straight lines, the monoculture of a plantation interrupted by transmission towers and powerlines, and shortly I pass a stretch of road that always brings to mind science fiction, the dystopic kind set in the concrete and rust of a post-industrial world. Behind barbed-wire fencing, various elements of power infrastructure make a tangled fortress of steel and wires, transformers and insulators, chimneys and pylons. It’s a kind of grandly engineered scrapyard now. In a line are the remnants of the Morwell power station, the briquette factory, the char plant. All this industry has shut down in the past few years, one closure precipitating the next.

Further along the road is the Morwell timber mill. The gates here are also bound in chains and giant padlocks. It, too, closed a couple of months earlier. After Black Saturday, and a second bushfire five years later, the plantation ran out of wood.

I veer onto Miners Way to get on the M1 back to Melbourne, and pass various Hazelwood buildings on the outskirts of the mine.

At one stage while I was researching this book, a local woman kindly took me for a drive and we stopped on the hillside overlooking the Valley. In the midst of the rolling green pastures were the power stations with their billowing towers, emitting pollution that would be illegal in China, the United States and Europe. My guide believed that God would not have created coal if He hadn’t wanted us to use it. At night, when Hazelwood was all lit up, reflected in the pondage of coolant water, it looked to her like an old paddle-steamer, oddly beautiful, even romantic.

But now this power station is closed too. More structures have been locked up, more jobs lost. This is the biggest change to hit the area during the time Brendan Sokaluk has been in jail. In early 2017, Hazelwood was unceremoniously decommissioned, regarded as an economic liability by the multinational that owned it. It’s a shock to see how suddenly a building becomes a ruin. To my eye, the vast chimneystacks are reminiscent of a brutalist monument. These concrete towers have a kind of ugly grandeur and still rule the landscape as completely as they did in their heyday.

Stephen Pyne’s larger point is that we have too much of the wrong kind of fire – these coal-powered flames ‘stuffed’ into our machines, rather than the burning regimes of Aborigines, who controlled the environment with low-intensity, mosaic blazes. This intricate knowledge that once maintained the great southern forests is now largely lost. Instead we have feral wildfires: untameable, predatory, beastly. And we have people – sometimes raised in the social toxicity common around resource-extraction sites – who can, at a whim, bring these brutes to life.

In February 2014, five years after Black Saturday, a series of suspicious fires joined together and swept into the Hazelwood coalmine. The powerline to the water pumps soon burnt and mine workers had no firefighting capacity. The fire blazed out of control in the mine for a month, spreading poisonous smoke over the adjacent town of Morwell. Locals watched a blue haze roll down their streets and were told there were no health ramifications, even as particulate matter fluttered outside their windows. There was a spike in the area’s death rate.

A government inquiry found the mine’s safety standards grossly lax, leading to its current majority owner, the French energy company Engie, announcing in 2016 that they would close the power station down. The 400 million dollars required to bring it up to legal safety requirements, they claimed, made continuing to operate economically impossible. Engie estimated the cost of rehabilitating the decommissioned site at 743 million dollars: 304 million to demolish the power plant and regenerate the immediate surrounding area; 439 million to turn the mine into a massive lake, requiring more water than Sydney Harbour, with birdwatching areas, picnic facilities and walking tracks – an eerie, post-industrial version of the prehistoric swamp that started all this.

In the afternoon light, the vast inside of the mine looks golden brown. It’s a pit seven and a half kilometres long, three to four kilometres wide, and roughly 150 metres deep. The sprinkler system is in operation; hundreds of arcs of water keep the coal from drying and spontaneously combusting on this hot day.

Even before the mine closed, it gave a strange sense of stasis. At least, that was the fleeting impression I would get driving by. Some button had stuck. A view of dredgers and tip trucks was on a constant loop. Nothing seemed to change, although the gouge in the ground revealed everything that had changed – the stratification of uncountable years. Apparently, complete fossilised tree trunks are sometimes visible within the coal. Thirty-million-year-old myrtle beech, trees from the lush Gondwanan forest predating the reign of the eucalypts. Here, the deep past feels eerily close, and if giant excavators can peel away geological time, unearthing in one movement prehistoric sediment, why can’t we scratch out and reconstitute the matter of a decade? A life’s most painful moments often still feel so recent you could almost reach back and undo them.

Along the road, pylons stretch out ahead, their sea of wires spreading from the Valley across the state in wavelike symmetry. On Black Saturday the majority of people died in fires caused by failures in a privatised electricity grid with inadequate safety standards and regulatory checks. Still, aging electrical infrastructure can be replaced, and monitoring these can be better regulated. In twenty or thirty years, will this even be the way electricity is delivered? These may be the feral fires we can most easily prevent.

But in places around the world with high rates of deliberately lit blazes, even if community programs are introduced to teach children fire safety and encourage locals to be vigilant, even if roads are closed and drones are used to watch for suspicious activity, even if convicted arsonists wear GPS tracking devices that bleat when they’re close to national parks, fire-setting can’t be stopped entirely. On hot days, police can’t monitor everyone with rage inside them like a striking stone. And so, in the end, the small world of someone like Brendan is not as unconnected to our own as it might seem – and we ignore this at our peril.

If arson is an expression of a particular psychology, there will always be arsonists. And as we head towards ever warmer summers in a changing climate, there will be ever more opportunities for those drawn to lighting fires. It is increasingly fertile ground for the venting of discontent . . . Behold Brendan’s inferno – his light show and proxy, all-powerful, all-destroying – converting the wounds he carried into pure pain for everyone around him. Revenge as elemental to the flames as oxygen.

I keep driving, the eucalypts on either side of the road flexing their loping limbs and biding their time.

At a small town, I make a turn. Here, there are vestiges of old Gippsland: a bakery selling neenish tarts and other bygone delicacies, a bric-a-brac and a lolly store, aging weatherboard cottages with blossom branches spilling over paling fences, a pretty church with a flagpole.

Outside the church stands a woman. She’s turning a skipping rope that’s tied to the pole. Lanky primary school students jump and recite the alphabet, to the thwack of the rope against the concrete. Round and round her strong arm rises, lifting the rope high enough to clear the children. Shirley Gibson, a petite eighty-year-old with short hair dyed a vivid burgundy, is a volunteer in an after-school program.

There are a variety of reasons why our relationship could be awkward – I’m writing, after all, about the fire that killed two of her sons – but it has not been. Shirley, an ex-English teacher now organises me into activities in the same enfolding manner she employs with the children. She encourages me to eat fruit, play board games, listen to performances of the songs she’s taught on an electronic keyboard. Then, when ‘her’ kids have been collected, she washes up their milk-stained plastic cups and heads to her car. I follow her in mine a short distance, to a cream-brick house.

Shirley bought it from a pastor, and he must have told the townspeople her situation, because she never did and yet from the beginning the community were incredibly kind to her. A woman she’d never met, and didn’t see again, turned up at the house with an enormous basket full of simple things: a hammer, pegs, even nail polish and lipstick. One of the reasons Shirley does so much volunteer work is to repay all she feels she’s been given, the kindness that was so diffuse. ‘Who do you go to to say thank you?’ she sometimes asks.

The door is unlocked and she ushers me inside.

Her front sitting room is decorated with bouquets of flowers. They are next to photographs of David and Colin, and her late husband Bill, who died eighteen months after the fire. Bill, a boilermaker and welder who’d worked on all the Valley’s power stations, had fought leukaemia for twenty-five years, but losing his sons made it harder to go on. In one frame, David is throwing his young granddaughter, who he was helping raise, into the air; in another, Colin is smiling in bemusement down the lens. Next to each picture are synthetic butterfly wings that are sent every anniversary by a support group for Black Saturday survivors.

Shirley walks through to the kitchen and checks on her pets, and of course, like the burnt seed in the sapling, or the ancient swamp in the mine, the ghost of the old house is within this one.

She can close her eyes and it’s that Saturday again, the curtains drawn to keep out the heat. She’s about to sit down at her sewing machine when a neighbour comes to tell them there’s a fire nearby. Shirley has just unpacked a suitcase of precious things selected the week before, when the Delburn fires were lit. Now she takes only a few clothes while Bill fetches their dogs. As they are backing out of the drive, Colin arrives.

Bill asks his son to leave for his own safety; then, frightened, he becomes angry, ordering Colin to get off the property. The fire is burning less than a kilometre away. Bill is worried that David will also be coming to defend the house, and he knows Colin won’t leave his brother. It isn’t that they are close, they’d never really been close, but if David comes, Colin will stay. When Bill can’t change his son’s mind, he drives away.

Soon, David slips cold drinks to the officers manning a roadblock and is allowed onto Glendonald Road. Both brothers have been CFA volunteers at different times. They carefully prepare the house, speaking to their parents intermittently through the afternoon, discussing the location of the fire, and even laughing when their proper father tells them to get the fuck out of there. Perhaps it feels good to work together.

Colin, older by a year, is a sweet-natured man who lives on a disability pension due to a genetic condition called Klinefelter syndrome. Growing up, he was bullied mercilessly because he was clumsy, slow and extremely tall. David had been embarrassed at having an older brother whom others regarded as dumb and freakish. They were rough places, the Valley schools of the 1970s, and at that age, how could he know better? Or rather, even while knowing better, how could he resist the pull of darker instincts, the desire to fit in when fitting in feels like a matter of survival? David joined the pack and bullied his brother too.

Colin’s other younger siblings worshipped their lovely, gangly-limbed brother. In the playground they fought his tormenters, and therefore they weren’t close to David either. (Not that David went on to have an easy life himself. He’d raised two children on his own with what he earned driving a truck, breeding dogs, and doing security and farm work.)

How do you unmake between siblings the deep past and its complicated geology? Maybe David suffered in some way from what he’d done, and maybe Colin stayed at the house in the path of the fire that day because he wanted his brother to know he forgave him. Colin was able to grow a bigger, softer heart from what he’d had to withstand. He became a man who felt compassion for anyone who was suffering.

When Shirley and I first met she was still training herself to erase the arsonist from the fire. ‘He’s a nothing,’ she told me, with bitterness that proved to be uncharacteristic. ‘He doesn’t exist as far as I’m concerned.’ This man was her lightning strike. Her glass shard waiting in long grass.

But she immediately added that she felt sorry for Brendan Sokaluk’s parents, though, because they too had lost a son. After the trial, she found herself writing a letter to Lou. In it, Shirley said that as the mother of four boys, she knew she’d had no control over any good or bad they might have done as men out in the world: she hoped this other mother did not feel responsible for her son’s actions.

Shirley never received a reply. Perhaps her letter never reached the Sokaluks. Or perhaps it got lost in their grief. (Brendan’s parents, it seemed, were still periodically haunted by the thought that their son was like the wrongly accused Mr Philpott, the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice.) When, later, Shirley heard that their house had burned down, she thought of writing again, before her days filled with other things.

This evening, sitting in her chair, Shirley says that she has recently allowed herself to start thinking about Brendan. She knows he’ll be out of jail before long, and to her surprise she can bear to consider his story.

She says she would like to meet him and ask why he lit the fire. The impossible question.

I remind her that he still claims to be innocent.

Shirley considers this, then says she’d prefer to think that her boys died because a man accidentally dropped a cigarette rather than deliberately set a fire.

Outside, the evening sky is lustred. Two dogs that Shirley has adopted are playing in the garden. Inside, sitting on the lid of the piano that someone has given her, are awards for community service and photos of the many children she has tutored. In a drawer are the letters of the alphabet, cut out of velvet or sandpaper, tactile aids she uses to help kids learn to read. A, B, C . . . one letter after another. Break things down to their simplest form and then go on. Try to go on. Each day. Start again and go on. For despite this new, full life, Shirley longs to go home. At night she dreams she is moving through the rooms of her old house and when she wakes it is lost once again.