Firescapes of disruption: An absence of insurance in landscapes of fire

Abstract

In this paper, I critically interrogate the expectation that insurance is becoming more present through the processes of financialisation and marketisation – as up-to-date policies and/or in the hearts and minds of consumers. I draw upon interviews about house and contents insurance, with householders in the flammable landscapes of south-eastern Tasmania, Australia. The participants identify these landscapes as resilient and permanent and thus ultimately unaffected by fire. In understanding bush-living as co-constituted with fire and not purely threatened by fire, they experience a strong sense of continuance in these places. In this context, the promise of insurance emerges as contingent, and even if an up-to-date policy is present, insurance moves in and out of focus, is present and becomes absent as various human and non-human actants exert agency. Drawing on critical landscape studies in exploring these spatial contingencies, I observe insuring as landscaping practice. As well as contributing to critical insurance studies and financialisation of everyday life research, I provide a signpost for rethinking the role of insurance in disaster management and climate adaptation.

Keywords

Fire financialisation insurance landscape marketisation

Introduction

The Australian bushfires of 2019/2020 captured international attention as predictions of climate catastrophe came to life on a large and terrifying scale (e.g. BBC, 2020). Over a period of five months, these fires burnt over 11 million hectares, destroyed around 3000 homes, and resulted in approximately 20,000 insurance claims and an estimated loss value of $1.7 billion¹ (Demetriadi, 2020). This physical destruction dovetailed with the psychological trauma experienced by impacted and displaced communities and individuals (Australian Government, 2020). In the aftermath of these fires, attention turned to re-building homes and communities and growing resilience to mitigate future threats. As with previous (though now seemingly small) bushfire events, the role of insurance in recovery and resilience garnered significant attention (e.g. Lucas et al., 2020).

Insurance remains a key safety net in modern western life, and with governments in countries like Australia pursuing agendas of self-responsibilisation, its prominence appears to be growing (Booth and Kendal, 2019). In this context, it could be expected that insurance is more present than ever before – as up-to-date policies and/or in the hearts and minds of consumers. For example, in market-based economies, the processes of insurance financialisation and marketisation maintain the presence of insurance through everyday discourses and practices. In ‘gradually expanding the empire of commodities and imposing the financial world’s modes of evaluation on more and more sectors of activity’ (Callon, 2016: 17), insurance marketisation includes advertising and branding that engenders insurance with a presence, re-calibrating emphasis on a more abstract sense of future contingency. Through the financialisation of everyday life, ‘households are tied into ever more complicated relationships with the international financial system’ (Hall, 2011: 405) including in reference to self-responsibilisation that emphasises the presence of up-to-date insurance policies.

To critically interrogate the expectation of insurance as a growing and solidifying presence, I draw upon interviews about house and contents insurance, with householders in the flammable landscapes of south-eastern Tasmania, Australia. This region was not impacted by the 2019/2020 events but has a history of bushfires including the 1967 Black Tuesday fires which burnt tens of thousands of hectares, left 7000 homeless and killed 64 (ABC, 2017), and the 2013 Dunalley fires which destroyed 203 homes (AIDR, 2020). With rising concern about bushfire risk in Australia, the interviewed householders are part of one of the cohorts garnering attention regarding disaster preparedness and mitigation (Cottrell and King, 2007; Hyde, 2013). They are part of a significant and growing group of amenity migrants or ‘tree changers’² that comprises populations motivated by lifestyle to move to peri-urban and rural areas (Abrams et al., 2012; Booth and Harwood, 2016).

Williams (2012) notes that flammable bush landscapes are recognised as an intrinsic part of Australian identity, and there is existing research exploring the lived experience of homemaking in disaster-prone areas (e.g. Edwards and Gill, 2016; Ratnam and Drozdewski, 2018; Steele and Vizel, 2013; Wilford, 2008) and work that considers the role of memory in relation to disasters (e.g. McKinnon, 2019; Reid et al., 2018). However, these bodies of research make little if any reference to insurance. Through the three themes that emerge from the analysis of these interviews – ever-present bush, ever-present fire and contingent promise – I contribute novel insights in this regard. The participants identify the bush landscapes in which they live as resilient and permanent and thus ultimately unaffected by fire. In understanding bush-living as co-constituted with fire and not purely threatened by fire, they experience a strong sense of continuance in these landscapes. In this context, the promise of insurance emerges as highly contingent – on landscape, government, community for example – and thus, even if an up-to-date policy is present, insurance moves in and out of focus, is present and becomes absent as various human and non-human actants exert agency.

In exploring and analysing these spatial contingencies of insurance, I draw on critical landscape studies. As John Wylie describes:

landscape isn’t simply something seen, nor a way of seeing: landscape is rather the materialities and sensibilities with which we see … Landscape is a seeing-with; an act which precipitates and distributes subject and objects, selves and worlds. So, what is distinctive and precise about landscape … is the manner of its working as the creative tension of self and world. And in this way it becomes the catalyst for different types of creative geographies. (cited in Merriman et al., 2008: 203)

In locating insurance within landscapes, I identify insuring as a practice, along with other ‘embodied acts of landscaping’ such as farming, walking, writing, looking, fishing and driving (Lorimer, 2005: 85). Thus, and as detailed below, I contribute to unsettling accounts of insurance and other aspects of global finance that are essentially abstracted from places and landscapes (Pike and Pollard, 2010). Specifically, I am interested in how presence and absence constitute landscapes, how and why things appear and disappear, and moments of coincidence and non-coincidence within and through landscapes. As I conclude, insuring as landscaping practice produces an absence – a ‘disruption of expectations’ (Frers, 2013: 434) in which hegemonic economic discourses and practices are missing (at least in any absolute sense). Insuring, in this context, is only ever partially about insurance. Hence, I follow our participants in moving away from insurance in key parts of this paper, before returning to it in concluding sections.

It is important to note that I do not engage with the ideas and scholarship pertaining to riskscapes (e.g. Neisser and Runkel, 2017); ‘the real-and-imagined geographies based on individual and collective experience, tradition and knowledge’ pertaining to risk perceptions and risk management (Müller-Mahn et al., 2013: 205). This is because risk does not emerge as a significant theme in our interviews with participants, despite the significant bodies of research that assume a necessary link between disaster, insurance and risk (e.g. Beck, 1992; Lloyd’s, 2018). I acknowledge, however, room for research in this regard that is beyond the scope of this paper and empiric.

Insuring as landscaping practice

Previous research on insurance has tended to under-appreciate or skate over the place-based co-constitution of insurance (Booth and Harwood, 2016). McFall (2011) observes that some Foucauldian scholarship defines,

insurance as a technology that compensates for the effects of chance through the mechanism of mutuality organized according to the laws of large numbers may capture the essentials but it also skates over the strange and varied ways insurance has been made to work. (665)

More recent research considers how morality and affect imbue the workings of insurance (French and Kneale, 2009; McFall, 2011; Zelizer, 2017). Locating insurance within landscapes of presence and absence contributes to further understanding of insurance beyond the actuarial, financial and judicial (Ewald, 1991); to how insurance is co-constituted through ‘force, energy and process, landscape present and alive in and of its ongoing animation and becoming’ (Wylie, 2009: 278).

In drawing attention to householder ‘insurantial moments’ in places of high bushfire risk, Booth and Harwood (2016) signpost such an understanding. They observe that the practice of insuring (or not insuring) is dynamically and momentarily constituted in relation to perceptions of local risk, bushfire mitigation measures, expectations of family and friends, a sense of responsibility or self-sufficiency, and imaginings of life after a major fire. As Rose (2002) argues, ‘the engine for the landscape’s being is practice: everyday agents calling landscape into being as they make it relevant for their own lives, strategies, and projects’ (33). Insuring in fire-prone landscapes appears to constitute one such practice.

As introduced below, the ‘tree changer’ participants in this study describe the aesthetic and recreational appeal of the places where they live, and they appear to hold a romanticised view of their relationship with the environment and nature – as backdrop and playground, and as life affirming or ‘escape from the city’. They make a clear differentiation between living in the bush and living in the suburbs, with the former perceived as less constraining and, in a sense, more real. Wylie (2013) identifies this as romanticism – a ‘preference for non-urban, remote and unpeopled landscape, as both an ideal landscape form, and as a testing-ground for enquiries of “knowing the self”’ (55). None of our participants are financially dependent on where they live, instead they hold a view ‘that something beautiful, good and true can be witnessed in “wild” landscapes, and moreover that such landscapes offer aesthetic and spiritual sustenance in a manner that transcends utilitarian and rational attitudes’ (Wylie, 2013: 55).

This romanticised account of landscape can map onto an understanding of landscape as ‘a phenomenological collapse of self and world’ (Rose, 2006: 547). Yet, it is also problematic as it negates historical and political complexities and overlooks more complex and conflicting accounts. This is not to disavow the experiences and perceptions of the participants in this study. Rather, it is to acknowledge and work with both the critiques of romanticised accounts of landscape and, as canvassed below, the complex histories and politics that bring insurance into being and constitute the practice of insuring (e.g. Booth and Kendal, 2019; Ewald, 1991; French and Kneale, 2009; McFall, 2011; Zelizer, 2017). As Wylie (2009) observes, there is value in ‘an account of landscape, matter and perception couched more explicitly in terms of absence, distance, displacement and the non-coincidence of self and world’ (279). There is no necessary ‘collapse’, there is always the possibility of estrangements, detachments and rifts within and between selves and worlds; of non-coincidences.

In focusing on ideas such as presence and absence, more nuanced articulations of experiences and perceptions appear possible (Howard et al., 2013). In particular, a focus on absence draws attention to non-coincidences that may be subtly articulated by ‘tree changer’ participants. This includes three conceptualisations of absence: absence as haunting and spectrality (Derrida, 1994), absence as a concrete and material presence (Meier et al., 2013) and absence as ‘disruption of expectations’ (Frers, 2013: 434).

Derridean ideas of haunting and spectrality, and absence as ‘fleshy, material expressions of decay and erosion’ (Meier et al., 2013: 424) are the two most common approaches to landscapes of absence and presence. Reflecting upon coastal benches dedicated to deceased persons, for example, Wylie (2009) observes an incorporation of landscape, perception and memory. Embodied within the benches that face the sea, the presence of memories bears witness to the absence of loved ones, co-producing a landscape tense with bodies and abodies. This entangling of presence and absence is infused with comings and goings, and ‘paradoxical incorporation’ (Derrida, 1994: 126). In other research, Williams (2012) describes the material traces of Tasmania’s 1967 bushfires, 50 years after the fact – grass covered foundations of burnt buildings, the white ‘stags’ of dead trees scattered through an otherwise green forest, stories exchanged by families and neighbours and the occasional interpretative sign. This is an absence that is very present: a haunting that retains a material or tangible presence (Wylie, 2009). As Meier et al. (2013) observes, ‘absence is all but a void; that it manifests itself in concrete places, people and things; that it is embodied, remembered and contested’ (424–425).

As Frers (2013) observes, absence and presence are not polar opposites, but are co-produced in complex and dynamic ways: ‘the experience of absence derives its peculiar power from its embeddedness in the body, in bodily practices, sensual perceptions and emotions’ (Frers, 2013: 432). This speaks to the ideas of ‘absent absences’ and of landscaping practices including practices of non-coincidence as well as practices of coincidence. In this, absence can be not so much a ‘paradoxical incorporation’ but a ‘disruption of expectations’ (Frers, 2013: 434), as ‘someone has to miss something for it to be specifically absent’ (Frers, 2013: 433).

As introduced above, much research into insurance, and economics and finances more generally, assumes a geographical detachment or disconnection (Pike and Pollard, 2010). However, the complex and evolving histories and politics of insurance speak to geographic entanglements: of the spaces and places of insurantial discourses and practices. Thus, in this paper, in understanding insuring as landscaping practice, I make three contributions to the literatures of economic and financial geography. First, as Lobo-Guerrero (2010) maintains, the insurance sector demonstrates prowess and power in mobilising and normalising ontological and epistemological ‘truths’. These truths may appear to infiltrate or subordinate everyday life, yet there is a substantial body of research that emphasises how the financial and the everyday are co-produced. Homeowners are simultaneously financialised subjects – self-responsibilised investors and entrepreneurs, and ‘fleshy bodies with ongoing needs for shelter and emotional comfort’ (Gillon and Gibson, 2018: 23). There is, however, little research that considers how insurance occurs in everyday life (exceptions include Booth and Harwood, 2016; Lehtonen, 2017a). Considering the presence (or otherwise) of insurance in landscapes can offer insights into this co-production of the financial and the everyday, and contribute to the growing field of critical insurance studies (e.g. French and Kneale, 2015; Johnson, 2015; Lehtonen, 2017b).

Second, as Booth and Kendal (2019) observe, households play an important role in the process of marketisation, as well as financialisation. In exerting agency in the co-production of markets, households can choose to recognise a ‘good’ as valuable and meaningful in its pacified form (Çalişkan and Callon, 2010), or resist or negate its pacification. Locating marketisation within the landscapes within which households live provides on opportunity to broaden the range of actants (human and non-human) commonly considered in relation to the constitution of insurance and in marketisation research (e.g. Birch and Siemiatycki, 2015; González, 2019). Third, for insurance to work effectively in terms of self-responsibilisation and in the face of landscape-borne disasters, it must be front of mind – it must be present in particular ways. Households must not only have an up-to-date insurance policy, but also an astute and evolving knowledge of local risks that informs careful and on-going insurance and mitigation decision-making (Booth, 2017). Insurance not being present or being present in more complex ways poses a challenge to hegemonic risk and responsibility discourses and practices. Thus, in the paper I also provide a signpost for rethinking insurance in disaster management and climate adaptation.

Methods

Interviews were conducted with 16 tree changers who live in the fire-prone landscapes of south-eastern Tasmania, Australia. These participants were recruited using a combination of convenience and snowball sampling (Merriam and Tisdell, 2016) – drawing upon personal networks as well as approaching resident and community groups in peri-urban and rural areas. In deciding who to interview, the aim was to ensure diversity in terms of age, gender, life stage, household composition, income and insurance status (Table 1). Overall, these participants were, by and large, middle class and have chosen to live on the outskirts of suburbia.

Table 1.

Participant profiles.

Participants (pseudonyms)	Insurancecoverage	Age	Household composition	Employment status	Notes
Adam and Lou	Uninsured	37 and 27, respectively	Live as a couple	Employed	Living in an illegal dwelling while making plans to build a fireproof ‘bunker’ as part of a larger house on the same bush block: ‘we engaged Australia’s expert earth-sheltered house designer… And I [Adam] provided conceptual ideas, and then got him to design the earth-sheltered side of it’.
Ann and Peter	House and contents insurance	62 and 72, respectively	Live as a couple	Retired	They moved onto their house on 6-hectare semi-rural block in 1998, with their two children. Ann says, ‘living in the bush was, I suppose, important. The environment’, with Peter adding ‘but we regarded this as moving into suburbia when we moved here, compared to where we’d been’.
Bruce	House and contents insurance	55	Lives alone	Employed	Bruce was a young child when the family home was destroyed in the 1967 fires. Apart from a temporary move at that time, he has never left the area: ‘In my 20s it was time to move out, find somewhere, and I wanted to live near to home… and this is the house I found and I’ve been living here since 1990’.
Dave and Jasmin	House and contents insurance	40s and 30s, respectively	Live as a couple, with two primary school aged children	Employed and post-graduate student, respectively	Dave and his German partner, Jasmin, built their bush home 12 years ago, and speak with neighbours about fire: ‘We do have a group in this road and we do meet maybe once a year, …but not everyone here is very close to us. It makes it more difficult to talk… and you sort of make a little plan or they have got their own plan but all these bushfire plans, they’re very individual as well’.
George and Renee	House and contents insurance	73 and 61, respectively	Neighbours	Retired	They have lived in the same rural area, on separate blocks since 1990. George describes his house as ‘brick veneer, double insulated, double glazed windows. I have fire shutters on all door apertures bar one, and window apertures as well’. Renee says, ‘if I lived anywhere else it would have to be right near the river because it’s the only place where I feel I’d be secure [from fire]’.
Jim	Uninsured	59	Lives alone	Self-funded unemployed	Lives in an illegal self-built dwelling on land previously owned by his mother. He estimates it cost between $10 and 20,000 to build: ‘I’ve put a bit into this but it’s not everything I’ve got. I could afford to lose it but I don’t want to. I’m not saying I’m rich. Unless I die fairly young I’ll run out of money’.
John	House and contents insurance	60	Lives with his wife and teenage daughter	Retired	He was born in the area, and returned 27 years ago and built his home. ‘We were burnt out in the ‘67 fires. I was 9, almost 10. I guess it’s hard to shake off your childhood. I grew up in the bush and you tend to go back and do the same thing. I think living in suburbia would be quite constraining…’
Margaret	House and contents insurance	Nearly 70	Lives alone	Self-funded retiree	Bought and built on burnt land shortly after the 1967 bushfires and directly adjacent to Mt Wellington Nature Reserve. ‘I was a bushwalker and I wanted to be in the bush. I got married in 1970 and I thought this would be a great place to bring up kids’.
Naomi	House and contents insurance	36	Lives with her husband	–	Her parents and sister live close by. She describes, ‘this place just came up and, ideally, I think I probably wanted to live here but hadn’t really thought we would be able to afford to, and this place just came up … it was totally affordable so that’s why we went for it’.
Rebecca	House and contents insurance	30	Lives with her partner	–	They moved into their house on a semi-rural block about two years ago. ‘We’re trying to keep the environment. Having it surrounded by nature is why we live here, but we also want to make it a little bit safer, but it does take a lot of time so at the moment it’s bushland’.
Rosalie	Uninsured	31	Lives with partner and pre-school aged child	Post-graduate student	They live in a caravan on a 30-acre bush block, while building their first home. ‘We’re building a straw bale house … with earth and render. It’s somewhere around lock-up stage… My husband just finished rendering the first coat yesterday, so it was a big mess yesterday [laughs]’.
Rose	House insurance	47	Lives alone	Employed part-time	She built her small timber house 15 years ago and has been adding extensions since then. Referring to herself and her partner: ‘we value nature and we want to be around nature. Maybe the people on the other side of the street, on the higher side… they’re really into green lawns’.

A qualitative place-based methodology was adopted in the employment of in-depth interviews and subsequent thematic analysis (Lyth et al., 2015). Our participants and their contributions during the interview process were understood as co-constituted through the places where they live – their homes and broader landscapes, and through the interview process itself. Thus, the aim was to remain reflexive to more-than-human agencies (Whatmore, 2006, 2007) including how the framing and recording of interviews constructed participants and their responses in particular ways (Henwood et al., 2008). Interviews were conducted in the homes of participants, with some choosing to be interviewed alone or as a couple (Table 1). These interviews varied in length from 45 to 90 minutes and were semi-structured, unfolding as conversations. However, the interviewee remained attuned to covering and drawing out particular topics pertaining to house and contents insurance. These included participant perceptions of local bushfire risk, previous experience with insurance and insurers, and possible feelings of trust and distrust towards insurers.

The analysis of these interviews involved an iterative process of listening to recordings, reading the transcripts and note taking. Themes that cut across interviews were identified, and then re-understood within the context of individual participant’s experiences and perceptions. This included interpreting themes in relation to previous bushfire experiences. For example, although none of our participants had experienced recent, immediate exposure to bushfire, one had experienced a major fire in their childhood. As noted elsewhere (Eriksen and Gill, 2010), such experiences can affect perceptions and thus findings.

Landscapes of presence, absence and promise

As introduced above, three broad themes emerged from our analysis: ever-present bush, ever-present fire and contingent promise. The bush landscapes speak to our participants of permeance and continuance, and in this context, fire is understood as an inherent part of everyday life. Thus, house and contents insurance as a means of mitigating a future loss is routinely and momentarily absented as fire is not in and of itself a threat to this permeance and continuance. Rather, insurance is a promise that is contingent on a range of entwined human and non-human actants.

Ever-present bush

As previously described, our participants are ‘tree changers’, choosing to live in the bush for lifestyle reasons. They value and feel connected to the environment, nature and amenity of the places where they live. As Rosalie describes,

… we feel pretty connected here. I get a good feeling about this land; it doesn’t have any sort of bad vibes about it, it’s a very welcoming place. I do feel more connected here than I have any other place.

For the younger participants, this includes undertaking outdoor activities:

I particularly like to get out and adventure when I can, so mountain-biking and walking. It’s the lifestyle. And just being near the bush is lovely … it’s very noticeable how many different types of birds there are. So it’s part of the reason that you kind of do want to live in these areas. It’s not suburbia. (Adam)

The differentiation made by Adam between the bush and suburbia is a defining feature of how our participants understand where they live. Many have moved into the bush to escape suburban life, and others have grown up in the bush: ‘I guess it’s hard to shake off your childhood. I grew up in the bush and you tend to go back and do the same thing. I think living in suburbia would be quite constraining’ (John).

Despite (or because) of this connection to the bush, most of our participants undertake mitigation measures around their homes to reduce fire risk. Both Rebecca and Rosalie describe vegetation removal around their homes, balancing a sense of environmental preservation with a desire to improve safety:

… we’re trying to keep the environment. It being surrounded by nature is why we live here but we also want to make it a little bit safer so we are doing a little bit of ground – what do you call it? Like scrub removal … (Rebecca)

‘… we’ve taken out a lot of trees and slashed a lot of undergrowth around the house, and it still keeps trying to grow back’ (Rosalie). After a low intensity bushfire that burnt a section of their land (but not their house), she describes how ‘charcoaled’ everything was on her property, but how, ‘It came back pretty quick … ’.

This understanding of the bush as ‘growing back’ relates to attempts at removing flammable vegetation and the response of vegetation to fire. The bush is infused with a sense of permanence. Adam articulates this is relation to the conservation status of the forest that surrounds his property: ‘It’s conserved. It’s forest that will remain forest’. For other participants there is something foundational about bush landscapes that surpasses conservation. As John describes when asked what he thought the area would be like after fire: ‘Bush does recover reasonably quickly, eucalypts do anyway. It would be pretty desolate for three or four years, but it does come back’. Rebecca observes, ‘I think the bush is quite resilient and it would grow back really well’.

Most of our participants echo this sense of permanence – that the bush bounces or grows back following fire and thus, while there was general agreement on ‘a charred waste land’ (Rebecca) immediately following a large fire, there is little concern about a loss of amenity caused by fire in the medium to long term. On the other hand, it is suburban development that permanently destroys the bush. Jim, for example, conveys dismay that his coastal area has turned from a shack community³ into more of a suburb: ‘It wouldn’t be a fire that stopped me being here, it’d be what would happen after the fire, the amount of hideous construction that would go on … that’d be the end … no shacky feel anymore … ’.

Adam describes how the bush of his childhood home has been turned into suburbs. However, the ability to move to places unaffected by urbanisation adds to a sense of ever-present bush. None of our participants expressed a sense or concern that the bush would ever cease to exist: that significant tracts would not exist as a – if not the – defining element of the Australian landscape.

Ever-present fire

In these ever-present landscapes, understandings of fire and bushfires take on two forms. One is the constant daily reminders of fire as part of these landscapes, and the other, direct experiences of bushfires. The former includes the fire scars and signs of burning on local trees. Rosalie, for example, observes following the recent fire that impacted their land:

All the trees have charcoal on the bottom of them, and the goats are all rubbing up against them, so they all come home black and stuff [laughter]. But interestingly there were still a couple of trees out there before the fire that had black stumps from the fire 40 years back, so I think it hangs around for quite a long time, the blackness.

Margaret, who studied botany and is aware of the flammable nature of most Australian vegetation, was firm and undoubting in the sense of ever-present fire: ‘ … my plan is to leave. I did botany, I’m not stupid’. The bush itself is co-constituted through fire; fire is an intrinsic part of these landscapes.

Another constituting factor is ‘fire’ weather in relation to local terrain, with reminders embedded within weather events and patterns, and topography formative in the movement for flames. As Adam describes,

… we’re exposed to the northwest winds, which are typical of bushfire or major or catastrophic bushfire events, because of that north-facing aspect, and just the way that the typography is; the valley. So a typical fire event here would probably come down along the base of Mount Wellington … So we could be hit fairly hard with winds.

Even when nothing is burning, fire and the possibility of fire inhabit the places where our participants live.

Both Renee and Rebecca describe feeling tense about bushfires each and every summer: ‘I’ve been terrified for nearly twenty-seven years every summer’ (Renee), and,

In the summertime, I’m a lot less chilled than I am in winter time. So certainly, I hate electrical storms. I always have but knowing they can spark a bushfire is something that makes me a little bit anxious. And then dry, hot, windy days in summer, I can’t stand them. I used to love them and now I can’t stand them. I’m just like – go away, go away. (Rebecca)

For some, it is their local places that are imbued with fire: ‘you live in a place like this, it will burn. If it burns, that’s what happens when you live in places like this’ (Peter). For others, fire, or more precisely fire risk, extends beyond the bush into towns and cities: ‘I actually think that a whole lot of Tasmania is a fire risk … There’s not many places, and I would include Hobart [city] as well, safe in fires’ (Renee). Jim observes that living without bushfire risk is ‘not possible in Australia’.

Some participants also have more temporally and spatially immediate experiences of fire that affirms this sense of ever-present fire. One participant survived their family home being burnt out in the 1967 fires, and others had more recent but less proximal encounters. Adam, for example, describes: ‘lots of experiences of bushfires nearby where I grew up, you know, having thick smoke and red sun type disc in the sky’. Smoky, hot days are a quintessential element of summer living in much of Australia.

Buildings that survived the 1967 bushfires also hold significance in the minds of many of our participants. Like the bush itself, they are everyday reminders that the landscape burns and this can raise feelings of fear and anguish. However, these buildings and homes are also signifiers of hope and continuance. Bruce observes that surviving houses in his area ‘give you some sort of cause for optimism’, and Naomi notes, ‘its nice to know’ that buildings survive fire. However, for Adam and Lou who are building a designer fire-proof home, the age of these buildings renders them ‘gone’ with the next big fire.

In embodying a complexity of affective responses, this ever-presence of fire is narrated, providing stories of why and how our participants live in high fire risk places. Rosalie describes how the low intensity fire on her property was an invaluable opportunity to get a feel for fire and how it behaved in her landscape. This experience and knowledge made her feel more confident in the face of bushfire risk. Rebecca describes how recent memorial events of the 1967 fires provided her with a sense of reassurance:

I think it made me – and this might sound weird, but it made me a little bit less afraid because I recognise that it has happened and not even very long ago and that people managed to get through it and that there’s worse things in life … obviously it’s really horrible but there are worse things, like you could lose your life rather than your house. So I guess it just puts things into perspective.

Contingent promise

In imaging life after a bushfire event in which homes are destroyed or severely damaged, our insured participants had mixed feelings about the role that insurance could and would play. As exemplified by Naomi, they are all, ‘pretty confident, not fully confident’ that insurance will do what it appears to promise. The reasons given for this lack of complete confidence vary. Margaret, who has ‘stuck with’ her insurance company, says she trusts them as they replaced a cabin on her property when it burnt down. However, she also describes how this insurer doesn’t have a local branch anymore ‘so who knows’. Rosalie is more specific about her feelings of disquiet in insurance companies: “Just the way they word things … they’re trying to make sure they exclude certain things, and while we sort of fall within the parameters of what’s included, I have a feeling that they’ll go, ‘oh no, you’ve got a dingle on your dangle and it’s just not included'”.

The reasons for trusting one’s insurer include the quality of customer service over the phone (Naomi), a company being large and high profile (Rosalie), and insurers making public statements about supporting claims after large-scale disasters (John). Also, regarding the insurer for Adam and Lou’s car (they don’t have house and contents insurance):

Lou: They’re a big company, they’re Tassie based, and we give them over a grand every year …

Adam: They’ve got a big building.

Lou: They’ve got a big building. They give you discounted movie tickets …

Adam: Discounted fuel …

Lou: Yeah, discount for K&D [hardware store]. So I guess that all builds trust in them …

When asked explicitly how trusting he is of insurers and his own insurance company, Bruce states, ‘you have to be. Really, you’ve got no choice’; or, as Jasmin notes, ‘you need to trust and at the same time you don’t trust’. This sense of dependence rather than trust informs understandings of the role and involvement of insurance, government and communities following a disaster event. Rose describes how her confidence in insurance is partly based on a sense that there would be a community outcry if, following a large-scale bushfire, insurance didn’t come through as expected. Government also has a role to play here, as Bruce describes:

… I realise the governments act as an insurer of last resort so you’d think that if worse came to worst you’d get some assistance from the government. Particularly that I’ve done the right thing and taken out a policy that’s sufficient to do what needs to be done. If I’m let down by the insurance company then to some extent I could say, “Please Mr Prime Minister, Mr Premier, I need help.” You know, I’ve done the right thing here. You have to believe – if you don’t believe insurance companies are going to pay then there’s no real point taking insurance at all. I’ve got a lot of insurance of various descriptions on the belief that I’m covered and they will pay when the time comes. (Bruce)

The role and function – the promise – of insurance following a bushfire is contingent on community and government stepping in when/if needed. It is also contingent on a sense of one having done the right thing by having insurance, as exemplified by Bruce (above). Adam and Lou also describe how more personalised forms of insurance would be attractive and of benefit to them:

there’s this emerging area of more personalised insurance plans based around the individual. I’m thinking of health … they’ve [insurers] talked about linking premiums to pedometer readings and smartwatch readings or like glucose levels in contact lenses for diabetics and things … it would be good actually, if they actually looked at the structure and the design of the house. But I don’t think it’s got to that point. It wouldn’t be far away. (Lou)

Other participants describe this sense of self-worth in relation to insurance as dovetailing with self-reliance and personal responsibility, as having other assets and resources that they could mobilise, reducing or bypassing dependence on insurers. Margaret, who is a self-funded retiree and owns a number of properties, is not interested in re-building after a fire even though she has insurance: ‘I will just go to town. I’ve got another house in town for when that happens’.

The intersection between (dis)trust in insurers and self-worth is evident in the way in which a number of participants recount successful insurance claims they have made. Ann and Peter, for example, indicate a sense of being rewarded by their insurer when they covered damage to a private power pole on their property: ‘we’ve been surprised at how generous they [insurer] were or accommodating they’ve been’. However, one couple describe losing a house they owned (but did not live in) due to arson and an extended battle with their insurers to ensure an adequate payout. As Jasmin describes, ‘we did never go overdue with our payments and you’re thinking you’re being looked after then’. When the insurer didn’t come through as promised, ‘we’re reliable insurance payers, never ever overdue and then yes, it is very naïve to trust anyone’. This breaking of trust and the associated perceived denigration of participant’s self-worth manifests anger and moral judgement against insurers. Rebecca, in mentioning how her partner’s grandparents were let down by life insurance, says, ‘if you’re making money off people’s fears, there’s something kind of gross about that’.

Overall, the promise of insurance – how it is perceived to act and the role it is understood to play following a bushfire – is co-constituted through the actions of insurers, government and community and how these relate to a sense of self-worth and self-reliance. In this, the relationship between insurers and our participants is not only contingent on trust, and perceptions of insurance coming through as promised are not only contingent on the anticipation of losing of a house.

The complex contingencies inherent within the promise of insurance is most evident in our non-insured or partially insured participants, all but one of whom had built or are building their own homes and had lived or are living in simple or illegal dwellings. For these ‘tree changers’, a sense of self-reliance and the importance of government and/or community in recovery nullifies the capacity and promise of insurance. Rose, who has house but not contents insurance for her small self-built home, describes: ‘I don’t really care about how big my house is, or how much I can afford. I’m quite happy building anything, even smaller than what I have already’. Adam and Lou, who are uninsured while building a house with a fire-proof section, imagine that if for some reason they couldn’t get insurance, ‘we’ll just keep the most important stuff in the [fire] protected area over summer, or just try and keep stuff in there always’ (Adam). These participants live lives and can imagine a life without insurance. They understand life after a bushfire as contingent on factors other than the loss of a house triggering a reliable insurance payout.

Firescapes of disruption

Insurance is ofttimes understood in relation to an abstract sense of future contingency: ‘insurance is not a tangible product or service rendered at the time of payment, but rather an intangible promise of future financial exchange contingent upon the occurrence of an undesirable event’ (Johnson, 2013: 2674).

However, through the processes of financialisation and marketisation, concerted effort goes into engendering insurance with a presence in everyday life, in that ‘insurance discourses and practices are always present-oriented and rather than preparing for “the” future, they seek to shape the present to generate “a” future’ (Lobo-Guerrero, 2010: 246). Yet, and as exemplified by the participants, where one might expect to hear these marketised and financialised discourses, there are instead tensions, contradictions and limitations (French and Kneale, 2012). Insuring as a landscaping practice co-produces absence in relation to presence and through discourses and practices associated with ever-present bush and ever-present fire.

With reference to two of the conceptualisations of absence introduced above – absence as haunting and spectrality (Derrida, 1994) and absence as a concrete and material presence (Meier et al., 2013) – we see glimmers of contestation in our participants’ responses to tangible absences created by past fire events. Participants tell stories and mention memorials that speak of loss and destruction, while surviving buildings glean both fear and uncertainty as well as a sense of hope and optimism. These landscapes and the lives of some participants may be haunted by past and future fire events, yet there is an ever-present sense of continuance that renders such absent presences part of, and not opposed to everyday life.⁴ As Williams (2012) observes, bush landscapes and summer fires are an indelible part of the Australian psyche and identity, and what is remembered through these absences is a dynamic mix of devastation and continuance. This is reinforced through the presence of vegetation and summer weather events imbued with the possibility of burning but not necessarily actual flames.

The other conceptualisation of absence – a disruption of expectations (Frers, 2013) – enables reflection on where and how house and contents insurance sits within the ever-present firescapes. For participants, insurance – the promise of insurance – is contingent on and co-produced within multifarious dimensions of everyday life, rather than marketisation and financialisation specifically. Being interviewed about house and contents insurance in the context of bushfires brings to the fore significant other actants – government, community and family for example – that sustain and at times, supplant the promise of insurance. Even when insurance is spoken about directly, everyday insurantial discourses and practices overflow the logics of marketisation and financialisation. Previous insurance experience contributes to feelings of trust (or otherwise) in insurers (Tranter and Booth, 2019), and the normative power of insurance that can be effectively mobilised in insurance marketing and sales (McFall, 2011; Zelizer, 2017) exceeds itself to produce feelings of anger and betrayal if the ‘promise’ is broken. A sense of self-worth as signified by an up-to-date insurance policy can be shattered, engendering a sense of acute personal victimisation.

Overall, insuring as landscaping practice produces an absence: a ‘disruption of expectations’ (Frers, 2013: 434) in which hegemonic economic discourses and practices are missing (at least in any absolute sense). Within the context of everyday life, the logics of insurance that permeate through marketisation and financialisation embody too many non-coincidences to engender a sense of coherence and continuance like that experienced and perceived in relation to the firescapes. Insuring as landscaping practice, in this context, is only ever partially about insurance.

Understanding insuring as landscaping practice enables three lines of contribution to the literatures of economic and financial geography, as signposted above. First, insights into insurance in fire-prone landscapes support and complement previous research that explores the co-production of the financial and the everyday. While insurers, and financial and market logics more generally, carry a lot of power (Lobo-Guerrero, 2010), in everyday life a complexity of other discourses and practices exist. Insurantial subjects, like financialised subjects, are risk adverse and self-responsibilising, and they are also constituted within landscapes. These landscapes embody cultural and social norms – such as the romanticised perspective and experience of the ‘tree changer’ participants, and knowledge of fire as part and parcel of the bush and not it and of itself, a threat to continuance. Insurance, in this context, is not the expected growing and solidifying presence envisaged through hegemonic financial and risk discourses and practices. Even if an up-to-date insurance policy exists, in the hearts and minds of participants, insurance slips in and out of focus, is present and becomes absent. In fact, the expectation of presence co-creates the absence of insurance; it is missed and appears absent because of expectations for its presence.

Second, this draws attention to the wide range of human and non-human actants involved – potentially involved – in constituting insurance and marketisation. This may include defining elements of firescapes: things that present – fire weather, memorials, surviving buildings and blackened trees, and things that appear more absent – losses signified by the memorials and etched in memories. Paying attention to these, and other actants, broadens the scope and context of phenomenon often deemed to be purely or primarily economic and financial. This enables more nuanced and ultimately geographical understandings that appear particularly important in light of climate change and natural disasters.

Third, insurance being absent or being present in more complex ways poses a challenge to hegemonic risk and responsibility discourses and practices. As governments in market-based economies embrace agendas of self-responsibilisation, there is a concerted attempt to mobilise insurance as the ideal risk management tool (Lobo-Guerrero, 2010). Yet a disconnect is apparent. For participants in this study, disaster in the form of fire is ever-present. Yet, as Williams (2012) observes in Australia, disaster management is premised on a problematic temporality that acts (or attempts to act) to absent impacts from landscapes and psyches. There is ‘a process of foreclosure at work here, refusing to let the horrendous blot that is a disaster remain on the landscape for any length of time beyond what is deemed absolutely necessary’ (Williams, 2012: 86). Differing perceptions of landscape influence approaches to climate adaptation and as such, ‘leaving unarticulated the taken-for granted constructions that landscape management actors have of their local landscapes holds great potential for misunderstandings and can constitute an obstacle for sustainable adaptation governance’ (Köpsel et al., 2017: 185).⁵ If insurance is a key dimension in adaptation and disaster management and everyday life is where insuring is practiced, then there is a need to rethink insurance from this perspective. Such as rethink could, for example, address issues of ‘maladaptation’, where insurance mandates the repair and construction of buildings following disaster events without the incorporation of new mitigative features (O’Hare et al., 2015). Thus, mobilising insurance appears to be less about what households should or could be doing with insurance, and more about what insurance should or could be doing for households.

Before concluding, it is important to note that insurance is on the move in significant ways, with new digital technologies emerging that are currently beyond the ken of most of the participants. Termed ‘insurtech’, these technologies include sourcing individualised data via digital devices and developing personalised, customised policies (VanderLinden et al., 2018). Only one couple, Adam and Lou, expresses a sense of this kind insuring that locates them within a firescape of personal recognition and reward, and a sense of earned and deserved continuance. These changes – this individualisation – may make insurance present in more tangible ways as monitoring and surveillance by insurers becoming part and parcel of everyday life. There appears to be an opportunity for further explorations of these changes both in the practice of insuring, and the landscapes – the coincidences and non-coincidences of selves and worlds – that this produces. During this process of significant change, a non-representational approach with a focus upon participative methods (Waterton, 2013) may be useful for gleaning a (re)understanding of insuring as landscaping practice both before and after disaster events.

Conclusion

In this paper, I set out to critically interrogate the expectation that insurance has become or is becoming more present within everyday life. To do this, presence is understood not simply as an up-to-date insurance policy but as co-produced through everyday discourses and practices, and I pay close attention to absence, including absence created through a disruption of expectations. I observe insuring as landscaping practice, making a novel contribution to the growing body of critical insurance studies and research into the financialisation of everyday life. I draw attention to actants not previously considered in this and the marketisation of insurance – the diverse human and non-human agencies embodied within landscapes. In observing a disconnect between insuring as part of everyday life in which insurance is absent or, more specifically, routinely absented, and insurance as part governmental and insurer risk and responsibility discourses, I also provide a signpost for rethinking the role of insurance in disaster management and climate adaptation.

As well as further research pertaining to insurance and insuring in pre- and post-disaster landscapes, and in response to significant changes in insurance technologies, there is also room to explore hegemony in the context of economic and financial discourses and practices. There is little doubt of the power embodied within these, including in relation to the insurance sector as the largest player on the global financial market (Sturm and Oh, 2010). However, this paper and other research looking at the co-constitution of the financial and the everyday identify how these hegemonic ‘truths’ do not straightforwardly infiltrate or subordinate everyday life. Householders maintain at least some agency, bringing a complexity of human and non-human actants to play through a range of alternative discourses and practices. Paying closer attention to spatial and temporal variegations in power and hegemony appears a useful and interesting avenue of further research. For example, when and where householders experience and perceive the power of insurer and government risk and responsibility discourses and practices, and when and where alternatives come to the fore.

Highlights

Flammable bush landscapes are co-constituted with fire and not purely threatened by fire

Householders feel a strong sense of continuance on these landscapes irrespective of fire risk

Insurance does not provide a sense of continuance, contributing to an ‘absenting’ of insurance in the everyday lives of households

This poses a challenge for hegemonic risk and responsibility discourses in which there is an expectation that insurance be present

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Kate Booth

Notes

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