Naming droughts: Historical perspectives on the scientific coining of “the Tinderbox Drought”

Most droughts go unnamed. At the time they are happening, they are generally referred to simply as “the drought.” After the fact, they are typically designated by a year or run of years rather than by a name: 1927–29, for instance. But in recent decades, proper names have increasingly been bestowed on droughts in southeast Australia in an informal although widely accepted practice. Examples include the Federation Drought, the World War II Drought, the Millennium Drought and, most recently, the Tinderbox Drought. This paper positions the practice of naming droughts within a longer history of naming weather extremes. It examines the implications of the naming practice for the investigation of droughts as complex objects of interdisciplinary knowledge that call for analysis from across the sciences, social sciences and humanities. And it considers the qualities and meanings attributed to the drought of 2017-19 by the name “Tinderbox.” Using the word “tinderbox” to describe environmental conditions has been criticised for naturalizing landscape flammability and so effacing human agency. But in fact the name “Tinderbox Drought” potentially enacts a semantic reversal that allows human-caused climate change to be reassociated discursively with recent and future drought events.