Bundarrah Days

Ross Bradstock , well known enemy of Mountain Cattlemen, makes the same claims against fuel reduction burning that he made against alpine grazing athough, to give him his due, he thinks that Black Saturday could have been prevented by the wholesale removal of forest and it's replacement with concrete.

To him it was a disaster that nothing short of radically unprecedented and impossible action could have prevented. Or, that's what he says publicly. What he says in private is likely to be a whole lot different.

Brackstock who is yet another dime a dozen professor of cattle dung and knows next to nothing about bushfire in practice is also a stranger to the truth. They may have met on the odd occasion but they're certainly not on friendly terms.

He says that fuel reduction measures can only mitigate the risk posed by fires to people but cannot eliminate it. We can't eliminate disease either but we cure some and mitigate others through the practice of medicine.

Here's what he said about Black Saturday.

"The scientists are saying the heat and wind were off the scale and several areas that had been burnt recently burned on the day."

That's a huge great misrepresentation. When a wildfire such as Black Saturday passes over a recently burned area it is going to set alight any available fuel. You don't need to be a Professor at Aunty Jack's Uni to work that out. What is debatable is the intensity of the fire. If the fuel burden is lower than the surrounding area there will be less firel and that's indisputable. Of course, when there is a surrounding wildfire it will be somewhat hotter than a fire limited to burning on recently burnt ground simply because the heat generated by a fire consuming massive amounts of fuel will make it so.

I shouldn't have to explain this but Bradstock should be made to explain why he feels the need to hide the truth and mislead people.

The fact that the heat and wind were "off the scale" on Black Saturday seems to have made little difference to most of Victoria. The 1.5 million ha burned in 2003 didn't catch fire again despite the "off the scale" factors. The 1.1 million hectares burnt in 2006-07 didn't catch fire again either despite the "off the scale" factors. But what is really telling is this. Both 2003 and 2006-07 burnt just as powerfully and for much longer than the Black Saturday fires in weather conditions that were benign by comparison.

Blind Freddie is no Wollongong Professor but even he can read the signs and they don't point in Bradstock's direction.

All he has proven is that too little fuel reduction burning is of little use in mitigating wildfire fed by massive fuel loads. He played the same game with alpine grazing. He and his mate Dick Williams set out to prove that alpine grazing does not reduce fire risk on the high plains by studying an area which scarcely carried any cattle. Their conclusion about cattle was the same as their conclusion about fuel reduction burning.

They say neither works because there is still fire where they are practiced. The truth is otherwise. It says that if there were sufficient cattle and sufficient fuel reduction burns there would be far less wildfire.

This green ploy is so obvious it's laughable. Reduce both FRB and grazing to a level where they can't achieve much and then they say they don't work. It's like batting Bradman at number 9 and complaining that he didn't hit a century.

RENOWNED American Fire expert, Stephen. J. Pyne is headed for Australia to provide expert advice and testimony to the Teague Royal Commission.

Professor Pyne of the School of Life Sciences at the University of Arizona has written two excellent books on fire in Australia - Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia and The Still Burning Bush.

Bundarrah Days is very encouraged by the request to Professor Pyne to appear before The Commission because it suggests that it is going to be a very thorough inquiry.

Professor Pyne believes that the very basic error that land mangers have made in dealing with fire are persistent attempts to either eliminate it or suppress it instead of learning to live with it.

A couple of weeks ago, in the initial aftermath of Black Saturday, he wrote this:

"It seems likely that Black Saturday II will yield another royal commission. Much has changed over 70 years; Australians are more urban, more sensitive to environmental issues, keener to protect unique ecological assets. Yet perhaps they are substituting another, more modern delusion, striving to remake the burning bush into an unburnt Oz, only to find this vision also repeatedly obliterated by remorseless fire."

Indeed, some Australians are striving after this delusion and others have delusions of their own. The greens want more wildfire along the lines of Black Saturday because they believe it is a part of the natural cycle.

That is their delusion and it bears no resemblance to the natural cycle that existed before European settlement and prevailed for many thousands of years. What would Victorian forests like look now if we'd had the fire events of the past six years repeated time and again in a cycle over 40,000 odd years?

These holocaust fires are not natural. Just as the Australian environment has changed since settlement so has the nature of fire changed. A fire that is burning vast amounts of ground fuel built up over decades is not the same as a fire lit by indigenous people to promote the growth of grass for their game animals, for example.

Which fire would you prefer to live with? Professor Pyne invites us to make a choice because whatever happens we will always have fire with us.

I know which one I choose.