Bundarrah Days

I WAS very young when I first become familiar with the term bushfire. I was so used to hearing it I grew up believing that fire in the bush was something that we Australians just accepted as a fact of life.

I didn't know back then that fire came in different varieties depending on what was being burned and when. Too many urban Australians still don't know that simple fact and merely repeat parrot fashion what they've been told by the green movement - "fire is a natural part of of our environment - get used to it, dude!"

There's something really aggravating about being told to get used by fire by someone whose knowledge of fire in Australia is as lacking as their understanding of Australian vernacular.

The answer of course, is this. "Fire is a natural phenomenon mate, but how bloody natural is it when it's your hair in flames, ay?"

Let's get down to some facts. Australia's native flora and fauna has evolved with fire from the very beginning. Man's flirtation with fire on this continent started about 40,000 years ago. The Aborigines farmed with fire using it to clear ground for walking, to provide grass for game and even to nuture specific plant communities. This pattern of burning created a mosiac of recently burned country across the landscape that limited the spread of wildfires.

In addition to Aboriginal burning lightning has always been a prime source of ignition. Lightning fires, however, often occur in relatively benign conditions and can be suppressed quickly, often by moisture, unless, as has been the case in recent years there is a massive fuel burned available to burn.

Too many urban Australians fail to understand that our forests have changed significantly since European settlement. If they were confronted by the same bushland as the explorers encountered they wouldn't recognise it. And just as the bush has changed so has the nature of bushfire.

Nowadays the absence of frequent burning leads to a build-up of fine and heavy fuels resulting in the kind of holocaust fires we saw on Black Saturday.

The management of forests and fires is incredibly complex. The green mantra that "fire is natural, dude - get used to it" is far too simplistic and ignorant to warrant serious consideration and yet it rules the day. One tragedy leads to another.

We have to find a solution to our fire dilemma. Over the past six years lack of fuel reduction burning has lead to a massive increase in the area of bushland burnt by high-intensity fires - more than 4 million hectares since 2003.

There's also another problem. The exclusion of fire in eucalypt forests and woodlands, in the absence of other fuel reduction strategies, causes the proliferation of shrubs and litter. It's a fact that shrubs can significantly change the conditions in which overstorey eucalypts are growing. A shrub understorey shades out the forest floor, decreases soil temperatures and increases the moisture of the soil. Heavy layers of organic litter effectively mulch the forest floor causing changes in soil chemistry by altering the nitrogen cycling regime. These kinds of changes increase the vigour of pests and pathogens which in turn afffect the health of the forest.

In addition, and we've pointed this out so often, when forests develop a scrub understory it burns for longer with much greater intensity and as the trees have not evolved with these kinds of fires their health is badly affected.

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.