A NEW ERA OF FIRE

Summer 2019-2020 was a difficult and dangerous one in many parts of Australia due to a long period of destructive bushfires. Debate continues over their causes and their aftermath. At The Sydney Institute, on Wednesday 5 February 2020, biologist and writer Dr Jennifer Marohasy and writer and researcher Dr Paul Collins, who is also the author of Burn: The epic story of bushfire in Australia, led a discussion on bushfires in Australia over the decades and how we might better understand and deal with them – are they getting worse or are we forgetting why they happen and, hence, how to mitigate their happening and their damage?

A NEW ERA OF FIRE

PAUL COLLINS

The bushfire culture wars have already begun and we’ve still got six weeks of the fire season to go. For some, the current crisis is apocalypse now, for others it’s just a bad example of business as usual on our incendiary continent. Debates range over hazard reduction burning and the effects of global warming. To get some perspective we need to review what history tells us? Has 2020 introduced us to a new era of fire?

These days “traditional” Aboriginal fire practices are much in vogue and I will return to them later in the paper. Here I want to begin with what has happened to fire in Australia since European settlement.

If we take Black Friday, 13 January 1939 and the important Royal Commission that followed it as a pivotal point in the history of Australian fire, then the years 1788 to 1939 was the settler period. There is no doubt that the settlers enormously increased the frequency and spread of fire on the continent, perhaps five or six-fold.

 This was disastrous for the landscape and biodiversity. Country that might have been burnt in a natural rhythm of every 30-50 years before 1788 was now being burnt every three years. What is clear is that settlers introduced a massive dislocation into the established ecological patterns of the landscape.

Fires were a reality for the colony from about 1792 onwards, but it was the squatters who were the first group of settlers to impact the landscape.  They were usually newly-arrived adventurers with some capital who decamped up-country seizing unoccupied crown land for sheep crazing. They saw the land as limitless and for them agriculture was an industry inspired by the mercantile dream of infinite profits riding on the sheep’s back. Their aim was to clear the landscape and the most potent instrument for that was fire which they introduced on an industrial scale, often leading to widespread wildfire.

The eventual result was Black Thursday, 6 February 1851. Confined largely to newly-settled Victoria, this massive wildfire burnt some five million hectares. Linked to a drought and temperatures in Melbourne reaching around 47° to 48° Celsius, the scale and ferocity of this fire was the direct result of widespread burning to clear forests that had been going-on for much of the 1850-1851 summer.

With the 1850s Gold Rushes, Australia’s population more than doubled to a million. By 1860, colonial governments were faced with finding work for the many disappointed gold seekers. The various land acts of the 1860s allowed this second group of settlers to select small holdings, often on runs already occupied by squatters. Selectors were to become yeoman farmers, thus creating “Britannia in the Great South Land”.

For selectors wildfire was the enemy. As Henry Lawson’s poem The Fire at Ross’s Farm illustrates, selectors and squatters fighting wildfire together broke down “the deadly feud of class, creed and race”. But the irony was that wildfire was the product of fires lit by both selectors and squatters themselves. They used fire in the hottest months of summer as the primary instrument of clearing. Forests were in the way of development and the best way to get rid of them was to burn them.

A vicious cycle was set-up: you lit fires to clear in mid-summer on days with high winds. When they got out of control, they had to be fought, and in the process a kind of ritual emerged in which Australian manhood was forged and the ethos of mateship developed in the struggle with nature. The rural myth was established that you had to burn to stop burning.

The classical fire of the selector age was Red Tuesday, 1 February 1898, again in Victoria. This conflagration came during the “Federation drought” of 1895-1903 and centred mainly in South Gippsland. It was part of the on-going destruction of one of earth’s last remaining cool temperate rainforests. Of the original half million hectares, nowadays only about 2500 hectares of rainforest remain in two tiny national parks. Much of the cleared land is now degraded.

There were repeated wildfires throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century, almost all due to deliberately or carelessly lit fires. In Victoria, Tasmania, New South Wales, South Australia, Western Australia and southern Queensland, these were usually bush or forest fires. But in outback NSW, western Queensland, South Australia, northern Western Australia and the Northern Territory, fast-moving and unpredictable grassfires were the norm. Lighting fires had become an ingrained habit across Australia and there was little or no legal control over what people did.

This pyromania came to a head in perhaps the most infamous of all fires: Black Friday, 13 January 1939. Conflagrations swept across Victoria, southern NSW, including the Snowy Mountains, burning two million hectares and killing 71 people.

What followed was Justice Leonard Stretton’s Royal Commission, the most comprehensive study up to then of fire in the landscape. Stretton’s Commission was the first to challenge the “burn, burn, burn” philosophy. In pre-European times, Stretton said, “the forests had not been scourged by fire. They were in their natural state. Their canopies had prevented the growth of scrub and bracken. They…were safe.”

Then came the Europeans. They destroyed the canopy by logging and burned forests to clear land. “They burned the floor to promote the growth of grass and to clear it of scrub,” Stretton said, “[and] the balance of nature was broken down. The fire encouraged…scrub growth far more…[when] fire was used to clear it, the scrub grew faster and thicker…and again the cleansing agent, fire, was used.” It was a vicious circle.

Despite Stretton, after 1945 it wasn’t the notion of a protective nature that was taken-up. Many “bushmen” witnesses had loudly complained to Stretton about “the failure of authorities to reduce the fuel load”. The blame game always follows wildfires and in 1939 it was the failure of the Victorian Forests Commission to “clean-up the bush” by regular burning that was blamed.

Two key figures post-1945 are Alan McArthur and Harry Luke. Both were “practical men” with no patience for theorists. Their book Bushfires in Australia (1978) explains how bushfires ignite and develop and how fire-fighters and land-holders should respond to them. They were especially strong on “reducing the fuel load”. Essentially, they were primarily concerned with the economic value of landscape, not environmental issues, let alone native flora and fauna.

McArthur and Luke notwithstanding, bushfires returned every year, sometimes becoming massive events like the 1967 fires in Tasmania when inner-Hobart suburbs were burned.  Another was Ash Wednesday, 1983 in Victoria and South Australia, when 103 people were killed and over 2000 houses destroyed. Many of the major fires between 1968 and 2002 were on the urban frontier and were often deliberately lit.

In 2002-2003 south-eastern Australia was hit by extreme fires across Victoria, southern NSW, the Snowy Mountains and Canberra. The Canberra fire roared out of the Brindabella range on 17 January 2003, killed four people and destroyed over 500 homes and much urban infrastructure. Most previous fires lasted only a few days, or at most a fortnight. These fires lasted from late-September to late-February and burned more than 3.8 million hectares. In the same period 2.1 million hectares were burnt in Western Australia. Summer 2002-2003 heralded a new era in Australian fire.

Then on Black Saturday, 7 February 2009 Victoria was again hit with a fire that roughly followed the same trajectory as 1939, but its velocity and intensity was far worse than any previous fire. Climate change was now impacting, and combined with worse droughts, high winds and intense summer heat, south-eastern Australia was increasingly becoming “a global climate hot-spot”.

While global warming is an important new element in the mix, there is a sense in which we are now reaping the results of 230 years of massive vandalism in the landscape. Non-Aboriginal Australia has defied nature and now nature is responding. We simply can’t continue to act as we have in the past.

In 2019-2020, we face a complete re-assessment of our relationship to nature and specifically to fire in Australia. Based on the history, I will now try to tease out some of the parameters of this new relationship as we are challenged to re-assess our whole approach to living in Australia. With global warming a reality, we face some pretty stark options.

The unprecedented fires of 2019-2020 were preceded by a drought which began in 2017, while we were still recovering from the flow-on effects of the Millennium drought of 1997-2009. These fires exceeded in extent, intensity and duration anything we have previously experienced.

In terms of intensity and duration, the nearest comparison are the bushfires of 2002-2003. Previous fires lasted days; the 2002-03 season lasted from late December to early March. The current fires across Australia began in early September 2019 with an estimated 10.8 million hectares already burnt by mid-January 2020.

The reality is that we are now reaping the results of 230 years of gross vandalism in the landscape. Our settler forebears tried to re-create their European homelands in a totally different world. While their nostalgia was understandable, the results have been disastrous. There has been a massive increase in fire post-1788 as land was cleared and eroded, forests logged or degraded and rivers dammed or drained. As a result, we now have to confront a complete re-assessment of our relationship to nature and specifically to fire.

First, we have to rethink our whole approach to the landscape and our place in it. The core question is one of values. We have to decide what is most important, what “asset” do we most want to protect? The “father” of fire ecology in Australia, Malcolm Gill says: “Unless ‘assets’ are understood, the nature of the fire problem is not understood…[and] what is considered an asset will vary within and between societies.” (A. Malcolm Gill, Environmental Hazards 6(2005), 65-80)

Gill distinguishes three types of assets: owned assets such as land, tangible assets such as a house, stock or pasture, and intangible assets such as biodiversity, natural beauty, wilderness, the spiritual/imaginative values of nature. He says that conflicts about assets are especially sharp on “the urban to wildland interface” and “the farmland to wildland interface”. The challenge facing us is negotiating viable compromises between these conflicting asset values.

However, I think we have now reached a situation in our relationship with nature in Australia where “viable compromises” are impossible. Yes, we need to negotiate, but we also have to choose priorities in a situation in which global warming will continue to impact every aspect of our lives. Australia’s climate has already increased by just over 1°C since 1910.

Therefore, we must decide what is most important to us. For me, unequivocally, the foundational moral principle is one that prioritises the natural world and biodiversity. With a shocking history of species loss and with estimates of a billion or more native animals killed since September – and that’s not counting bats, frogs, insects or other invertebrates – I’m happy to say that the survival of species takes priority over everything else, including human assets.

This question of priorities is already confronting us, because those who believe the old doctrine that you fight fire with fire are already out on the hustings. Scott Morrison tells us that he wants to see more land clearing and “hazard management in national parks”. He later told Sky News, “Hazard reduction is as important as emissions reduction… Many would argue even more so, because it has a direct practical impact on the safety of [people].” National Party hacks, the coal and logging industries and the CFMEU are already blaming conservationists and insufficient hazard reduction for the fires.

NSW Rural Fire Services chief Shane Fitzsimmons rejects these claims insisting that hazard reduction is an important element of fire prevention, but isn’t a panacea for bushfire risk and has “very little effect at all” on wildfires in severe or extreme weather.

Australians have been obsessed with “hazard reduction” for decades. A whole succession of self-proclaimed “practical bushmen” told Leonard Stretton in 1939 that you fight fire with fire. Despite Stretton’s nuanced response to the mania with burning, hazard reduction became the “prevailing orthodoxy” post-1945.

We need to retreat from our obsession with “managing” nature; it doesn’t need human “management”. Originally Australian forests were self-protecting with an intact canopy. The understory was open, damp and “park-like”. Because only limited light penetrated the forest floor, the growth of combustible vegetation was prevented. Once forests were logged, or partially cleared, the canopy was broken and they became vulnerable to combustible undergrowth and fire.

The evidence shows that hazard reduction burning, even in dry sclerophyll forests doesn’t reduce fire spread. What does work are 40 metre buffer zones around houses and other assets. Broadscale burning of forests and national parks achieves little or nothing.

One approach that has gained much traction lately is the use of “Aboriginal fire management”, to quote the current catch-phrase. The Aboriginal fire regime was not to improve the land, or to “farm” it in a modern sense; its purpose was entirely different.

Indigenous Australians were essentially trying to maintain stasis in the landscape. Their cosmology and religion aimed at keeping the landscape exactly as it had always been. They were, in Bill Stanner’s words, trying to “defeat history”. The ideal was the “Dreaming”, a timeless world without duration, without beginning or end, before or after.  Again, Stanner is right when he calls it “everywhen”.

The traditional Aboriginal focus was burning open grassland and savannah and was not consistent across the continent. People knew their own country intimately, so their burning practices likely varied in different landscapes. Also, how certain can we be that we still have access to the details of traditional knowledge?

And even if we had that knowledge, the real problem is the country has changed radically. There were about 750,000 Aboriginal people here in 1788. The population is now 25.3 million, which creates a vastly different situation. Secondly, the landscape has been modified and changed on a vast scale; we are literally dealing with a different country. I’m not saying we have nothing to learn from traditional fire practices, but they won’t solve everything.

The real changes that have to occur are attitudinal. We have to prioritise nature. The core moral principle that governs everything must be that the biological diversity of life, expressed in all its detail and species, as well as the maintenance of the integrity of the earth must come first, before everything else. And by “everything” I mean everything, including us. Given our total dependence on the earth system, to think or act otherwise is delusional.

In the end we just have to accept the principle “nature first”!