AUSTRALIAN BUSHFIRES: A HISTORY

On Wednesday 5 February 2020, at The Sydney Institute, Paul Collins, writer and author of Burn: The epic story of bushfire in Australia, joined Jennifer Marohasy, biologist, columnist and blogger on climate, to present a range of views on the causes, impact and history of bushfires in Australia. Following what had been a unique and tragic bushfire season in Australia, beginning in November 2019 and lasting until late January 2020, the evening discussion was particularly timely. The paper which follows from Jennifer Marohasy is an edited transcript of her speech.

AUSTRALIAN BUSHFIRES: A HISTORY

JENNIFER MAROHASY

Thank you so much to The Sydney Institute, to Anne and Gerard for the opportunity to be here this evening to talk about bushfire history. I’d also like to talk a little bit about the rewriting of climate history. In particular, to contrast best practice conservation as understood by lefty greenies versus best practice conservation as understood by the first people of this nation, by Aboriginal Australians.

For the Australian Aboriginal, wilderness was not a cause for fond nostalgia, but a land without custodians. There are two very different philosophies that we need to start discussing, and deciding which has primacy, which is the most important, which will give us the best environmental outcomes. These two philosophies, to a large extent, are incompatible. Certainly, the balance of nature philosophy is not a scientific one.

It is perhaps relevant that I grew up in the Northern Territory. My very first memories are of wildflowers emerging from ground still ashen from bushfire, and of swimming with Indigenous friends at Coomalie creek in that billabong. The information that I will present tonight has also been peer reviewed by two colleagues, a botanist and an ecologist – Dr David Ward and Dr Bill Burrows – from Western Australia and from Queensland.

Let me begin by quoting from a report from in 1939, from Judge Stretton, following that terrible bushfire in Victoria.

The rich plains, denied their beneficent rains, lay bare and baking; and the forests, from the foothills to the alpine heights, were tinder. The soft carpet of the forest floor was gone; the bone-dry litter crackled underfoot; dry heat and hot dry winds worked upon a land already dry, to suck from it the last, least drop of moisture. Men who had lived their lives in the bush went their ways in the shadow of dread expectancy. But though they felt the imminence of danger they could not tell that it was to be far greater than they could imagine. They had not lived long enough. The experience of the past could not guide them to an understanding of what might, and did, happen.

That is from Judge Leonard Stretton’s report of the Royal Commission into the bushfires that consumed two million hectares of Victoria back in 1939. This last summer 1.4 million hectares burnt in Victoria, and more extensive areas burnt in southern New South Wales – a reported 5.2 million hectares to 10 January 2020.

It has been claimed that this season’s 5.2 million hectares is unprecedented in extent. However, somewhere in the vicinity of 7.2 million hectares burnt during the summer of 1951-52. I’m referring to a CSIRO report entitled “The bushfire history of the South Coast study area”. It details fires in Bega, Nowra, Mount Dromedary and other parts of Southern New South Wales. There were also terrible fires, again, in this region in 1994.

These are vast areas: 5.2 million hectares, 7.2 million hectares, 1.4 million hectares. But let’s put them in perspective relative to what happens in Northern Australia. I am from the North. In 1974-75, 52 million hectares of northern Australia burnt. That’s according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ special report on bushfires published in 1995.

There is no consistent Australia-wide methodology for determining even the area burnt. Since 2011, the Commonwealth has published state of forest reports every five years. The largest unplanned area burned, according to this report, in a single year was 12 million hectares in Queensland in 2012-2013. But it is the wildfires that most impact on our built environments that are most remembered.

In 1939 townships were obliterated in a few minutes, to continue with Justice Stretton from his report:

On that day it appeared that the whole state was alight. At midday, in many places, it was dark as night. Men carrying hurricane lamps, worked to make safe their families and belongings. Travellers on the highways were trapped by fires or blazing fallen trees, and perished. Throughout the land there was daytime darkness.

This last summer, we witnessed, through live streaming on social media, the seaside town of Mallacoota in East Gippsland, become as dark as night. One morning, engulfed in a fire storm. Back in 1939, Judge Stretton made reference the shortness of a single man’s experience, how he may not have lived long enough to experience such infernos.

Nowadays, the word “unprecedented” is generally applied to destructive climate related events. It is as though history is irrelevant and that all these climate related events could not have been predicted and have never happened before. The Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, has gone as far as to claim the recent bushfires were caused by hotter and drier summers. But I have some charts that query that. The data does not suggest summers are actually getting hotter or drier. Certainly not relative to the 1930s in Australia, or the US.

Remember John Steinbeck’s book of the 1930s depression –The Grapes of Wrath – and the dust storms and the heat. We have temperature records from parts of Victoria that the heat back then was really exceptional, really unprecedented.

It could be the case that the bushfires this summer have nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with the current zeitgeist which embraces a romantic balance of nature myth. A notion that makes appropriate hazard reduction burning so difficult. It is the case that for a forest to incinerate it must contain what is referred to in the technical literature as critically high fuel loads. Tasmania, parts of New South Wales and Victoria as well as the south west corner of Western Australia have the tallest eucalyptus forests. If not appropriately managed, these forests contain explosive fuel loads, potentially feeding devastating infernos. In Queensland, it’s predicted that the instance of wildfires will increase given the additional restrictions on hazard reduction burning since the introduction of the Vegetation Management Act in 1999.

Every Royal Commission Coronial Enquiry since 1939 – I understand there’s been about 18 – has suggested particular hazard reduction targets but they are never achieved. Rather, as is the case with the Queensland Vegetation Management Act, a premium is placed on any landscape with trees, and fire too often prohibited. The Queensland legislation prohibits burning in areas designated remnant, even though this remnant vegetation may be invasive scrub less than 15 years old replacing once open woodland.

There needs to be a national discussion about the implications of this type of legislation. These restrictions on hazard reduction don’t begin in 1999 with the Queensland legislation. There were restrictions from as early as 1847 in Western Australia. Soon after this, bushfire acts were legislated in South Australia and Tasmania and a conservator of forest was appointed in Victoria in 1888. His focus was on protecting the state’s forest from overcutting, overgrazing and fire.

For our first people, fire was a tool used to create buffer zones, buffer zones that prevented the spread of fire into particular eucalypt forests. Fire was a tool used to create nested mosaics, to reduce the risks of dangerous wildfires. The Noonga people of Western Australia, for example, considered frequent fire their friend, making the bush safe and promoting grass for Yonka, the kangaroos.

Most of us have very little firsthand experience of such nature. We don’t know how to find breakfast in the Australian bush. We don’t know the effect of fire on bush tucker plants. We may visit natural environments on our holidays and expect that there is ecological balance. However, that balance has no basis in ecological science. This myth has no empirical support and it’s not scientific. The idea that if we leave things alone everything will be or better is not science based.

Yet this concept of a balance of nature, which does not have a scientific basis in ecology and biology, has come to underpin land management across Australia. It assumes, as with the Queensland Vegetation Management Legislation, that preventing active land management including hazard reduction burning is the best option. This myth is embraced by white fella culture, by lefties and greenies, and is alien to the Aboriginal way. In their Dreaming, wilderness was never a cause for fond nostalgia, but a land without custodians. It is so important that Australians come to understand this truth.

The Aboriginal philosophy of Dreaming and the laws derived from the Dreaming required active management and real responsibility for country. They required an understanding of country. The first Europeans commented again and again that about particular landscapes  of the land diary evoked the feelings of a country estate in England. This is documented How Aborigines made Australia a book that I would highly recommend to those who want to try and understand how we might manage our natural landscapes actively, including with fire.

My colleague Dr David Ward likes to explain how, before Europeans arrived, the Noongar people managed the dry forests and woodlands in the far south west of Western Australia, a region now prone to catastrophic wildfires. Local Indigenous Australians managed all this without fire trucks, water bombers, helicopters, television journalists, concerned politicians, the conservation council, hundreds of firefighters and the Salvation Army to give them breakfast.

At the peak of the recent bushfire crisis, Prime Minister Scott Morrison did say that there was a need for a Royal Commission into the killer bushfire season, and that summers had become hotter and drier. And this is also a reason used by fire chiefs for inadequate hazard reduction burning over recent decades.

I have charts which show that the first half of the last century was so much drier than the second half. The temperature data also shows that the 1930s were particularly hot and particularly dry. If you look at things like annual heatwave indexes for 1895-2015, as published by the US environment protection agency, this season was not unprecedented but occurred a long time ago in terms of that 1930s drought and the other hot years.

There’s a policy in place, for example, that says when you move from a Mercury thermometer in a Stevenson screen to an electronic probe, as has happened at 695 weather recording stations across Australia, you should actually check that the probes are recording as per the Mercury thermometer. But that’s not happening. At most places they take the probe out, they take the Mercury thermometer out on one day, they put in a probe the same day. The few places where we have parallel data, for example Mildura, the probes are recording 0.4 degrees hotter for the same weather.

Then there’s the issue of homogenisation. Even after the temperatures are measured, be it by probe or be it by Mercury thermometer, there is a remodelling to create the idea that we have, each year, one that is hotter than the last. That is the impression from the remodelled data.

In his book Dark Emu Bruce Pascoe takes Bill Gammage’s thesis, that land management by Australian Aboriginals was deliberate and sophisticated, to a new level. He talks about the sophistication of not only fire management but also of storing of grain, irrigation practices. Many people say that this is just extraordinary and could not be true. For me, however, I have spent so much time looking at the accounts of anthropologists. I have read how Indigenous Australians salted fish, stored grain and functioned with their complex system of governments. They had a sustainable harvest of wildlife in what was then a functioning Murray River estuary.

Perhaps, somewhat like the Bureau which remodels our temperature history to create a particular narrative in accordance with a particular agenda, perhaps the more things change, the more they stay the same.