As a living landscape, Australia has been through four massive changes during the past 600 million years or so. When it was part of Gondwana, the supercontinent held endless rainforests across a landmass that linked South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia, Zealandia and the Indian subcontinent. Then the emergence of arid habitats in the Miocene Era saw the creation of the red centre of the continent, the expansion of sclerophyll vegetation and the rise of the eucalypts, the emergence of fire and the shrinking and disconnection of closed forests and rainforests.
Then people arrived, who over thousands of generations created what can only be seen as a cultural landscape through long interaction between land, nature and human land management practises. And finally, just a few centuries ago, there was the brutal colonisation by Europeans.
Each of these events has had profound impacts on land and vegetation, and as climate change really starts to kick in, we are facing the prospect of longer and more intense fire seasons in a landscape that is attuned to fire and primed to burn.
We all remember the Black Summer of 2019–20. Exceptionally dry conditions, a lack of soil moisture and early fires in Central Queensland led to an early start to the bushfire season, beginning in June 2019. Hundreds of fires burned, mainly in the south-east, until rains arrived in May 2020. The fires burnt an estimated 24.3 million hectares, destroyed over 3,000 buildings, and killed more than 3 billion animals and at least thirty-four people. According to the University of Tasmania’s Menzies Institute, bushfire smoke was responsible for more than 400 deaths.
That was the summer that really brought home the reality that we are now living in the Pyrocene—the era of fire. The world has entered an unprecedented fire age, with fires now a reality pretty much everywhere, including places like Scotland where there is no natural ‘fire season’.
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That summer saw the first Code Red day in Victoria since 2010. A Code Red—which indicates the prospect of catastrophic fire conditions—was announced for 21 November. The night before, the Country Fire Authority’s chief officer Steve Warrington had warned, ‘If you live in those areas and a fire occurs, a fire will take your home. You need to make sure you are not there. Code Red says to us that we cannot control a fire if it starts. Move out tonight’.
That morning my brigade was on Strike Team roster, so we needed a crew and truck ready to go at a moment’s notice. Early in the day we started to hear fires being called in over the radio. Authorities were throwing everything they had at each fire—aircraft and ground crews—and most were quickly contained. One, at Mt Glasgow in our area in central Victoria, sounded serious. We heard the local crew request extra trucks, which rapidly went from ‘make tankers five’ to ‘make tankers twenty’. Immediately our pagers went off, we raced to the truck and took off to the fire.
The state was ready to burn that day. It was already oppressively hot. As we drove through town going Code 1 (lights and sirens) people stopped and applauded. We drove west across the Moolort Plains and I felt like we’d entered a sepia-tone photo from the nineteenth century. There was no colour left in the land or sky. The wind howled, and instead of the usual truck banter, we sat and listened to the dispatch channel on the radio.
We heard truck after truck arriving at the fire, then going off air as they switched to a local radio channel. We knew we were joining a big fight, but as we arrived at the fire-ground and saw groups of fire-fighters frantically refilling trucks from a creek and a wall of flame in front of us, the penny dropped. This was going to be epic.
We were directed to drive up a hill through a thick and tall forest that was, as we say, ‘fully engaged’—that is, burning from the grasses and shrubs to the canopy—and emerged on a hilltop where several people in shorts and singlets were defending a house by whacking at the flames with hessian sacks. For the first time on the whole drive, the team leader spoke and barked at two of us to get on the back of the truck and start attacking the fire. We saved the house, then went to get water. As we drove off I tossed a face mask to the woman nearest the truck and she waved her thanks. She stood in the ruin of blackened trees, bare ground and burnt-out sheds. It’s hard to explain how good you feel when you save someone’s house.
Then we were directed to the eastern flank of the fire: it had raced through a plantation and over a control line of fire trucks and was now burning haphazardly off a volcanic cone and down a slope into a dried wetland. Snakes wove through the tussock grass and rushes as we lugged heavy hoses around and worked to knock off the fire in a kind of whack-a-mole game as the fire emerged in jets from the vegetation. The only thing you could hear was the heavy sound of helicopters working above us and the whine of pumps on the trucks, pushing water up the hill. We fought like crazy for hours in 40°+ temperatures, drinking as much water as we could hold down and trying not to get knocked by heat exhaustion, knowing that a dry and gusty change was coming and the next town downwind of us was Hepburn Springs. If you’ve ever visited that pretty town that crowds around a deep valley and snaky hills thick with trees and old wooden houses, you know what a fire would do if it hit the place.
As a fire-fighter, this is the new reality. We have to expect longer and more intense seasons. As many volunteers leave and many brigades age, we will need a lot more people and resources in coming years.
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That summer the fires threatened forests along the eastern seaboard of the country, roaring across the mountains of the Australian high country, through the Upper Murray and along the coast, forcing mass evacuations from the beach at Mallacoota. Vast areas of fire-sensitive vegetation including older mountain ash and alpine ash, rainforests and subalpine communities like snow gums were burnt. The negative impacts of these fires will be felt for years to come, as will the impact of the intensive logging that was allowed in large sections of these forested areas.
From logging to burning?
In May 2023, the Andrews government announced that logging on public lands would end on the first day of 2024, offering a once-in-a-lifetime chance to ensure the long-term protection of these forests. The next twelve months will be critical for forested landscapes as First Nations custodians, regional communities, forest campaigners and scientists all contribute to a vision of how to interact with our forest landscapes beyond industrial logging. These forests exist within the cultural landscapes of the unceded sovereign lands of Traditional Custodians, and this fact has in turn created a tension between the aspirations of environmental activists, who have worked for decades to see an end to native forest logging and who generally want to see new national parks created to ensure the long-term protection of the forests, and those of Traditional Owners. Many of these forests have been ravaged by logging and have failed to regenerate, and will need long-term intervention and monitoring to ensure their survival, recovery and resilience to climate impacts.
First Nations people have expressed a range of views for the future, but generally operate through the lens that sees forests as part of a cultural landscape. The Taungurung, Traditional Owners of a significant part of the forested landscape now being considered, say that ‘All forests are places of people’.
They spell out the problems:
Taungurung people showed the invaders our Country and what was important to us only to have it stolen … [Now] Country is badly damaged. Right fire has gone. Nothing is in balance. Forests are stripped bare through logging or suffocated by neglect, choked and overrun with the wrong plants and animals. Fire is wrong. Everything is disturbed. No-one is managing Country properly and she is sick.
And for them the solution is the return of Country: ‘Forests will return to the care of Taungurung. Cultural practice and connection will heal Country and forests will thrive from right management’.
The forest wars continue on a new front
This moment of opportunity already feels murky. First Nations people and environmentalists have contrasting views of the future and no obvious way to resolve these differences. Those who want to see continued extractive use, such as hunting and prospecting, are getting organised to oppose national parks. And prescribed fire, sometimes called fuel reduction burning, has quickly emerged as a new front in the forest war. Prescribed burning can cause significant damage to forests through loss of habitat trees, and only temporarily reduces fire risk. Government fire-fighters are also targeting long-unburnt old growth forest, as it has been assessed by the Department as being of ‘extreme fire risk’. Old, long-unburnt forest supports the highest quality habitat and is rare and hard to find. It’s critical that these forests are protected from burning, but the Department’s fuel reduction operations have little or no ecological oversight.
The state environment minister seems disengaged. More than a year on from announcing the end of logging, the process is moving slowly, and some worry that land won’t be protected before the next state election. Likewise, the state Treaty process offers many opportunities for First Nations people, but the Liberal and National parties are likely to do what they can to wind back the clock and restart native forest logging if elected in November 2026.
Time is of the essence if we are to secure protection of the forests before the election. But we can only move ‘at the speed of Trust’ as environmental activists seek to build relationships and connection with Traditional Owner groups.
Comments
The 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria caused widespread devastation and the greatest loss of life from fire since colonisation.
Around 1927, Australian botanists started to divide the Australian vegetation into two classes in relation to fire. These were ‘pyrophytes,’ or ‘fire plants’ and ‘pyrophobes’ or ‘fire haters.’ Pyrophytes (eg eucalyps and acacias) were designed by Nature to burn, and actually came to depend on fire to clear out competing vegetation and to create a suitable ash-bed for their seedlings to grow in and thrive. Pyrophobes (eg the many species of the genus Casuarina sp.) went in the opposite evolutionary direction.
The late palynologist (student of fossil pollen) Gurdip Singh of the ANU, made an interesting discovery from a core sample he took from the bed of Lake George, NSW: “A study of an eighteen-metre core sample from Lake George (Weereewa), near Canberra, in the 1980s produced Singh’s most controversial assertion. Continuing with the interdisciplinary application of his palynological research, he posited that the presence of charcoal, dated from the last interglacial period (120,000 years ago), could be the result of Aboriginal burning practices. The figure dwarfed contemporaneous archaeological estimates of the duration of Aboriginal occupation of Australia, forty thousand years being the generally accepted figure at the time. He was aware of the contentious nature of the claim but saw no other explanation for the evidence of regular burning he found in the core. Later research, however, argued that his analysis had overlooked groundwater fluctuations that may have affected the stratigraphy, and therefore the dating, of organic and carbonaceous materials in the core.”
Singh also discovered that the lake bed at its deepest level sampled, showed the earliest dominant species to be of pyrophobic casuarinas, giving way at the 120,000 year level to pyrophytic eucalypts, and he put this down as likely due to the ‘firestick farming’ practices of (newly-arrived) Aborigines.
As a boy growing up on the outskirts of Sydney, I saw “Prevent Bush Fires’ posters everywhere. Understandably, farmers with their fences, sheds and built infrastructure, had a lot to lose even from ‘cool burns’ in the bush. So, they fought every small fire, only to prepare the fuel mass for the big, uncontrollable conflagration such as the 2009 ‘Black Saturday’ bushfires in Victoria, which caused widespread devastation and the greatest loss of life from fire since colonisation. And judging by the present fuel build up on places like Farrer Ridge in Canberra, nearby to where my wife and I live, it is all set to go again.