Kinglake-350 (17 page)

Flame Trees

Its beginnings were hardly auspicious.

Thirty million years ago, as the continent was rafting towards the equator, warming up and drying out, a scraggly, hard-leafed, sun-loving weed made its first appearance in a clearing on the edge of the rainforest.

French botanist Charles Louis L’Héritier de Brutelle would eventually give it the name ‘eucalypt’. The word comes from the Greek—
(
eu
), meaning ‘well’, and
(
kalyptos
), meaning ‘covered’, a reference to the plant’s bud structure: there is initially a covering on the calyx that conceals the flower.

Ever the most opportunistic of colonisers, the eucalypt flourished in the changing environment. It was able to thrive just about anywhere—in the alps, the desert, on coastal strips or river margins, in rich and poor soil alike—and came to dominate the continent of its birth in a way that no genus does any other continent. At the time of Captain Cook’s arrival in 1770, it accounted for some 70 percent of the Australian flora.

Its partner in that colonisation, the secret of its success, was fire. What water is to the rainforest, fire is to the sclerophyll. In the moist conditions of a rainforest, leaf litter and debris decompose. When the climate is dry and the soil poor, it is fire that carries out the essential task of recycling litter. The eucalypt captures nutrients released by fire and stores them for later use. It takes advantage of fire to purge hostile microbes from its vicinity, to encourage better percolation of ground water and to open up areas to sunlight, thus allowing its seedlings to choke out less sun-tolerant rivals. Fire mobilises vital nutrients such as molybdenum, evaporates leachates in the litter.

Eucalypts constantly shed material—leaves, bark, branchwood— that is both nutrient and fuel. The leaves are ready to burn at every stage of their existence. They burn when they are green because of their oil. They burn when they are brown and fallen because of their rich mineral content. You could even say they burn in the air: the distinctive blue haze that shimmers over the Australian bush on summer days is caused by vaporising eucalypt oil, and it is extremely volatile. Those who have the misfortune to witness a bushfire up close often describe the sky as being on fire, fraught with flares and fireballs, flaming whirlwinds. What they are describing is clouds of eucalypt vapour released by the heat, whipped by the wind, igniting.

In recent years there has been a significant decline in the health of the temperate eucalypt forest. Most observers automatically assumed that the drought was responsible, but a major study now suggests that a significant factor in that decline has been the reduction of burning.

The displacement of traditional burning has meant a thickening of the understorey vegetation—tea-tree, acacia, she-oak—which has brought about a revolution in the arrangement of the forest, with changes to light intensity, ground temperature, litter accumulation and soil processing. It also leads to an accumulation of nitrogen, the binding up of nutrients such as phosphorous and copper and a reduction in the mycorrhizal fungi essential for the uptake of water. The nutrient and water stress means that the eucalypt becomes vulnerable to insect attack and disease. And when fire does come, it can be so intense that it will actually kill the genus it once nourished, or at least weaken it in favour of tea-tree and acacia. The high-intensity fire will also be much more devastating for the wildlife that makes its home in the eucalypt forest.

‘There are hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest in decline throughout Australia because of the inappropriate use of fire,’ comments botanist Neil Davidson.

In essence, without fire the eucalypt cannot thrive. Fire is not only useful to the genus among which we build our homes, it is essential to it.

There was a long period before the eucalypt came to dominate the continent during which it carried on a kind of protracted guerrilla warfare with the rainforest. As recently as 80,000 years ago, the
150
scleromorphs and the ancient gymnosperms were evenly balanced. But the sclerophyll eventually won out, and its final victory came some 38,000 years ago—a date that roughly coincides with the arrival of humans. The two events were clearly connected.

A Salamander Race

When John Stokes, an English naval officer who was with Darwin on the
Beagle
, stepped ashore in Van Diemen’s Land in 1841, his most memorable impression of the indigenous inhabitants was of their relationship with fire. He has left a vivid description of a hunting party in which he captures the shouts and the smoke, the beating with green boughs, the scuttling wallabies:

The dexterity with which they manage so proverbially a dangerous agent as fire is indeed astonishing…The whole scene is a most animated one, and the eager savage, every muscle in action and every faculty called forth, then appears to the utmost advantage, and is indeed almost another being.

Australia had always burned, but with the arrival of its first humans, the burning intensified. Many historians of the Australian environment argue that Aboriginal people did more than just enter the new environment, they manufactured it. The question is hotly debated: did Aboriginal people actually transform the land with fire, or did their arrival simply coincide with climate changes that increased its volatility?

What is not in doubt is that the fire stick was the most important implement in the Aboriginal toolkit. With it they transformed the country: they opened forests, encouraged grasslands, cleared trails. Wherever they went those first inhabitants of the land carried fire sticks: they used them for hunting and cooking, for medicine, warmth and signalling, for working their weapons, repelling pests. Anthropologist Rhys Jones estimates that a single family grouping of perhaps thirty people would be responsible for some five thousand fires a year.

Fire hallowed every stage of the Aboriginal existence, from the ritual smoking of the newborn baby to the lighting of the funeral pyre from which the dead were propelled into the cycle of rebirth. Initiates ran a gauntlet of fire, and the association of flame with entry into the adult world would have remained with the boy for life. The dreamings were replete with images and tales of fire. The people sang of its origins as a gift from the ancestral beings and passed on to their youth admonitory tales about respecting its power and maintaining its vitality.

For tens of millennia, Aboriginal people behaved thus: refining, polishing, utilising the pyric patterns inherent in the land. The cornerstone of their firecraft was their alliance with the eucalypt, an alliance so powerful that it volatilised much of the country, exaggerating its flammability.

That most erudite of explorers, Ernest Giles, was to report: ‘The natives were about, burning, burning, burning; one would think they were of the fabled salamander race, and lived on fire instead of water.’

Non-indigenous Australia knows something of this, but does not fully understand it. There is a perception that Aboriginal people burned just for the sake of it, that their torches were random and indiscriminate. It’s a view that has profound implications for the present: ‘The blackfellers burned that bush; we need to as well.’

But Aboriginal burning, whether to light a campfire or a landscape, was an extraordinarily complex procedure. It was far from indiscriminate and never random. The practice would have varied immensely, regulated by a web of dreamings that was a reflection of the accumulated knowledge for each locality. The burn was limited, persistent, a mosaic, and scrupulously planned.

Listen to an elder from Arnhem Land describing his people’s preparations for a burn:

…there is one kind of burning which is men’s business alone—and it is dangerous work. This is the fire drive mainly for macropods (the larger ridge-dwelling species like
kalkberd, djukerre, kandakidj, karndayh
) rather than the agile wallabies (
kornobolo
) which favour monsoon jungle and thicker forest.

When the most senior landowner from the area where the fire drive (
kunj ken manwurrk
—fire for kangaroo) is to be held sees that the time is getting close, he will talk with his senior
djunkay
. They sit down and discuss how the
djunkay
will organise the drive—where it will be held, when it will be held (expressed by reference to floral seasonal indicators and moon phases) and who will be invited.

The decision to put spark to fuel was based upon an intricate knowledge of the country and its cycles, a knowledge acquired and refined over tens of thousands of years. They knew the intricacies of the weather, which plants needed fire, which didn’t. The questions of when and where to burn, of who was to be involved and how the vegetation would respond, were matters of serious consideration. Those who transgressed—whose fires, for instance, roared into somebody else’s country, or flared at the wrong time—were likely to be severely punished.

Rhys Jones comments on the practice of the Gidgingali people of the Northern Territory:

People used their fires accurately, aiming them into a natural break such as an old fire scar or a swamp, timing the fire so that the predictable wind changes later in the day would blow them back onto their own track, or so that evening dew would dampen them down.

These people were, in the phrase coined by Jones, ‘firestick farmers’. Their farming was locally based, firmly controlled, carefully crafted towards the requirements of the biota. Areas that supported food plants such as the yam daisy or the hyacinth orchid would have been burnt with precision, to encourage their growth, as would the grassy woodlands that attracted grazing animals with their sweet green blades.

Fire was viewed as an element of the natural world, one that was there to be lived with, accommodated, exploited.

The disastrous megafire was not unknown. A. P. Elkin describes a myth of the Ularaga people of Lake Eyre that features a figure named Yigaura, responsible for dangerous fires that can travel underground and spring up far ahead; it sounds very much like spot fires whipped by the wind to fall kilometres ahead of a crowning ridgetop fire.

But deliberate, broad-scale burning of the type we see now, the burning of thousands of hectares to protect settled communities, would not only have been unnecessary. It would have been unthinkable.

Burn Everything about Us

Around two hundred years ago a new coloniser arrived, one who preferred his landscapes tamed and his combustion in an industrialised form. The British found the vegetation monotonous, the topography impenetrable and the animals bizarre. The platypus was an essay in contradiction, the marsupials bounded about on two legs, the dogs didn’t bark. And the fires had a ferocity that their own green land had never known.

The interlopers quickly learned its potency. In one early encounter, when Cook’s
Endeavour
was beached for repairs, the gentleman naturalist Joseph Banks paused to admire the deftness and facility with which Aboriginal people worked their fire—and then found himself running for his life as the resulting inferno drove him and his men back to the boats.

But indigenous fire, for all its subtlety and tradition, stood no chance before the brute strength of European firepower. In the blink of an eye, it seemed, the newcomers were swarming all over the continent, softening it up for their animals and plants, hefting axes, pushing ploughs—and dropping matches. Banks’ reaction to that first attack was a portent: the next time they made land, he determined, they would ‘burn everything about us before we begin’.

Those who came after him took up that advice with an enthusiasm born, perhaps, of some primordial memory of the African plains. They didn’t burn just to defend themselves, they burned to attack. In what they quickly recognised as a primed and volatile environment, fire became an offensive weapon not just against the original inhabitants, but against the land itself.

They burned freely, those first settlers: they burned to clear the land of its pestilential scrub and towering trees, to uncover its mineral wealth, to foster the succulent ‘green pick’ for which their cattle tongued. Sometimes they burned just to relieve the boredom. For many a lonely stockman or shepherd, the vision of all that wild energy emerging from his fingers to devour mountains must have been a welcome relief from the extraordinary monotony of existence. One can imagine a mob of rum-stoked wild colonial boys galloping about in their cabbage tree hats and laughing with wild delight as the fire flickered in their eyes.

The shifting frontier between black and white Australia was aglow with the blaze of innumerable fires, large and small, measured and wild. Fire scientist Phil Zylstra, looking at the evidence of burning in the Alpine area through dendrochronology—the science of examining rings on trees to study events in the tree’s history— concludes: ‘All fire regimes increase dramatically in frequency following European occupation.’

He suggests that fire frequency in the high country during the early European years was five to seven times greater than it had been during the period of Aboriginal management. Furthermore, he adds, ‘European settlers missed entirely the subtlety of indigenous fire practices.’ Seeing the native species as messy, ugly and obstructive, ‘they interpreted indigenous fire management as nothing more than Aboriginal attempts to get rid of all the rubbish and make the landscape look the way it was supposed to.’

This attitude to the land manifested itself in two almost contradictory ways. When settlers first moved into an area, they burned hard and they burned often. The burn-off was their most significant technique for clearing land. As Robert Clode, a senior inspector with the Forest Commission, commented to the Royal Commission into the disastrous Victorian fires of 1939: ‘We have inherited a point of view from our ancestors. They had to clear the land and they regarded every tree as an enemy. Unfortunately, we still have many people who feel that way.’

The pioneers fired whole mountains, river valleys, scrubby plains, vast tracts of what they regarded as wilderness. But then, as settlement developed and population grew more dense, they were forced to change tack: they now tried to eradicate fire, particularly in the places they valued most—close to homesteads, trails or towns, or on the prime pasture they wanted for their cattle.

Neither approach worked. Each brought disruptive new elements into an ecology of which fire was an informing principle. Each brought its own dangers. Stephen Pyne writes of the pastoralists:

In some regimes they changed the timing of fire; in some they introduced fire where it had previously not existed; in others, by consuming the fine fuels, they denied routine fire. Everywhere, during their initial passage, they inadvertently promoted larger, more unpredictable bushfires.

Frequent and indiscriminate burning led to the rampant growth of volatile pyrogenic species—bracken, sedges—which made future fire more likely. An account by forester D. M. Thompson illustrates the conundrum soon faced by graziers in Victoria’s Cann Valley:

Only constant burning kept the fuel hazards sufficiently under check to allow settlement. But more fire only encouraged the flammable scrub that served as fuel, which demanded control by more fire…Their ‘extensive use of fire’…was thus a double-edged sword. It made the valley habitable, yet it compelled still more fire, which stimulated flammable fuels, which made it more likely that, on some gusty day, a fire would inevitably escape.

One old timer put it more colloquially:

Sixty, seventy years ago I shepherded a thousand sheep out there. I could let ’em all feed out and I could stand in one place and watch the whole flock. Only twenty years ago I could walk out there and shoot a kangaroo a hundred yards off, easy. Now if I walked in there twenty yards and didn’t watch where I was going I’d bloody get lost.

So rampant pyromania ultimately increased the danger to the fledgling communities. But the attempt to banish fire altogether led to the build-up of fuel which, when the big one came—and come it must—would explode with devastating intensity.

The high-intensity fire will also have a horrific effect upon the native fauna. ‘Frequent low-intensity burns create a mosaic that fosters heterogeneity and biodiversity—it could leave gullies for animals to hide in, or boundaries across which animals can forage,’ says Neil Davidson. ‘The wildfire, on the other hand, burns everything.’