The Burning Question

Across the road from my place on Lemon Tree Passage on the New South Wales central coast is an overgrown council reserve. Thirty years ago it was open grassland with a few scattered gum trees. Every couple of years I’d go down to the fire station, get a drip-torch from the truck and burn it off. This kept us safe from summer bushfires. Today it can’t be done despite constant requests to council and extensive environmental studies. Native Vegetation legislation, brought in by a green-leaning Labor government, has all but stopped traditional burning off. This policy is the root cause of the devastating firestorms of recent times.

The rot set in during the 1980s with environmentalism all the rage. Politicians, keen for the marginal green vote, quickly climbed on board.

Consider these statistics from my own brigade’s records: Lemon Tree Passage bushfire brigade averaged fifteen burn-offs a year in the decade of the 1970s, around nine a year during the 1980s, and a mere one or two a year ever since. This dramatic fall and the subsequent fire fuel build-up, would be mirrored in all other areas of New South Wales and other fire-prone states as well.

Perhaps the attitude of these times can be best summed up by former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr. In May 2000, reacting to an energy authority which had slashed scrub beneath powerlines in the Snowy Mountains, he made his infamous statement: “We’ll throw the book at them …” The company was prosecuted but the slashed easement saved the power lines when bushfires ravaged the forest. The cleared easement also provided the only green grassy area for the surviving kangaroos to graze after the firestorm had passed.

In 1993 the old Bushfire Act was amended, together with a corporate-culture makeover of the Rural Fire Service. Localised fire management was removed and a centralised, autocratic bureaucracy replaced it.

The new structure was seen at brigade level as a recipe for disaster, as the complex web of rules and procedures put a virtual end to fuel reduction burns. The summer fires were to get bigger and more destructive.

Even more worrying was the muzzling of the volunteers. They were no longer to speak to the media and only press releases by salaried RFS spin doctors were fed to the public.

It all seemed cut-and-dried for the government of the day, the greenies and, of course, the Fire Commissioner and his entourage of yes-men. But it didn’t quite work out the way they planned.

Bushfire fighters fall roughly into two categories. Around the big cities and urbanised coastal towns they are, in many ways, something of the “weekend warrior” type, more likely to do what they are told by the paid careerists in the RFS hierarchy. Tony Abbott, a serving member of a Sydney brigade, would probably be one such volunteer.

In the more remote towns and west of the Great Divide you get the real firefighters. These are bushmen who have used fire as a tool of trade for generations. Summer fires mean a loss of stock, crops, fences and property. These people can’t afford to be burnt out, and refuse to pander to greenies or be dictated to by remote fire control officers shuffling papers in offices. Time and again they ignore authority in the interest of the wider community and their judgments prove to be right.

Barry Gibson from Molong was one such person. A bushfire in a nearby national park had him worried. He took to the air in a light plane, realised that he had do something, so he rallied the local volunteers and backburned into the night. He was told not to do this by the fire controllers in Orange some seventy kilometres away. Despite saving the day he was unceremoniously stood down when the fire controllers turned up the next morning.

Val Jeffery did the same sort of thing. He sensed that a bushfire in the Brindabella Ranges was coming his way. A lifetime of experience told him to get in a backburn. This he did while those in charge dithered. He saved his tiny town of Tharwa as the firestorm swept into Canberra, killing four people and destroying 500 homes.

Val has little time for a politicised Rural Fire Service structure. Here is how he sees it: 

Australian society cannot continue to condone the escalation in scale and damage from wildfires because the culture has changed from mitigation to suppression. And suppression has developed into an industry that has to have big and bigger fires to expand. Sad but true. 

After years of frustration, grassroots firefighters decided to act. For years, not allowed to fire up the scrub, they had sat around their stations while perfect burn-off days came and went. They comprised 98 per cent of the firefighting force but were excluded from the decision-making process. The same bureaucrats who refused permission to burn off expected them to face the unfightable firestorms the following summer. They’d had enough. On May 17, 2003, a statewide meeting saw volunteer firefighters vote overwhelmingly for change. Salaried fire control officers were to be excluded from their Volunteer Fire Fighters’ Association and they refused to fight fires in national parks where trail clearing and burn-offs had not been done. Since then their VFFA has grown in membership and constantly lobbies for change. They also publish Volunteer Fire Fighter Magazine, in which ordinary firefighters tell it like it is without fear of vilification from the RFS hierarchy. 

It was in Victoria, however, that the neglect of preventive bushfire mitigation on a massive scale was to be exposed. In February 2009 a firestorm unleashed the raw energy of 660 Hiroshima bombs. Some 173 Australians died and 2000 homes were lost. The green lobby group suddenly fell silent. Bob Brown, the self-appointed guru of all things green, muttered something about climate change before wandering off to save the whales. Very few journalists got in under the story, most of them going for the human interest stuff which boosts television ratings and pumps up newspaper sales. Not so Roger Franklin. His book Inferno: The Day Victoria Burned (Slattery Media, 2009) backtracked to the time before the disaster and revealed why a catastrophe was inevitable. He turned to a scientist for some answers.

Six years before Black Saturday, experienced bushfire researcher David Packham was invited to the Nillumbik area, north-east of Melbourne, by the local ratepayers’ association. They had pleaded with their council for years to do something about the fuel loadings but to no avail. They thought an independent expert might sway them. He didn’t.

Packham stated: “The mix of fuel, unsafe roads and embedded houses will all ensure that when a large fire impinges on the area a major fire will result.” He also predicted that the 30-tonne-per-hectare ground fuel loading would see a bushfire out of control within fifteen minutes of ignition. “Nillumbik is living on borrowed time,” he stated. Six years down the track everything he said proved to be true. 

Arguably, the eastern seaboard of Australia is the most bushfire-prone place on the planet and to understand why wildfires have increased in both frequency and intensity we need to go back to the times of the first recorded incidents. Almost every explorer commented in his writings on the many fires which were constantly working their way through the countryside. They include:

Governor Arthur Phillip (1788):

“The natives always make their fire, if not before their own huts, at the root of a gumtree, which burns very freely and they never put a fire out when they leave the place.”

Captain John Hunter (1788):

“They [the Aborigines] … set the country on fire for several miles extent; this, we have generally understood, is for the purpose of disturbing such animals as may be within reach of the conflagration … We have also had much reason to believe, that those fires were intended to clear that part of the country through which they have frequent occasion to travel; of the brush and underwood, from which they, being naked, suffer very great inconvenience …”

Ernest Giles (1872):

“The natives were about, burning, burning, ever burning; one would think they were of the fabled salamander race, and lived on fire instead of water.”

Perhaps it is best summed up by Geoffrey Blainey in Triumph of the Nomads: 

The burning of large areas of Australia at least once in every few years was not simply the result of breakaway fires. In many regions the hunters seem to have set fire to grasslands for the same reason farmers plough and fertilise the soil. They were cultivators, using fire in the hope of producing lush grass for the game when the next showers fell. 

What is also known is that their firestick ways changed the vegetation. After the Aborigines came to the continent, fire-reliant species began to dominate the country. The white settlers learned from them the importance of fire in managing the land, but as the Aborigine put down his firestick to become a fringe dweller, the art of controlled fire management became somewhat lost. It still survives in the outback.

With the dramatic decrease in burning, the unchecked growth and subsequent fire fuel build-up saw wildfires get bigger and uncontrollable. As early as 1890 A.W. Howitt noted this change in the landscape: “at present time these [trees] have so much increased that it is difficult to ride over parts”.

Some of the biggest bushfires of recent years were in national parks. Failure to use friendly fire to preserve them has cost us dearly. Sweeping firestorms in the Victorian and Snowy Mountains high country have seen colonies of rare flora and fauna obliterated, the loss of topsoil and aquatic life destroyed as rivers of eroded sludge choked the streams.

Noeline Franklin, an academic and CSIRO researcher, comes from a long line of high country graziers dating back some 160 years. Her extensive writings and broadcasts tell of an alpine landscape that was once cool-burn-managed by the summer cattlemen. All was in harmony until control came under the umbrella of the National Parks and Wildlife Service. This government department is now referred to by locals as “The National Sparks and Wildfire Service”, a reference to their refusal to adopt the practice of mosaic pattern burning which kept ground fuel at low levels and wildfire at bay.  

If we turn to the environmental groups which hold disproportionate influence on policy-making, we find that they invariably consist of student activists, middle-aged housewives, political climbers, opportunists and the insane. They are anti-everything and when it comes to the controlled burning of the bush they will have none of it. Local government councils Australia-wide are stacked with them. The Nillumbik Shire is a classic case of extreme environmentalism with fatal consequences. They love fancy words. In refusing residents permission to clear trees on their land they said that the council “preferred future high-hood character”.

Approval was needed to mow nature strips in front of houses, residents were fined if they gathered roadside firewood, and the council argued about chopping two dead branches off a tree in a public park. After Black Saturday, none of these rules applied as there was nothing left to worry about.

With carbon credits very much in the news it is interesting to see how cool burning can, by default, protect the environment. Research by David Packham, Phil Cheney and Roger Underwood conclusively proved that a low-impact burn-off of the bush was carbon-neutral. On the other hand, a high-intensity bushfire released a huge amount of carbon into the atmosphere.

Using this knowledge, mining companies in the far north employ Aboriginal people to burn off their leases and claim carbon credits. It is notable that the north-west of our continent has the least trouble with bushfires. By continuing the black man’s traditional firestick ways fuel, the element that controls a fire’s intensity, is kept to a minimum.

Despite the loss of over seventy houses in Western Australia recently, that state has a far better approach than the do-nothing attitude of its eastern counterparts. The Australian gave detailed coverage of the fires and put the loss of property down to fuel loadings in adjacent parks and private land as well as a local government fire management policy based on flawed research.

But experienced bushfire researcher Phil Cheney praises their targeted prescribed burning: 

The telling statistic to me is the [WA] land managers in the forested areas spend somewhere between 21 per cent and 25 per cent of their time on fire management. WA has a huge commitment and it works. 

So what of the future? I have been involved in the bushfire business in one way or another for the past thirty years. Nothing changes. After every disaster there is an inquiry of some sort with recommendations that are rarely implemented. Politicians want greenie votes so they take soft options. Green local government bodies refuse point blank to burn the bush while fire authorities and national park structures are more about empire building and career enhancement than land management. Reactive firefighting has proved to be futile and authorities more or less admit it. Their new “catastrophic” fire warning index puts responsibility back on the individual—and lets them off the hook. When these signs come into effect it’s a matter of “get out or get burnt out”. Nobody takes responsibility and life just rolls along.

Geoff Walker is president of the Lemon Tree Passage Bushfire Brigade and author of White Overall Days (a bushfire memoir), 2002.