The dry summer/autumn season still has 4 months to run, and most of Australia is facing the highest ever-recorded temperatures, so danger still lurks. We have slashed all the grass around our house to make a firebreak and our gutters are covered so that sparks cannot get into the roof cavity - here in Australia that is how most buildings go up in flames during a bushfire.

Despite the enormous damage in contemporary-built Australia, in a sense fires are 'natural' in our landscapes because for 40,000 years Aborigines practiced 'firestick management' - burning forests and grasslands to improve conditions for their hunting and gathering. Over the centuries, the environment adapted to regular burning, and much of our native flora, from delicate ground orchids to huge eucalyptus trees, can only regenerate after fire since the seed casings need the heat of fire to crack open and release the seeds. No fire, no re-seeding.

With our changing use of the land we have new issues of fire management. We have created farms with fences and non-native livestock for which fire is often calamitous. But at the same time, many farmers also light 'controlled' cool fires in the winter - cool, because the undergrowth is wet, conditions are damp, and so the material is not highly inflammable, in contrast to the tinder dry conditions of summer and after the flush of Spring growth when millions of tonnes of new leaf and grass make the bush much thicker and much more combustible. Slow winter burns are designed to thin out the undergrowth to prevent major bush fire damage.

One problem for us is that eucalyptus trees contain a huge amount of oil, in summers this evaporates, and so we get huge fire 'storms' - a spark will travel a kilometre on the wind in front of a ground fire, hit a patch of evaporated oil and simply explode - perhaps 150 metres above the ground, with intense heat. Everything around is absolutely torched, and the trees below, still containing huge amounts of oil, also explode. So the fire moves at incredible speed - more than 100kms per hour, jumps firebreaks and roads, and even moats are useless to stop the blaze, often trapping people and firefighters in between the new outbreak. A 'hot' summer fire in Aussie is completely unpredictable and uncontrollable.

One of the key weapons is to try and back-burn, say 3-5 kilometres ahead of the fire front. Our firefighters start a fire that burns back towards the main blaze, against the wind. They will use a road or some other bare ground as the starting point, and set up a defence line of water trucks and firefighters to protect the bush on the other side from where they start the fire. Since the fire has to burn against the wind, it tends to be slow, and not reach great temperatures, although there is always the danger of a wind-blown spark crossing the defence line. As the backburn slowly moves towards the main fire, it increases the gap to the unburnt areas from just the width of the road initially until it is 3-5 kms wide of blackened, burnt-out land. Such back-burning travels slowly, is relatively ‘cool’, but removes most of the combustible material so that when it converges with the main fire they both simply go out. It is a scorched earth policy of different mode, and fuzzy logic in a sense – we set fire to the bush to stop the fire. But depending upon wind strength, we cannot always engage in back-burning as a defence mechanism: sometimes it is just too risky.

This then brings us to issues of ‘saving the wildlife’. Until about 40 years ago, farmers could burn their land at their discretion. Now they must apply for a fire burning license or face a substantial fine for illegal burning – and in many cases, their applications will be opposed by environmentalists and animal lovers, and permission will be refused. Where cities have expanded into the countryside (so-called ‘acreage’ blocks of 1-10 hectare which now surround most of our cities) and where there are small seaside towns and villages with second homes and retirees, this conflict is particularly acute. Any fire that does start risks being catastrophic but people complain of smoke, of air pollution, of ash staining their fences, of release of carbon monoxide and dioxide from burning. So the danger builds up yet they will not contribute to having the grass and blackberries and other undergrowth cleared by hand. Indeed, one of the headlines in this morning’s papers is that because farmers have been prevented from winter burnings, the fires here in Tasmania have been far more intense and able to spread far more quickly than in the past, their farm houses, barns and thousands of sheep and cattle have been lost, and they blame ‘city armchair environmentalists.’ I suspect there is a modicum of accuracy in this allegation. Human nature in all its fickle diversity . . . . . !

Our national parks for years have had a policy of winter cool burns to prevent devastating summer fires – but again, there is now growing opposition to this practice. The problem is that there is always destruction and death in any fire, and the ‘Bambi syndrome’ is starting to assert supremacy over ecological science so that even ‘natural’ fires started by e.g. lightning strikes, must be extinguished immediately. So increasingly even natural processes are not allowed to be natural any more. But the issue gets really complex in other ways as well.

A recent International Geographers’ Union conference paper that I presented last year cast an eye over some of these problems, an extract follows:

“This raises the problematic issue (amongst others) of just what constitutes ecological restoration, an issue which tends to be much starker in semi-urban locations than for isolated non-urban wilderness sites. It requires not only spatial boundaries but temporal boundaries to be identified and established, in the sense that restoration requires returning an environment to its previous state. But what is that ‘previous state’? How far back in time might we proceed to determine just what we have to do to restore the current situation to that desired ‘What-it-was-before’ state?

This can be perplexing as the example of the Townsville Town Common, North Queensland, Australia, illustrates. In 1992/93 I was engaged in researching an urban natural environment of 2,200 hectares called the Townsville Environmental Park, in far north Queensland (Sofield & Birtles 1993). Its iconic animal was the giant brolga or Australian crane and at the time of our original tourism environment management plan we recorded about 50 breeding pairs in the Wet (Monsoon) season and about 350 brolgas utilizing the Common in the Dry when surrounding wetlands had receded. However we noted that both numbers of breeding pairs and flocks had been steadily declining from the 1970s when there were more than 1000 brolgas there. A major factor in the declining population was a reduction in the staple food of the brolgas, the Bulkuru tuber caused by the invasion of a dense blanket of Para grass (Brachiaria mutica) that smothered the Bulkuru sedge and spread over the water, restricting the feeding and roosting areas of the brolgas. The question then was: Why had para grass spread to such a degree?

We found two answers. The first was that for at least 10,000 years the local Aboriginal tribe, the Wulgluru Kaba people, has used firestick management (controlled burning on a regular basis over centuries) to modify the landscape and enhance food security. This resulted in two main types of agronomized (man-made) permanent grasslands:

i) those that were burned with a cool fire after seeding to produce new growth that was particularly attractive to kangaroos, wallabies, wombats and some ground birds such as crested pigeons and several species of parrots which they hunted; and

ii) hot fires that bared the earth in order to facilitate access to tubers (Gammage, 2002).

In other words, the brolgas were there because humans had modified the environment and created an appropriate habitat for them. The regular burnings ensured that Para grass remained a minor part of the vegetation.

However, with European settlement in the 1860s the Aborigines were displaced, regular burning ceased and para grass began to increase. But the European settlers introduced cattle and an Act in the 1870s created the Townsville Town Common on the same basis as commons in England which were areas set aside specifically for livestock; and the cattle grazed the Para grass and prevented it from taking over. Brolga populations continued to frequent the area. In the 1980s some 30,000 international birders visited the Town Common since this urban natural area provided the easiest access to brolga viewing in Australia.

But then ecological science informed us that cattle had adverse environmental impacts - erosion, pollution of waterways, introduction of exotic weeds through their supplementary feed and droppings, and other habitat modification resulting in less grass for native animals such as kangaroos and wallabies. And so in the 1970s, when the Common was placed under the care of the Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection, on sound ecological science they removed the cattle under a statute that made it illegal to take livestock into the reserve. From that date the Para grass began its expansion and brolga numbers began to decline. For the past 20 years annual counts of the brolgas by the Townsville branch of Birds Australia each October have revealed a disastrous situation: since 1997 the maximum number of birds recorded in any one year has been just 18. In effect the Townsville Town Common has virtually lost its iconic bird (http://ozcranes.net/consv/town, accessed 2 June 2011).

The two obvious tools to control the Para grass and restore an appropriate habitat for the brolgas would be to reintroduce hot fire burning and/or cattle grazing. But both carry their own individual problems. Townsville has now grown to a population of about 250,000 and suburbs surround the Town Common, with the largest airport (both civilian and military) in north Queensland demarcating its southern boundary. There is strong public opposition to burning so close to residential built up areas, and atmospheric pollution would be inevitable. Burning would not be a one-off solution but would be required on at least an annual basis for several weeks each year. Grazing would also control the Para grass but it would need to be continuous and as noted cattle are illegal and would reintroduce adverse environmental impacts. Both ‘solutions’ are required to deal with an original landscape that has been modified by man, the first solution relating to modification by Aborigines over a 10,000+ year period to return the landscape to a brolga-friendly habitat, and the second solution relating to modification by European settlers over the most recent 150 year period. In terms of rehabilitating the Town Common to a brolga-friendly environment, can one civilization take precedence over the other? And who would decide?

At one level, the answer would be simple: Aboriginal land management practices should be re-introduced. Given their longevity in the region the Town Common as it existed before the arrival of European settlers could be argued as its natural state. But contemporary cultural values which are now embedded in a residential urban landscape where environmental standards incorporate concern about climate change and the need to reduce man-made pollutants, over-ride acceptability of the ancient technology: burning with its attendant smoke and air-borne ash pollution is not acceptable. Colonial cultural heritage with its grazing of cattle in protected areas however is also unacceptable to our contemporary culture where our scientific knowledge base provides stringent guidelines for management of our nature reserves. In short the ecological policy of the Town Common to restore the environment on the one hand and its cultural heritage policy to conserve, enhance and promote the indigenous, colonial and contemporary cultural heritage on the other, all establish boundaries where incompatibilities between the different strategies rather than harmony tend to dominate and render it difficult to return the Town Common to its original state. In addition to the brolga, any other bird species and animals may be observed in their natural habitats behaving naturally (as wildlife) in the Common without human intervention, yet ironically current ‘best practice’ management strategies have ensured the virtual disappearance of the Common’s iconic bird.”

Whole books have been written about fire management in Australia, and thousands of papers. We, Australians are in turn fascinated by and turned off from bush-fires, and often it tends to be an emotional topic of discussion. What is certain is that it is a complex situation and not easily solved.