We need to bring some historical discrimination to debates about what was new about the Black Summer. In particular we need to look at the history of firestorms, the distinctive fatal fires of southeastern Australia that culminated in named days of terror: Black Thursday 1851, Red Tuesday 1898, Black Sunday 1926, Black Friday 1939, Black Tuesday 1967, Ash Wednesday 1983 and Black Saturday 2009. How did the summer of 2019–20 relate to this grim lineage?

Black Thursday, 1851

The British colonists of Australia came to “this continent of smoke” from a green, wet land where fire was cosseted and coddled. They had rarely, if ever, seen free-ranging fire at home for it had been suppressed and domesticated over generations. They had so tamed fire that they had literally internalised it in the “internal combustion” of the steam engine.

These representatives of the industrial revolution brought to Australia many new sources of ignition, yet they also introduced houses, cattle, sheep, fences and all kinds of material belongings that made them fear wild fire. And they found themselves in a land that nature and human culture had sculpted with fire over millennia, a land hungry for fire and widowed of its stewards by the European invasion. It was an explosive combination. They did not know what the bush could do.

The foundational firestorm of Australian settler history occurred a few months after the residents of the Port Phillip District heard the news that British approval had been given for their “separation” from New South Wales. The impending creation of a distinct colony, soon to be called Victoria, was a cause for much celebration in Melbourne in November 1850, and a five-day holiday was declared.

Three months later, on Thursday the sixth of February 1851, in the soaring heat of a scorching summer, terrifying fires swept across the forests, woodlands and farms of the southeast. “Separation” had been celebrated with hilltop bonfires and now it was sealed by a scarifying firestorm. It was right that fire should forge the political identity of the most dangerous fire region on the planet.

“Black Thursday,” wrote the visiting British writer William Howitt, who arrived the year after the fire, “is one of the most remarkable days in the annals of Australia.” “The whole country, for a time, was a furious furnace,” he reported, “and, what was the most singular, the greatest part of the mischief was done in one single day.” He then went on to make some startling parallels. “It is a day as frequently referred to by the people in this colony as that of the Revolution of 1688 in England, of the first Revolution in France, or of the establishment of Independence in the United States of America.” In Australia, Howitt seemed to be suggesting, it was nature more than politics that would shape our identity.

Black Thursday, “the Great Bush Fire,” was a revolution of a kind. It was the first of the Black Days to be named by Europeans, the first recorded firestorm to shock and humble the colonists. Although the newcomers had quickly learned to expect bushfires, this was something else; its magnitude and ferocity terrified all who experienced and survived it.

At first the Melbourne Argus could hardly credit the reports from the bush, but then the breathless testimony kept tumbling in. Drought, high temperatures and ferocious northerly winds fanned the flames into a giant conflagration. People rushed to fight with green boughs “as in ordinary bushfires,” but all were forced to flee. Flames leaped from tree to tree like lightning; the fire careered “at the rate of a horse at full gallop”; sheep, cattle, horses, kangaroos and smaller native animals hurtled before it and hosts of birds were swept up in it: “the destruction of the wild creatures of the woods, which were roasted alive in their holes and haunts, was something fearful to contemplate.” People “went to bed, or lay down (for many did not dare go to bed), in a state of the greatest suspense and doubt as to whether they should see daylight next morning.”

Four days after the fire, Frances Perry, wife of the Bishop of Melbourne, recorded that “in some parts of the country the people are completely panic-struck. They thought, and well they might, that the world was coming to an end.”

The words of survivors painted a picture strikingly similar to the grand panorama of Black Thursday (1864) by artist William Strutt. For his imagery he drew on reportage as well as his own experience of the heat, smoke and fear of the day. Over three metres in breadth, the painting depicts what Strutt called “a stampede for life,” where people and animals, eyes wild with panic, flee southwards in terror.

Stampede for life: William Strutt’s Black Thursday, February 6th 1851 (1864). Click here to enlarge. State Library of Victoria

The “Great Bush Fire” of 1851 was the first large-scale firestorm to terrorise the British colonists. It wreaked its havoc just a decade and a half after British pastoralists invaded the Port Phillip District of New South Wales. Sheep, cattle and people had swiftly moved into the grasslands of the southeastern corner of the continent, but in 1851 the invaders had only recently outnumbered Aboriginal peoples and Indigenous burning regimes persisted in some places.

Because of its timing on the cusp of this change, Black Thursday was an intriguing amalgam of old and new Australia. It was an event embedded in the unravelling ecological and cultural rhythms of the southeastern corner of the continent. But Black Thursday was also an outrageous outbreak of disorder, the first schism in the new antipodean fire regime, a portent of things to come.

Red Tuesday, 1898

European settlers feared and suppressed fire near their properties and towns, and misjudged its power in the bush. But it did not take them long to begin to use fire for their own purposes, even if clumsily and dangerously. “The whole Australian race,” declared one bushman, has “a weakness for burning.” The language the bush workers used — “burning to clean up the country” — was uncannily like that of Aboriginal peoples.

In the drier forests of the ranges (but generally not the wet mountain ash forests, which had less grass), graziers used fire as Aboriginal peoples had done: to keep the forest open, to clean up the scrub, to encourage a “green pick,” and to protect themselves and their stock from dangerous bushfire. But, unlike Aboriginal peoples, the newcomers were prepared to burn in any season. And the legislative imperative for settlers was to “improve” the land they had colonised — and “improvement” first meant clearing. The Australian settler or “pioneer” was a heroic figure depicted as battling the land and especially the trees.

This fight with the forest assumed theatrical dimensions in South Gippsland, where each summer neighbours gathered to watch the giant burns that, they hoped, would turn last year’s fallen and ring-barked forest into this year’s clearing. They needed to establish pastures as quickly and cheaply as possible. Small trees were chopped, undergrowth was slashed, and sometimes large trees were felled so as to demolish smaller timber that had previously been “nicked,” thereby creating, as one settler put it, “a vast, crashing, smashing, splintering, roaring and thundering avalanche of falling timber!” The slashed forest was left to dry until the weather was hot enough for the annual burn, the frightening climax of the pioneer’s year.

In the mostly wet sclerophyll forest of the South Gippsland ranges, some of it mountain ash, it was often hard to get a “good burn” because of the heavy rainfall and the thick scrub’s resistance to wind. Farmers therefore chose the hottest summer days for these burns, “the windier and hotter the day the better for our purpose.” These settlers of the world’s most fire-prone forests awaited the most fatal days.

A “good burn” could so easily become a firestorm and in Gippsland in 1898 it did. “Red Tuesday” (1 February) was the most terrifying day of the “Great Fires” that year, a whole summer of fear and peril. Intense clearing fires had accompanied ringbarking, ploughing, sowing and road-making in Gippsland for two decades, but settlers were still shocked by the Great Fires, which were like nothing they had ever experienced. Although they were stunned by the speed and violence of the firestorm, the new farmers understood that it was a product of their mode of settlement. Their principal pioneering weapon had run amok. As farmers burned their clearings into the encircling edges of the wet, green forest, they might have guessed that soon the fires would link up and overwhelm them.

Just as Black Thursday was memorialised in a great painting so was Red Tuesday captured in a grand work of art. When historian Stephen Pyne surveyed fire art around the world, he found Australian paintings to be exceptional for their gravitas, their capacity to speak to cultural identity or moral drama. “Bushfires did not simply illuminate the landscape like a bonfire or a corroboree,” he wrote, “they were the landscape.”

This is vividly true of John Longstaff’s depiction of Gippsland, Sunday Night, February 20th, 1898. Longstaff was born on the Victorian goldfields a decade after Black Thursday and travelled to Warragul to witness the long tail of the 1898 fires. Whereas Strutt’s painting was intimate in its terror and chaos, showing us the whites of the eyes of people and animals, Longstaff evoked the drama through its magisterial setting. Human figures are dwarfed by towering mountain ash trees and the immensity of the bush at night, and appear encircled and illuminated by fire. Flames lick at the edge of the clearing and a leaping firestorm races towards us from a high, distant horizon.

Longstaff exhibited his grand painting in his Melbourne studio in August of that year, lit by a flickering row of kerosene-lamp footlights. Gippsland, Sunday night, February 20th, 1898 is a painting of a landscape, and it focuses on the forest as much as the fire and the settlers. “The Great Scrub,” the enemy of the settlers, is a powerful presence in the panorama; it inspires as much awe as the flames. The people in the painting, who are seeking to “settle” this fearful forest, are enclosed and entrapped by its vast darkness. The erupting bushfire is both a threat and a promise.

Burning off

Firestorms became more frequent in the twentieth century, as sawmilling and settlement moved more deeply into the mountain forests of Victoria. The greatest of them came on Friday 13 January 1939, the grim climax of a week of horror and a summer of fire across New South Wales, South Australia, the Australian Capital Territory and Victoria. In that week, 1.4 million hectares of Victoria burned, whole settlements were incinerated, and seventy-one people died. Sixty-nine timber mills were engulfed, “steel girders and machinery were twisted by heat as if they had been of fine wire,” and the whole state seemed to be alight.

Judge Leonard Stretton, who presided over the royal commission into the causes of the fires, pitied the innocence of the bush workers, immigrants in a land whose natural rhythms they did not yet understand:

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.

Stretton investigated the settlers’ culture of burning, taking his commission to bush townships and holding hearings in temperatures over 100°F (38°C). His shocking finding was that “These fires were lit by the hand of man.” Yet rarely were they malevolent arsonists. Mostly they were farmers and bush workers, and their fire lighting was casual and selfish, sometimes systematic and sensible, and increasingly clandestine and rebellious. They were settlers burning to clear land and graziers firing the forest floor to promote new grass. Burning was a rite — and a right. They were landowners who, when they saw smoke on the horizon, threw a match into their home paddock.

Settlers felt “burning off” helped to keep them and their neighbours safe. Travellers to the Yarra Valley in the first decades of the twentieth century wouldn’t have been surprised to see “half a dozen fires on the sides of mountains.”

When the Forests Commission of Victoria was founded in 1918, it assumed control of the state forests and forced graziers out if they did not stop burning their leases. Forest officers, charged with conservation of timber, tried to suppress fire, but farmers and graziers believed that their burning kept the forest safe from fire by keeping fuel loads down. George Purvis, a storekeeper and grazier at Moe in Gippsland, explained to the 1939 royal commission that everybody used to burn off many years ago: “We could meet a few of our neighbours and say ‘What about a fire’… Nowadays, if we want a fire we nick out in the dark, light it, and let it go. We are afraid to tell even our next door neighbour because the Forests Commission is so definitely opposed to fires anywhere, that we are afraid to admit that we have anything to do with them.”

As a result, Purvis explained, the bulk of farmers did not burn their land as much as they wished. And so, as fires gathered force in the week before Black Friday, people desperately burned to save their property and their lives. It was considered better to burn late than never, and these fires (indeed “lit by the hand of man”) “went back into the forest where they all met in one huge fire.”

Perhaps fire was so much a part of the Australian landscape and character that it could never be eliminated or suppressed. It had to be accepted and used, and perhaps it could be controlled. The 1939 royal commission signalled a new direction. In his recommendations, Stretton gave official recognition to a folk reality and tried to give focus and discipline to the widespread popular practice of burning to keep the forest safe. He recommended that the best protection against fire was regular light burning of undergrowth at times other than summer. Only fire could beat fire.

Vivid word-picture: the report of the 1939 royal commission.

As Stephen Pyne observed, this “Australian strategy” was in defiant counterpoise to the North American model of total fire suppression. The strategy was reinforced by another royal commission, this one following the 1961 Dwellingup fires in Western Australia, which endorsed systematic, expansive, hazard-reduction burning of the jarrah forests of the southwest.

It took time for official “controlled burning” to supplant unofficial “burning off.” In 1967, a Tasmanian firestorm provided dramatic evidence of the persistence of rural traditions of burning. On 7 February, which became known as Black Tuesday, a “fire hurricane” stormed through bushland and invaded Hobart’s suburbs, coming within two kilometres of the CBD. The fire caused the largest loss of life and property on any single day in Australia to that time.

Black Tuesday had strong elements of Black Friday 1939 embedded within it. Of the 110 fires burning on that Tuesday, ninety started prior to the day and seventy were uncontrolled on the morning of the 7th. Significantly, only twenty-two of the 110 fires were started accidentally; eighty-eight were deliberately lit. In other words, bushfires were common, deliberate and allowed to burn unchecked. “No one worried about them too much,” reflected Tasmanian fire officer John Gledhill, echoing Stretton.

Tasmania’s 1967 Black Tuesday fire, with its heart in the expanding suburbs of Hobart, signalled a new type of firestorm in Australian history. The bush had come to town. But the town had also come to the bush, insinuating its commuters and their homes among the gums. This event initiated an era of fires that would invade the growing urban interface with the bush: Ash Wednesday 1983 (Adelaide and Melbourne); Sydney 1994; Canberra 2003, when more than 500 suburban homes were destroyed in the nation’s capital; and Black Saturday 2009, when only a wind change prevented the Kilmore East fire from ploughing into Melbourne’s densely populated eastern suburbs.

During the second half of the twentieth century, casual rural fire lighting gradually became criminalised. The law was enforced more strongly and public acceptance of open flame declined. Fire was gradually eliminated from normal daily experience as electricity took over from candles, kerosene and, eventually, even wood stoves. Firewood for the home became more recreational. “Smoke nights” — once part of the fabric of social life and an especially masculine ritual — went into decline as smoking itself became a health issue. Instead of being a social accompaniment and enhancement, smoking was pushed to the margins of social life, even becoming antisocial.

It had been different in the interwar years: in 1939 the Red Cross, “concerned about the health of the bush fire refugees,” appealed to the public for “gifts of tobacco.” Even for victims of fire, smoke was then considered a balm. On Black Sunday 1926, Harry King, a young survivor at Worrley’s Mill where fourteen people died, crawled scorched and half-blinded for four kilometres through the smoking forest to tell his story in gasps. At the end of his breathless account, he opened one badly burned eye and whispered: “I’m dying for a smoke, dig.”

The ferocity of “the flume”

The years of the most fatal firestorms were burned into the memories of bush dwellers: 1851, 1898, 1926, 1939, 1967, 1983, 2002–03 and 2009. Stretton’s vivid word-picture of Black Friday 1939, which became a prescribed text in Victorian Matriculation English, joined the paintings by Strutt and Longstaff in forming a lineage of luminous fire art.

The most frightening and fatal firestorms have all roared out of the “fire flume.” That’s what historian Stephen Pyne called the region where hot northerly winds sweep scorching air from the central deserts into the forested ranges of Victoria and Tasmania. In the flume, bushfires strike every year, firestorms every few decades. Firestorms are generated when spot fires ahead of the flaming front coalesce and intensify, even creating their own weather. They entrap and surround. Firestorms are bushfires of a different order of magnitude; they cannot be fought; they rampage and kill. Their timing, however, can be predicted. They come at the end of long droughts, in prolonged heatwaves, on days of high temperatures, low humidity and fierce northerly winds.

The firestorms are intensified by particular species of trees — the mountain ash and the alpine ash — that conspire to create a raging crown fire that kills and then reproduces the whole forest en masse. These tall ash-type eucalypts need a hot, fast-moving crown fire, upon which their regeneration uniquely depends, to crack open their seeds. The ecology of the forest depends on firestorms, so we know they also happened under Aboriginal ecological management.

In the last 200 years, the clearing, burning and intensive logging of the new settlers exaggerated and intensified the existing rhythm. In many remaining forest districts firestorms have come too frequently for the young ash saplings to grow seed, and so towering trees have given way to scrubby bracken and acacia. Those two colonial paintings captured the fatal, colliding elements of the Victorian firestorm: the peril, horror and panic of the people, and the indifferent magnificence of the tall, fire-hungry trees.

In 2009, I resisted use of the word “unprecedented” to describe Black Saturday because it was the familiarity of the firestorm that horrified me. Although the event was probably exacerbated by climate change, the recurrent realities were more haunting. As I wrote in Inside Story at the time, “the 2009 bushfires were 1939 all over again, laced with 1983. The same images, the same stories, the same words and phrases, and the same frightening and awesome natural force that we find so hard to remember and perhaps unconsciously strive to forget.” As a historian of the fire flume, I was disturbed by Black Saturday’s revelation that we had still not come to terms with what we had already experienced.

In the months following Black Saturday (2009), I was invited to assist the small community of Steels Creek in the Yarra Valley to capture stories of their traumatic experience. Working with historians Christine Hansen, Moira Fahy and Peter Stanley, I wrote a history of fire for the community that presented the ubiquity and sheer repetitive predictability of the phenomenon in that valley. One bushfire after another, year in year out. As we set out this rhythm, a deeper pattern emerged, which was the distinction in this region between bushfires and firestorms. The ferocity of the firestorms was generated not necessarily by trees near a settlement but by forests more than ten kilometres away, perhaps thirty or forty kilometres away. Survival in summer is not just a matter of clearing the gutter but also knowing what forests live in your region.

It has proven too tempting and too easy for Australians to overlook or deny the deep local history of the Victorian firestorm. Sometimes Aboriginal mosaic burning, which was applied to so many drier woodlands across the continent, is assumed to have been used in the wet ash forests too. For example, in his book Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe argued that “a mosaic pattern of low-level burns” was used in mountain ash forests and suggested that wild fires in the forests affected by Black Saturday “were largely unknown before the arrival of Europeans.” But this cannot have been the case, for when Europeans arrived they found mature, even-aged ash forests, the very existence of which was evidence of historical, powerful crown fires.

For example, botanist David Ashton identified one old stand of mountain ash at Wallaby Creek as dating from a firestorm in 1730. Furthermore, ash forests would have been destroyed by frequent fires, and low-level burns are not feasible in such a wet ecosystem. Aboriginal peoples would have used low-level cool burns to manage the drier foothill forests but not the ash forests themselves, for mature mountain ash trees can easily be killed (without germinating seed) by light surface fire. Woiwurrung, Daungwurrung and Gunaikurnai peoples used the tall forests seasonally and probably burned their margins, maintaining clearings and pathways along river flats and ridgetops. They were familiar with the forest’s firestorms and would have foreseen and avoided the dangerous days.

Even six generations after Black Thursday 1851, we stubbornly resist acknowledging the ecological and historical distinctiveness of the Victorian firestorm. It is astonishing that the Black Saturday royal commission cranked through 155 days of testimony but failed to provide a vegetation map in either its interim or final report. In one of my submissions to the inquiry, I drew the commission’s attention to this absence in their interim report, but it was not remedied. Senior counsel Rachel Doyle was more interested in pursuing the former Victorian police chief Christine Nixon about her haircut on 7 February than in directing the commission’s attention to the unusually combustible forests through which the fires stormed.

The royal commission went some way towards being more discriminating about the variety of bushfire, weather, topography and ecology, but not far enough. Forests featured in the commission’s report mostly as “fuel.” “The natural environment,” the commissioners explained in opaque bureaucratic language, “was heavily impacted.”

Thus the firestorm’s origin in the ecology of the forest was ignored even by a royal commission. Or people explained it away by interpreting such outbreaks as entirely new, as products of either the cessation of Aboriginal burning or of anthropogenic climate change. Indigenous fire and global warming are highly significant cultural factors in the making of fire regimes, but both work with the biological imperative. It is clearly hard for humanity to accept the innate power of nature.

The same tendency led Victorians up the garden path of fire policy. The most shocking fact about Black Saturday 2009 was that people died where they thought they were safest, where they were told they would be safest. Of the 173 people killed on Black Saturday, two-thirds of them died in their own homes. Of those, a quarter died sheltering in the bath.

As I wrote in Inside Story in 2009 and 2012, the “Stay or Go” policy was a death sentence in Victorian mountain communities in firestorm weather. Although the policy guided people well in many areas of Australia and had demonstrably saved lives and homes elsewhere, it misled people in this distinctively deadly fire region to believe that they could defend an ordinary home in the face of an atomic force. And it was this confidence in the defensibility of the home and denial of the difference of the firestorm (coupled with a faith in modern firefighting capacity) that underpinned the lack of warnings issued by authorities to local residents about the movement of the fire front on Black Saturday.

For much of the history of these forests, including their long Aboriginal history, no one believed their homes were safe in a firestorm. Evacuation was the norm. Sometimes the elderly and vulnerable were extracted by force from their homes by caring relatives and friends. Most people fled of their own accord. A “safe place” was a creek, a bare or ploughed paddock, a safely prepared or quickly excavated dug-out, a mining adit or railway tunnel, or just somewhere else. If you were trapped at home, there was an art to abandoning it at the right moment. The acknowledged vulnerability of homes made it essential for those caught in them to get out. And people in those earlier times were more inclined to look out the window, go outside and watch the horizon, sniff the air.

In 2009, the internet was a killer. The private, domestic computer screen with its illusion of omniscience and instant communication compounded the vulnerability of the home.

The Black Summer

The fire season of 2019–20 was completely different in character from Black Thursday (1851) and its successors. It might be compared best with the alpine fires of 2002–03, which were also mostly started by lightning in remote terrain and burned for months.

Coming after severe drought and more record heatwaves, the summer of 2019–20 tipped fire patterns into widespread rogue behaviour. It is not unusual for Australians to have smoke in their eyes and lungs over summer — the Great Fires of our history are remembered not only for their death tolls but also for their weeks of smoke and dread. But in the summer of 2019–20 the smoke was worse, more widespread and more enduring, the fires were more extensive and also more intense, NSW fires started behaving more like Victorian ones, and the endless “border fire” symbolically erased the boundary anyway.

Australia was burning from the end of winter to the end of summer, from Queensland to Western Australia, from the Adelaide Hills to East Gippsland, from the NSW south coast to Kangaroo Island, from the Great Western Woodlands to Tasmania. Everywhere, suddenly, bushfire was tipping into something new.

As spring edged into summer and the fires worked their way down the Great Dividing Range and turned the corner into Victoria, people who remembered Ash Wednesday (1983) and Black Saturday (2009) braced themselves. January and February are traditionally the most dangerous months in the southern forests. But this time central Victoria’s good winter rainfall and wetter, cooler February prevented the flume from ripping into full gear.

Therefore an unusual aspect of the fire season of 2019–20 was that these Great Fires did not explode out of the firestorm forests of Victoria and Tasmania. It was one reason why the death toll for such extensive and enduring fires was relatively low; they did not break out in the most fatal forests. Another reason was that Black Saturday had led to a new survival policy: to leave early rather than to stay and defend. Early evacuation thus became the enforced strategy of authorities well beyond the firestorm forests. Again, a regional and ecologically specific strategy became generalised as a universal policy. But at least this time it erred on the side of caution and surely saved lives.

The sheer range, scale, length and enduring ferocity of these fires made them unprecedented. The blackness of the named days of Australia’s fire history describe the aftermath of the sudden, shocking violence of a firestorm; it evokes mourning, grief and the funereal silence of the burned, empty forests. Black and still.

But when the fires burn for months, a single Black Day morphs into a Black Summer. There seemed never to be a black day-after; instead the days, the weeks, the months were relentlessly red. Red and restless. The colour of danger, of ever-lurking flame, of acrid orange smoke and pyrocumuli of peril. The smoke killed ten times more people than the flames. The threat was always there; it was not over until the season itself turned — and only then was it declared black. But the enduring image is of people cowering on beaches in a red-orange glow, awaiting evacuation. I think of it as the Red Summer.

Living with fire

A long historical perspective can help us come to terms with “disasters” and even ameliorate them, but most significantly it can also enable us to see beyond the idea of fire as disaster. There will be more Black Days and, under the influence of climate change, longer Red Summers. We have to accept and plan for them, like drought and flood. We should aim to survive them, even if we can’t hope to prevent or control them. We must acknowledge the role of global climate change in accelerating bushfire and urgently reduce carbon emissions. And we should celebrate, as I think we are already beginning to do, the stimulus that bushfire can give to community and culture.

In the quest for how to live with fire, Indigenous cultural burning philosophies and practices have much to offer all Australians. Sometimes we can even see a fired landscape (of the right intensity and frequency) as beautiful or “clean,” as Aboriginal peoples do. We are slowly learning to respect cultural burning and its capacity to put good fire back into a land that needs fire. But we must go further and actually allow Indigenous fire practitioners to take the lead again.

Victor Steffensen, a Tagalaka descendant from North Queensland, has written a humble and hopeful book, Fire Country (2020), which is as much about negotiating the bureaucratic hierarchies of fire power as it is about fire itself. As his mentor, Tommy George, declared in frustration, “Those bloody national park rangers, they should be learning from us.”

But cultural burning is not the same as prescribed burning. Sensitive controlled burning might, in some ecosystems, render the land safer for habitation, although it has proven difficult to achieve required levels in a warming world. And in a landscape of transformed ecologies, greatly increased population and rapidly changing climate, it is unreasonable and dangerous to expect Indigenous peoples to make the land safe for the proliferating newcomers; it would again set vulnerable people up to fail. Anthropologist Tim Neale has argued that the settler “dream of control” places an “impossible burden” on Aboriginal peoples, trapping them again within an idealised expectation of unchanging ancient behaviour.

Renewing and reviving Indigenous fire practices is important, first and foremost, for human rights, native title and the health, wellbeing and self-esteem of First Nations communities. We are fortunate that an additional opportunity presents itself: for a rapprochement between the exercise of Indigenous responsibility to Country and modern Australia’s need for labour-intensive and ecologically sensitive fire management on the ground. There is much creative promise in that partnership, and developing it will take time, patience and respect.

Throughout 2019, fire experts pleaded with the federal government to hold a bushfire summit to prepare for the dreaded summer, but the prime minister refused, fearing that acknowledging the crisis would give credence to climate action. Yet at the end of the summer he established another retrospective bushfire inquiry, the fifty-eighth since 1939. Many of the sensible, urgent recommendations of those earlier commissions have been ignored and await enactment. Rather than spending millions of dollars on lawyers after the flames, the nation would do better to spend a few thousand on environmental historians to distil and interpret existing, hard-earned wisdom.

Australian scholars of fire need to work on at least three temporal scales. First, there is the deep-time environmental and cultural history of the continent and its management over millennia. Second, there is the century-scale history of invasion, documenting the changes wrought by the collision of a naive fire people with the fire continent. And third, there is the long future of climate-changed nature and society. Black Thursday was the first firestorm after the invasion, an ancient ecological cycle with new social dimensions. Red Tuesday, Black Sunday and Black Friday were exaggerated by settlement and rampant exploitation. Black Saturday was more like the past than the future, a frighteningly familiar and fatal amalgam of nature and culture. But the Red Summer of 2019–20 was a scary shift to something new, fast-forwarding Australians into a new Fire Age. •

This is an abridged version of “The Fires: A Long Historical Perspective,” Tom Griffiths’s contribution to The Fires Next Time: Understanding Australia’s Black Summer, edited by Peter Christoff (Melbourne University Publishing, 2023).

The post Continent of fire appeared first on Inside Story.

Curtin’s famous statement came in late December — and I will quote it because it is meet and right so to do. The prime minister said: “Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with Britain.”

With those carefully chosen words — “inhibitions,” “pangs” and “kinship” — Curtin acknowledged that this geopolitical pivot carried an emotional cost for Australians. The population was still overwhelmingly of British descent and “home” was Britain, even for many of those born here. Curtin’s words therefore implied a national coming of age, a relinquishment of childhood dependence, a step into maturity. A British dominion was asserting an independent foreign policy. Australia, facing peril, was insisting on a direct, unmediated relationship with the United States of America.

When we think of Curtin, it is so often this declaration that comes to mind for it represents a cool Australian assessment of geopolitical realities at a moment of existential threat for the nation. My predecessors as lecturers in this series have often revisited this declaration too. They have analysed the geopolitical world of Curtin and its transformation through the decades that followed: superpower rivalry and the cold war, the reconstruction of postwar society, the strengthening American alliance, the rise of China, empire and decolonisation, the reckoning with a settler nation’s colonial past, Australia’s defence and security in a globalised world. These are all extrapolations of the world Curtin knew; he either played a part in bringing them about or might reasonably have foreseen them. His words echo down the years with enduring meaning.

But there is a dimension of the future that he could not possibly see or even imagine. Indeed, it has blindsided us all. That is my subject tonight.

When John Curtin died in office in 1945, his legendary status was confirmed and his words gained even more weight. The year of his death became another turning point: the loss of a revered prime minister, the end of the second world war, a new era of social reconstruction in which Curtin had invested, the beginning of a long economic boom such as Australia had not known since the 1880s, and the unleashing of the atomic bomb.

The atomic era was born eleven days after Curtin’s death. On 16 July, the world’s first nuclear device was exploded at the Trinity test site in New Mexico. Stratigraphers identify geological eras by residues in rocks, and 1945 is marked in sediment by the abrupt global geological signature of nuclear fallout.

Curtin was acutely conscious of Australia’s place in the world. “World-mindedness” was a common phrase in the 1940s, expressing an aspiration for peace and understanding after decades of war. Curtin also thought globally, for he was a citizen of an empire that spanned the Earth, a pacifist and a politician keenly aware of the international labour movement. He was conscious that a land at the bottom of the globe could not isolate itself from an increasingly connected world. He revived and extended immigration and joined international negotiations leading to global institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. His colleague, Dr Evatt, would later serve as president of the United Nations General Assembly.

So there was world-mindedness and there were global social and political perspectives, but did Curtin ever think in terms of the planet, a living, breathing, vulnerable Earth? Probably not. This requires environmental thinking in deep time and deep space, a consciousness that has evolved in our own lifetimes. It’s a perspective and an understanding that Curtin and his contemporary leaders could not have foreseen or even imagined.

John Edwards writes beautifully in the first volume of his book, John Curtin’s War (2007), of Curtin’s sense of time and space. Edwards reconstructs Curtin’s regular commute across the Nullarbor — his crossing of the vast treeless plain by train from Perth to Canberra, a journey that took him five nights and four days on six different trains with five changes of gauge. He describes Curtin and his fellow passengers smelling “the faint dry fragrance” of saltbush and mallee scrub “as it had been for millions of years.” When stretching their legs during the stops, they walked the bed of an ancient sea and “crunched fossils of sea creatures underfoot.” Edwards reminds us that “In its entire length the Trans-Australian track did not cross a single permanent stream of water.”

What a path to the parliament! There were 500 kilometres of “precisely straight track” surrounded by desert where Curtin “could see the circle of the plain around him from horizon to horizon.” At night through the right-hand windows he could pick out the points of the Southern Cross. He preferred not to fly, and anyway, the air services were neither frequent nor comfortable. But later during wartime, when he was forced to fly the Atlantic, Curtin told his secretary that he placed his hopes of making the crossing in the skill of the pilot, the rotation of Earth, and God Almighty. That is, human ingenuity, the steady old reliable planet, and God.

It is that view of the steady old reliable planet, the unchanging Earth, that has been disrupted in our lifetimes. How has our understanding of the world — the planet — changed since John Curtin’s death?

In the first decades of the twenty-first century we are living in “uncanny times,” weird, strange and unsettling in ways that question nature and culture and even the possibility of distinguishing between them. The modern history of the Western world — the Renaissance, the expansion of European peoples across the globe, the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the dawning of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution — these are chiefly stories of the separation of culture from nature; indeed, they are stories of the mastery of culture over nature. Now in our own time we find nature and culture collapsing into one another all around us. No wonder it feels uncanny.

The Bengali writer Amitav Ghosh uses the term “uncanny” in his book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016). For him, the word “uncanny” captures our experience of what he calls “the urgent proximity of non-human presences.” He’s referring to other creatures, insects, animals, plants, biota, the very elements themselves — water, earth, air, fire — and our renewed and long-forgotten sense of dependence upon them.

The planet is alive, says Ghosh, and only for the last three centuries have we forgotten that. We have been suffering from “the Great Derangement,” a disturbing condition of wilful and systematic blindness to the consequences of our own actions, when we are knowingly killing the planetary systems that support the survival of our species. That’s what’s uncanny about our times: that we are half-aware of this predicament yet also paralysed by it, caught between horror and hubris.

We inhabit a critical moment in the history of Earth and of life on this planet, and a most unusual one in terms of our own human history. To understand the implications of the present, we have to learn to think in deep time.

It’s very hard for us humans to comprehend or even imagine deep time. If you think of Earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, that is, the distance from the King’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand, then one stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases all of human history. The discussion of deep time is full of these sorts of metaphors — human history as the last inch of the cosmic mile, the last few seconds before midnight, the skin of paint atop the Eiffel Tower. Metaphor is possibly the only level on which we can comprehend such immensities of time.

In the last couple of decades we have developed three powerful historical metaphors for making sense of the ecological crisis we inhabit. One is that we live in the Sixth Extinction. Humans have wiped out about two-thirds of the world’s wildlife in just the last half-century. Let that sentence sink in. It has happened in less than a human lifetime. This is an extinction rate a hundred to a thousand times higher than was normal in nature.

There have been other such catastrophic collapses in the diversity of life on Earth, five of them sudden shocking falls in the graph of biodiversity separated by tens of millions of years, the last one in the immediate aftermath of the asteroid impact that ended the age of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. We now have to ask ourselves: are we inhabiting — and causing — the Sixth Extinction? In 2014 the American journalist Elizabeth Kolbert wrote an influential book called The Sixth Extinction, and she subtitled it An Unnatural History. It is unnatural because the Sixth Extinction involves, to some extent, our consciousness and intent.

Another metaphor for the extraordinary character of our times is the idea of the Anthropocene. This is the insight that we have entered a new geological epoch in the history of Earth and have now left behind the 12,000 years of the relatively stable epoch known as the Holocene, the period since the last great ice age. The new epoch of the Anthropocene recognises the power of humans in changing the nature of the planet, its atmosphere, oceans, climate, biodiversity, even its rocks and stratigraphy. It places humans on a par with variations in Earth’s orbit, glaciers, volcanoes, asteroid strikes and other geophysical forces.

There is debate about exactly when the Anthropocene began, but one definition is that we were first jolted into the new epoch by the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, when we began digging up and burning fossil fuels. That brilliant and profligate exploitation of a finite, buried resource underpinned population growth and economic expansion — and it also unleashed carbon on a massive and accelerating scale and began changing the atmosphere of the planet.

Another date given for the beginning of the Anthropocene is around 1945, the year of Curtin’s death. It was, as we’ve seen, the beginning of the atomic era. It also initiated an exponential shift in the impact of humans on the planet. In the mid twentieth century, the human enterprise exploded dramatically in population and energy use and rapidly began to outstrip its planetary support systems. World population, water use, tropical forest loss, ocean acidification, species extinction, carbon dioxide and methane emissions, fertiliser consumption and so on, all soared after 1950. This turning point is known as the Great Acceleration.

So I’ve talked about the Sixth Extinction and the Anthropocene. And there is a third potent metaphor for the moment we inhabit. It concerns the history and future of fire. It suggests that we are entering not just the Anthropocene but also a fire age that historian Stephen Pyne has called the Pyrocene. The planet is heating due to human greenhouse gas emissions and it is heating so quickly that it threatens to tip Earth into an escalating cycle of fire. In other words, we are entering an extended fire age that is comparable to past ice ages.

Let’s take a moment to think about those ice ages.

Some 2.6 million years ago, Earth entered a period of rhythmical ice ages — a geological epoch called the Pleistocene — and during this epoch average global temperatures dropped 6–10°C and ice sheets at the poles extended dramatically across Eurasia and North America. These repeated glaciations were harsh and demanded innovation and versatility; they were a selective pressure on evolution and promoted the emergence of humanity on Earth. Throughout the Pleistocene, the ice ages were punctuated by brief warmer periods known as interglacials, which generally lasted about 10,000 years.

We are living in an interglacial right now; geologists have separated it off from the Pleistocene and called it the Holocene, which means “recent.” But it is really part of the same rhythmic pattern that has prevailed since we evolved. We humans are creatures of the ice. The Pyrocene — the fire age — is something we’ve never seen before. The Pyrocene threatens to knock Earth out of the steady planetary rhythm that has seen the birth of our own species.

How do we know about these ancient rhythmic ice ages? By reading the rocks, of course, but now also by studying the ice itself. I’m fortunate to have visited both of Earth’s ice caps, and the most awesome one is definitely ours, the southern one, Antarctica. I twice voyaged south with the Australian Antarctic Division, on the second occasion at the invitation of the Australian government to mark the centenary of Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911–14. After a long wait for a break in the weather, we held a ceremony on the ice at the historic huts, the place Mawson called “the home of the blizzard.” Through the years of Curtin’s political life, Antarctica was becoming a primary site for Australia’s world-mindedness, and in 1959 our nation was one of the original twelve signatories to the Antarctic Treaty, which was effectively the first disarmament treaty of the nuclear age.

Antarctica is where nine-tenths of the world’s land ice resides. Seventy per cent of Earth’s fresh water is locked up in that ice cap. That’s a discovery humans made in my lifetime. Antarctica is not only the coldest and windiest continent; it is also paradoxically the driest — and it is the highest. It has the highest average height of any continent because it is a great dome of ice four or five kilometres thick that has built up over millions of years. In the 1950s we discovered that the driest of all continents is actually a vast elevated plateau of frozen water. The implications of that discovery are immense: it means that world sea levels are principally controlled by the state of the Antarctic ice sheet. If the southern ice cap melted, oceans would rise by more than sixty metres.

As we enter the Pyrocene, Antarctica is vulnerable and fragile, more brittle than we expected. This year the expanse of winter sea ice around Antarctica diminished dramatically below its average by the size of Western Australia. The continent of ice is a precious glistening jewel that holds the key to our future and to our past. It’s a giant white fossil, a luminous relic, a clue to lost ages: it enables us to travel through time to the Pleistocene Earth. The ice is an amazing archive. Embedded in an ice cap are tiny air bubbles from hundreds of thousands of years ago. When you drill into an ice cap kilometres thick, you can extract a core that is layered year by year, a precious archive of deep time. I think of ice cores as the holy scripts, the sacred scrolls of our age.

The deepest Antarctic cores currently retrieve 800,000 years of climate history. Right now, the search is on for the first million-year ice core, and Australia is involved in the quest.

In the 1990s, a long 400,000-year Antarctic ice core was extracted from the inland ice sheet. It produced a rhythmic, sawtooth graph of past ice ages, revealing the heartbeat of the planet. The brief peaks on the graph represented warmer interglacials; the extended troughs were the cold ice ages. The ice core charted four full cycles of glacial and interglacial periods and established that the carbon dioxide and methane concentrations in the atmosphere moved in lockstep with the ice sheets and the temperature. It’s the barometer of the planet’s health — a graph of its nervous system — through hundreds of thousands of years.

Ice cores also revealed that present-day levels of greenhouse gases are unprecedented during the past 800,000 years. The level of carbon dioxide in the historical air bubbles has leapt since the Industrial Revolution, and especially since 1950. So, before Antarctica was even seen by humans, it was recording our impact. And it was this glimpse of the deep past as revealed in the archive of ice that shocked people into a real sense of urgency about the climate crisis.

These three metaphors — the Sixth Extinction, the Anthropocene and the Pyrocene — are historical concepts that require us to travel in geological and biological time across hundreds of millions of years and then to arrive back at the present with a sense not of continuity but of discontinuity, of profound rupture in our own time. That’s what Earth system science has revealed: it’s now too late to go back to the Holocene. It may even be too late to hang onto the Pleistocene, the long epoch that birthed our species. We’ve irrevocably changed the Earth system and unwittingly steered the planet into an uncertain future; now we can’t take our hand off the tiller. We have to use our awesome power wisely.

The metaphors of deep time that we’ve been considering have some visual counterparts in deep space that have also emerged in the last half-century. In 1968, the historic Apollo 8 mission launched humans beyond Earth’s orbit for the first time, out and across the void and into the gravitational power of another heavenly body. For three lunar orbits, the three astronauts studied the strange, desolate, cratered surface below them and then, as they came out from the dark side of the Moon for the fourth time, they looked up and gasped:

Bill Anders: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!

Frank Borman: Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.

They did take the unscheduled photo, excitedly, and Earthrise became famous, perhaps the most famous photograph of the twentieth century, the blue planet floating alone, finite and vulnerable in space above a dead lunar landscape. Frank Borman said, “It was the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life.” And Bill Anders declared, “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

A few years later, in 1972, a photo taken by the Apollo 17 mission and known as The Blue Marble became one of the most reproduced pictures in the world, showing Earth as a luminous breathing garden in the dark void. Earthrise and The Blue Marble had a profound impact on environmental politics and sensibilities.

Within a few years, the American scientists Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock put forward “the Gaia hypothesis”: that Earth is a single, self-regulating organism. In the year of the Apollo 8 mission, Paul Ehrlich published his book The Population Bomb, an urgent appraisal of a finite Earth. During the years of the Moon missions, British economist Barbara Ward wrote Spaceship Earth and Only One Earth, revealing how economics failed to account for environmental damage and degradation, and arguing that exponential growth could not continue forever.

Earth Day was established in 1970, a day to honour the planet as a whole, a total environment needing protection. In 1972, the Club of Rome released its controversial and enormously influential report The Limits to Growth, which sold more than thirteen million copies and went into more than thirty translations. Authors Donella Meadows and Dennis Meadows wrestled with the contradiction of trying to force infinite material growth on a finite planet. The cover of their book depicted a whole Earth, a shrinking Earth.

Two decades later, on Valentine’s Day 1990, the Voyager spacecraft was tracking beyond Saturn, six billion kilometres away, when it unexpectedly glanced over its shoulder. Again, Voyager was not programmed to look behind as it journeyed into the unknown, but scientists decided to take a risk and commanded the spacecraft to look back. And so we have a picture of Earth as a mere speck of dust in space, an image that astronomer Carl Sagan called Pale Blue Dot. “Look again at that dot,” wrote Sagan. “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”

These images from outer space of the unity, finiteness and loneliness of Earth helped escalate planetary thinking. From a colossal integration of Earth systems data came a keen understanding of planetary boundaries — thresholds in planetary ecology — and the extent to which the human enterprise is threatening or exceeding them. Three identified thresholds have already been crossed: changes in climate, biodiversity and the nitrogen cycle. At least we now understand our predicament even if we are perilously slow to act. The fossil fuels that got humans to the Moon now endanger our civilisation.

Now let’s bring this story back home to our place on this Earth. Australia is uniquely exposed to the grim, rough edges of these new world narratives. Shockingly, we are leading the world into the Sixth Extinction. Modern Australian history is like a giant experiment in ecological crisis and management. Ecologists working in Australia today often feel like they are ambulance drivers arriving at the scene of an accident. The southwest of Western Australia, for example, is one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots and it is experiencing an exceptional loss of habitat. It is the site of what literary historian Tony Hughes-d’Aeth has called a “radical disappearance,” “an extinction event on a grand scale.”

And we inhabit the continent of fire, the driest inhabited continent, a land of drought and flooding rains that is held in the grip of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, which means that Australia is on the frontline of the Pyrocene. Southwest Western Australia, with its sudden 30 per cent decline in rainfall since the 1970s, is one of the first places to experience the climatic shift expected with global warming. The Black Summer fires — when more than twenty-four million hectares of Australia’s southern and eastern forests burnt, including a million hectares of the Great Western Woodlands — were a symptom of our condition and became a planetary event. Smoke from those fires encircled the globe.

Furthermore, our modern history is a by-product of the Anthropocene. The British invasion of Australia was part of the age of empire and took place as the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum in England. Thus ancient Australia’s transformation into a colony coincided with the start of the fossil fuel era. The Endeavour was a repurposed coal ship. The new nation became highly dependent on fossil fuels, especially on coal, and in recent decades it drew world attention by persisting with the political denial of climate change. Modern Australia, we have to remember, was built on denial: the denial of Aboriginal sovereignty and cultural sophistication, the denial of frontier violence and warfare. At the recent referendum about the Voice, we witnessed a further national expression of denial.

But we have many opportunities here too. Our robust democracy, our active citizenship, our capacity for creativity and innovation, our impressive community leaders (many of them young, most of them women), our unique and inspiring environment, our destiny as a renewable energy superpower. And the continent’s deep Indigenous human history. In just a generation we have turned upside down the way we understand the history of Australia.

When I was in primary school, the history of this country was told as a footnote to the story of the British empire. In my classroom, the book we used was A Short History of Australia, written in 1916 by Professor Ernest Scott. It began with what he declared was “a blank space on the map” and it ended with “a new name on the map” — that of Anzac. So the story of Australia climaxed with a national sacrifice on a beach on the other side of the world. Australia at that time was seen as a new, transplanted society with a short and derivative history, a planned, peaceful and successful offshoot of imperial Britain. Aboriginal peoples, depicted as non-literate, non-agricultural, non-urban and non-national, could have no “history” and did not constitute a “civilisation” — thus they could find no place in the national polity or the national story or even as citizens of the Commonwealth.

But in the half-century that followed, Australians realised that the New World they thought they’d discovered was actually the Old, and that the true “nomads” were themselves, the colonisers who had come in ships. From the early 1960s, archaeologists confirmed what Aboriginal people had always known: that Australia’s human history went back eons, into the Pleistocene, well into the last ice age, earlier than Europe’s. The timescale of Australia’s human history increased tenfold in just thirty years and the journey to the other side of the frontier became a journey back into deep time.

We now recognise the first Australians as the most adventurous of all humans, pioneer sea-voyagers who, over 60,000 years ago, saw the beckoning, burning continent of eucalypts glowing over the horizon of the ocean. The island continent girt by sea was transformed into a complex jigsaw of beloved and inhabited Aboriginal Countries and ecologies. Aboriginal societies were — and are — diverse, innovative and adaptive; over 300 languages flourished here. Now our histories of Australia strive, as the Uluru Statement puts it, to let “this ancient sovereignty… shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.” This challenge is not going away, no matter how many toddler tantrums the nation has. Reckoning with our colonial history is a daily responsibility of living on this continent.

Therefore we can now see more clearly that, on Australian beaches in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there took place one of the greatest ecological and cultural encounters of all time. Peoples with immensely long and intimate histories of habitation encountered the furthest-flung representatives of the world’s first industrialising nation. The circle of migration out of Africa more than 80,000 years earlier finally closed.

This is a land of a radically different ecology, where climatic variation and uncertainty have long been the norm — and now those extremes are intensifying. Australia’s long human history spans great climatic change and also offers a parable of cultural resilience. The history of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia takes humans back, if not into the ice, then certainly into the ice age, into the depths of the last glacial maximum of 20,000 years ago and beyond, into and through periods of average temperature change of 5°C and more, such as those we might now face.

When Europeans and North Americans look for cultural beginnings, they are often prompted to tell you that humans and their civilisations are products of the Holocene and that we are all children of this recent spring of cultural creativity over the last 10,000 years. By contrast, an Australian history of the world takes us back to humanity’s first deep sea navigators and to the experience of people surviving cold ice-age droughts even in the central Australian deserts. It brings us visions of people living along fast-retreating coastlines as they cope with the dramatic rising of the seas.

Human civilisation here was sustained in the face of massive climate change. This is a story that modern Australians have only just discovered, and now perhaps it offers a parable for the world. The continent of fire will lead the world into the new age of fire. But it also carries human wisdom and experience from beyond the last ice age.

Living on a precipice of deep time has become, I think, an exhilarating dimension of what it means to be Australian. We can now see that the modern Australian story, in parallel with other colonial cataclysms, was a forerunner of the planetary crisis. Indigenous management was overwhelmed, forests cleared, wildlife annihilated, waters polluted and abused, the climate unhinged. Across the globe, imperial peoples used land and its creatures as commodities, as if Earth were inert. They forgot that the planet is alive.

In the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is clear that Australia is facing a new existential threat, quite different from that which Curtin addressed in 1941. We are embroiled in a climate emergency and biodiversity crisis that threaten to destroy our security and way of life.

It’s not just a threat; it’s actually going to happen unless we act swiftly and decisively. It is a planetary event, but Australia and its region are especially vulnerable to its effects. National security assessments and reports from Australian defence chiefs have acknowledged our predicament, identifying the climate crisis as “this clear and present danger,” “the greatest threat to the security and future of Australians” and “the Hundred Year War” for which we are seriously unprepared. To meet the challenge, we will need to recognise that we do indeed face a crisis, an emergency, and that we will be required to mobilise with a grave sense of urgency as if in a war.

In that December 1941 address to the people, Curtin sought to wean Australians off a subconscious cultural reflex to trust to luck, isolation and Britain. “I demand,” he said, “that Australians everywhere realise that Australia is now inside the firing lines.” He spoke of the need to shake citizens out of false assumptions of security; he talked of awakening “the somewhat lackadaisical Australian mind” and of the “reshaping, in fact revolutionising, of the Australian way of life until a war footing is attained quickly, efficiently and without question.” “We can and we will,” he promised.

What would a brave but realistic geopolitical pivot look like in our own time? What would constitute a Curtinesque act of visionary leadership now?

I think it would entail a recognition that, because of our extreme ecological and economic vulnerability in this escalating crisis, Australia needs to lead the world into the energy transition. Not to drag its feet, not to wait for other nations, but actually to demonstrate the path to zero emissions. To provide global direction and inspiration. And to do so out of intelligent national self-interest as well as out of “world-mindedness.”

Australia needs to grasp its opportunity as a renewable energy superpower. It needs to wean itself swiftly off its fossil fuel dependency, not cling to old, polluting forms of power and vested interests. A Western Australian like John Curtin would have to take on that challenge in the mining state, reminding constituents of the long-term significance of minerals in the renewable future. Of course it will be difficult and fraught. But that is what leadership is about: stepping wisely into the future that is coming for you.

Yes, it will be difficult but it is also simple. The physics of the planet are simple and we know what we have to do and what will happen if we don’t. The enemies of action are either ignorant and short-sighted or selfish and greedy. The pathway to electrification has been laid down clearly. The technologies are there or fast developing, as is the business momentum.

But the free market can’t move fast enough and government must lead. Even funding for the transition is readily available in the form of massive government fossil fuel subsidies that can be diverted, and windfall profits to the oil and gas industry that demand to be taxed. The economic, social and environmental benefits to the nation will be immense. I believe that the people are ahead of government on this and that they will welcome bold leadership. To paraphrase John Curtin, we should step into that future now, quite clearly, without any inhibitions of any kind, and free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with coal, oil, gas, Murdoch and Rinehart. •

The post The world after John Curtin appeared first on Inside Story.

The stars are our ancestors lighting up their campfires across the night sky. The universe exploded into being fourteen billion years ago and is still expanding. As it cooled and continued to inflate, an opposite force — gravity — organised matter into galaxies and stars. Everything was made of the elements forged by stars. Around billions of fiery suns, the interstellar dust and debris of supernovas coalesced as planets, some remaining gaseous, some becoming rigid rock. Earth, with its molten core, its mantle of magma and a dynamic crust, was born. The planet is alive.

In the shallow waters off the western coast of the continent metamorphosed by the Dreaming sit solid mementos of the beginning of life. They are living fossils, cushions of cells and silt called stromatolites. After life emerged in a fiery, toxic cauldron in an ocean trench, bacteria at the surface captured sunlight and used it to create biological energy in the form of sugar. They broke down carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, feeding off the carbon and releasing oxygen as waste. Photosynthesis, Earth’s marvellous magic, had begun. It was just a billion years after the planet was formed.

To later inhabitants, oxygen would seem the most precious waste in the firmament. But it was a dangerous experiment, for the oxygen-free atmosphere that had created the conditions for life was now gone. Stromatolites hunched in the western tides descended from the creatures that began to breathe a new atmosphere into being.

Two billion years ago, enough oxygen existed to turn the sky blue. The same oxygen turned the oceans red with rust. Thus life itself generated the planet’s first environmental crisis. This ancient rain of iron oxide is preserved today in the banded ores of the Hamersley Range. The universe was then already old, but Earth was young.

The planet was restless and violent, still seething with its newness. When separate lands fused, the earth moved for them. Australian landmasses shifted north and south as crusts cruised over iron-rich magma. Large complex cells fed off the growing oxygen resource and diversified rapidly. For almost 400 million years the whole planet became gripped by glaciation and scoured by ice, and most life was extinguished. The long reign of the ancient glaciers was written into rock.

As the ice withdrew, life bloomed again. Organisms of cooperative cells developed in the oceans and became the first animals. Six hundred million years ago, a supercontinent later known as Gondwana began to amass lands in the south, and their titanic fusion created a chain of mountains in central Australia. Uluru and Kata Tjuta, inspirited by the rainbow python, are sacred rubble from this momentous first creation of Gondwana.

Life ventured ashore, protected now from dangerous radiation by the strengthening shield of ozone gas around Earth. Plants and animals sustained each other, the essential oxygen circulating between them. Gondwana united with other continents, creating a single landmass called Pangaea. When the planet cooled again, surges of glacial ice scoured life from the land once more. But life persisted, and its reinventions included the seed and the egg, brilliant breakthroughs in reproduction. They were portable parcels of promise that created a world of cycads and dinosaurs.

Earth gradually changed its hue over eons. Rusted rock and grey stone became enlivened by green, joining the blue of the restless oceans. Chlorophyll conquered the continents. Pines, spruces, cypresses, cycads and ferns found their way up the tidal estuaries, across the plains and into the mountains, but the true green revolution awaited the emergence of flowering plants. These plants generated pollen and used animals as well as wind to deliver it. Insects especially were attracted to the perfumed, colourful flowers where they were dusted with pollen before they moved to another bloom. It was a botanical sexual frenzy abetted by animal couriers. The variety of plants exploded. Nutritious grasslands spread across the planet and energy-rich fruits and seeds proliferated. As this magic unfolded, Gondwana separated from Pangaea again and consolidated near the south pole, where it began to break up further.

The cosmic dust that had crystallised as Earth, dancing alone with its single moon and awash with its gradually slowing tides, seemed to have settled into a rhythm. The bombardment of meteors that marked its early life had eased. Giant reptiles ruled, small mammals skulked in the undergrowth, and flowers were beginning to wreak their revolution.

Then, sixty-six million years ago, the planet was violently assaulted. A huge rogue rock orbiting the Sun plunged into Earth. The whole planet shuddered, tidal waves, fires and volcanoes were unleashed, soot blackened the atmosphere, and three-quarters of life was extinguished. The largest animals, the dinosaurs, all died. But the disaster of the death star also created the opportunity for mammals to thrive. The comet forged the modern world.

Flat and geologically calm, the landmass that would become Australia was now host to few glaciers and volcanoes. But ice and fire were to shape it powerfully in other ways. About fifty million years ago, in the final rupture of Gondwana, Australia fractured from its cousin, Antarctica, and voyaged north over millions of years to subtropical latitudes and a drier climate. Fire ruled Australia while Antarctica was overwhelmed by ice. The planet’s two most arid lands became white and red deserts.

The newly birthed Australian plate rafted north into warmer climes at a time in planetary history when the earth grew cooler, thus moderating climatic change and nurturing great biodiversity. It was the continent’s defining journey. It began to dry, burn and leach nutrients, the ancient soils became degraded and impoverished, and the inland seas began to dry up. In the thrall of fire, the Gondwanan rainforest retreated to mountain refuges and the eucalypt spread. Gum trees came to dominate the wide brown land. The bush was born.

Three million years ago, when North and South America finally met and kissed, the relationship had consequences. Ocean currents changed and the Pleistocene epoch, marked by a succession of ice ages, kicked into life. Regular, dramatic swings in average global temperature quickened evolution’s engine. The constant tick and tock of ice and warmth sculpted new, innovative life forms.

In southern Africa, an intelligent primate of the forests ventured out onto the expanding grasslands and gazed at the horizon. This hominid was a creature of the ice ages, but her magic would be fire. One day her descendants walked north, and they kept on walking.

By the time they reached the southeastern edges of the Asian islands, these modern humans were experienced explorers. They gazed at a blue oceanic horizon and saw that there was no more land. But at night they observed the faint glow of fire on a distant continent. And by day they were beckoned by haze that might be smoke and dust. What they did next was astonishing.

The people embarked on an odyssey. They strengthened their rafts and voyaged over the horizon, beyond sight of land in any direction — and they kept on sailing. They were the most adventurous humans on Earth. They crossed one of the great planetary boundaries, a line few land-based animals traversed, one of the deep sutures of tectonic earth. This was over 60,000 years ago. The first Australians landed on a northern beach in exhaustion, wonder and relief. They had discovered a continent like no other.

The birds and animals they found, the very earth they trod, had never known a hominid. The other creatures were innocent of the new predator and unafraid. It was a bonanza. But the land was mysterious and forbidding and did not reveal its secrets easily. The people quickly moved west, east and south, leaving their signatures everywhere. They had to learn a radically new nature. Arid Australia was not consistently dry but unpredictably wet. The climate was erratic, rainfall was highly variable, and drought could grip the land for years. The soil was mostly poor in nutrients and there were few large rivers. But these conditions fostered biodiversity and a suite of unique animals and plants that were good at conserving energy and cooperating with one another.

The first people arrived with a firestick in their hands, but never before had they known it to exert such power. For this was the fire continent, as distinctive in its fire regimes as in its marsupials and mammal pollinators. Fire came to be at the heart of Australian civilisation. People cooked, cleansed, farmed, fought and celebrated with fire. The changes they wrought with hunting and fire affected the larger marsupials which, over thousands of years, became scarce. People kept vast landscapes open and freshly grassed through light, regular burning. By firing small patches they controlled large fires and encouraged an abundance of medium-sized mammals. As the eucalypt had remade Australia through fire, so did people.

They had arrived on those northern beaches as the latest ice age of the Pleistocene held the planet in its thrall. Polar ice was growing and the seas were lower, which had made the challenging crossing from Asia just possible. People could walk from New Guinea to Tasmania on dry land. This greater Australia, now known as Sahul, was the shape of the continent for most of the time humans have lived here. People quickly reached the far southwest of Western Australia and the southern coast of Tasmania. From the edge of the rainforest they observed icebergs from Antarctica, emissaries from old Gondwana.

For tens of thousands of years after people came to Australia, the seas continued to retreat and the new coastlines were quickly colonised. Every region of the continent became inhabited and beloved, its features and ecologies woven into story and law. Trade routes spanned the land. People elaborated their culture, history and science in art and dance, and buried their loved ones with ritual and ceremony in the earliest known human cremations. Multilingualism was the norm. Hundreds of distinct countries and languages were nurtured, and the land was mapped in song. This place was where everything happened, where time began.

As the ice age deepened, the only glaciers in Australia were in the highlands of Tasmania and on the peaks of the Alps. For much of the continent, the ice age was a dust age. Cold droughts settled on the land, confining people in the deserts to sheltered, watered refuges. Great swirls of moving sand dunes dominated the centre of the continent but the large rivers ran clear and campfires lit up around the lakes they formed. About 18,000 years ago, the grip of the cold began to weaken and gradually the seas began to rise. Saltwater invaded freshwater, beaches eroded, settlements retreated, sacred sites became sea country. The Bassian Plain was flooded and Tasmanians became islanders. Over thousands of years, Sahul turned into Australia.

The rising of the seas, the loss of coastal land, and the warming of average temperatures by up to 8°C transformed cultures, environments and economies throughout the continent. People whose ancestors had walked across the planet had survived a global ice age at home. In the face of extreme climatic hardship, they continued to curate their beloved country. They had experienced the end of the world and survived.

The warm interglacial period known as the Holocene, which began 13,000 years ago, ushered in a spring of creativity in Australia and across the planet. Human populations increased, forests expanded into the grasslands and new foods flourished. Australians observed the emergence of new agricultural practices in the Torres Strait islands and New Guinea but mostly chose not to adopt them. They continued to tune their hunting and harvesting skills to the distinctive ecologies of their own countries, enhancing their productivity by conserving whole ecosystems. A complex tapestry of spiritual belief and ceremonial ritual underpinned their economies. The sharing of food and resources was their primary ethos.

Strangers continued to visit Australia from across the seas, especially from Indonesia and Melanesia. Four thousand years ago, travellers from Asia brought the dingo to northern shores. During the past millennium, Macassans from Sulawesi made annual voyages in wooden praus to fish for sea cucumbers off Arnhem Land where they were generally welcomed by the locals. The Yolngu people of the north engaged in trade and ceremony with the visitors, learned their language, adopted some of their customs and had children with them. Some Australians travelled by prau to Sulawesi.

In recent centuries, other ships nosed around the western and northern coasts of the continent, carrying long-distance voyagers from Europe. One day, early in the European year of 1788, a fleet of tall ships — “each Ship like another Noah’s Ark” carefully stowed with seeds, animals and a ballast of convict settlers — entered a handsome harbour on the east coast of Australia and began to establish a camp. These strangers were wary, inquisitive and assertive, and they came to stay. They were here to establish a penal colony and to conduct an agrarian social experiment. They initiated one of the most self-conscious and carefully recorded colonisations in history on the shores of a land they found both beautiful and baffling.

They were from a small, green land on the other side of the world, descendants of the people who had ventured west rather than east as humans exited Africa. They colonised Europe and Britain thousands of years after the Australians had made their home in the southern continent. They lived in a simplified ecology scraped clean by the glaciers of the last ice age, and were unprepared for the rich subtlety of the south.

For 2000 years before their arrival in Australian waters, the Europeans had wondered if there might be a Great South Land to balance the continents of the north. By the start of the sixteenth century, they confirmed that the planet was a sphere and all its seas were one. They circled the globe in tall sailing ships and voyaged to the Pacific for trade, science and conquest. The British arrivals were part of the great colonialist expansion of European empires across the world. For them, success was measured through the personal accumulation of material things; Australians were the opposite.

On eastern Australian beaches from the late eighteenth century, there took place one of the greatest ecological and cultural encounters of all time. Peoples with immensely long and intimate histories of habitation encountered the furthest-flung representatives of the world’s first industrialising nation. The circle of migration out of Africa more than 80,000 years earlier finally closed.

The British did indeed find the Great South Land of their imagination seemingly waiting for them down under and they deemed it vacant and available. It was an upside-down world, the antipodes. They would redeem its oddity and emptiness. The invaders brought the Bible, Homer, Euclid, Shakespeare, Locke and the clock. They came with guns, germs and steel. With the plough they broke the land. They shivered at “the deserted aboriginal feel of untilled earth.” They dug the dirt and seized it. Sheep and cattle were the shock troops of empire; their hard hooves were let loose on fragile soils and they trampled them to dust. Australian nature seemed deficient and needed to be “improved.” Colonists believed that the Australians were mere nomads, did not use the earth properly, and therefore did not own it.

But the true nomads were the invaders and they burned with land hunger. War for possession of the continent began. It continued for more than a hundred years on a thousand frontiers. Waterholes — the precious jewels of the arid country — were transformed into places of death. It was the most violent and tragic happening ever to befall Australia. So many lives were sacrificed, generations of people were traumatised, and intimate knowledge of diverse countries was lost.

Australia entered world history as a mere footnote to empire; it became celebrated as a planned, peaceful and successful offshoot of imperial Britain. A strange silence — or white noise — settled on the history of the continent. Nothing else had happened here for tens of thousands of years. Descendants of the newcomers grew up under southern skies with stories of skylarks, village lanes and green hedgerows from the true, northern hemisphere. And they learned that their country had a short triumphant history that began with “a blank space on the map” and culminated in the writing of “a new name on the map” — Anzac. So the apotheosis of the new nation happened on a distant Mediterranean shore. The cult of overseas war supplanted recognition of the unending war at home, and the heroic defence of country by the first Australians was repressed. They were disdained as peoples without agriculture, literacy, cities, religion or government, and were allowed neither a history nor a future.

The British and their descendants felt pride in their new southern land and pitied its doomed, original inhabitants. Colonists saw themselves as pioneers who pushed the frontier of white civilisation into the last continent to be settled, who connected Australia to a global community and economy. They were gratified that their White Australia, girt by sea, a new nation under southern skies, was a trailblazer of democratic rights: representative government, votes for working men, votes for women. But the first Australians lay firmly outside the embrace of democracy. They continued to be removed from country onto missions and reserves; they did not even have a rightful place in their own land, and every aspect of their lives was surveyed.

The invaders lived in fear of invasion. Had they used the soil well enough, had they earnt their inheritance? Would strangers in ships, boats, threaten again? Had they reckoned with their own actions in the land they had seized? There was a whispering in their hearts.

New peoples arrived down under from Europe, the Americas and Asia, and the British Australians lost their ascendancy. Australia became the home again of many cultures, vibrantly so, and a linguistic diversity not seen on the continent since the eighteenth century flourished. Many languages of the first peoples persisted and were renewed. The classical culture of the continent’s discoverers endured; their Dreamings, it was suggested, were the Iliad and Odyssey of Australia. A bold mix of new stories grew in the land.

The invaders of old Australia did not foresee that the people they had dispossessed would make the nation anew. The society they created together was suffused with grief and wonder. The original owners were recognised as full citizens and began to win their country back through parliament and the courts. They believed their ancient sovereignty could shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.

But now the planet was again shuddering under an assault. The meteor this time was the combined mass of humans and their impact upon air, oceans, forests, rivers, all living things. It was another extinction event, another shockwave destined to be preserved in the geology of Earth. The fossilised forests of the dinosaurs, dug up and burnt worldwide since Australia was invaded, had fuelled a human population explosion and a great acceleration of exploitation. Rockets on plumes of flame delivered pictures of spaceship Earth, floating alone, finite and vulnerable in the deep space of the expanding universe. Ice cores drilled from diminishing polar ice revealed, like sacred scrolls, the heartbeat of the planet, now awry. The unleashing of carbon, itself so damaging, enabled a planetary consciousness and an understanding of deep time that illuminated the course of redemption.

The Australian story, in parallel with other colonial cataclysms, was a forerunner of the planetary crisis. Indigenous management was overwhelmed, forests cleared, wildlife annihilated, waters polluted and abused, the climate unhinged. Across the globe, imperial peoples used land and its creatures as commodities, as if Earth were inert. They forgot that the planet is alive.

The continent of fire led the world into the new age of fire. But it also carried wisdom and experience from beyond the last ice age.

Humans, as creatures of the ice, were embarked on another odyssey. It would take them over the horizon, to an Earth they have never before known. •

References: The stars are our ancestors: B.T. Swimme and M.E. Tucker, Journey of the Universe • “the most precious waste in the firmament”: Richard Fortey, Life: An Unauthorised Biography • “The planet is alive”: Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement and The Nutmeg’s Curse • iron oxide, the seed and the egg: Reg Morrison, Australia: Land Beyond Time • the true green revolution: Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey • expanding grasslands: Vincent Carruthers, Cradle of Life • distinctive in its fire regimes and mammalian pollinators: Stephen Pyne, Burning Bush • conditions of biodiversity: Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters • Sahul and the last ice age: Billy Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming • conserving whole ecosystems: Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe, Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? • “each Ship like another Noah’s Ark”: First Fleet surgeon George Worgan in Grace Karskens, People of the River • agrarian social experiment: Grace Karskens, The Colony • guns, germs and steel: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel • “the deserted aboriginal feel of untilled earth”: George Farwell, Cape York to the Kimberleys • “the true, northern hemisphere”: Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus • “a blank space on the map”: Ernest Scott, A Short History of Australia • a whispering in their hearts: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts • “the Iliad and Odyssey of Australia”: Noel Pearson, A Rightful Place • “a bold mix of the Dreamings”: Alexis Wright, The Swan Book • “we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood”: The Uluru Statement 2017 • a great acceleration: John McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration • “the heartbeat of the planet”: Will Steffen • the new age of fire: Stephen Pyne, The Pyrocene.

The post Odyssey down under appeared first on Inside Story.

How do plants, animals, insects, birds, nesting bees, raspy crickets, humans, mulgaras, yellow billy buttons, bats, bush flies, river red gums, euros, desert oaks, salt lake wolf spiders, thorny devils, copperburrs, mulga, sap suckers, zebra finches, waddywoods, banded stilts, spinifex, marsupial moles, antlions, Mitchell grass, lerps, harvester termites, burrowing frogs and fat-tailed dunnarts — how does this gorgeous, ebullient array of life come to be, how does it find ways to flourish, and how do its constituents relate to one another, now and over time, across millions of years?

How do we learn to see the richness and diversity of this life? How do we read Country for its presences and absences? How do we fine-tune our capacity as humans to appreciate and understand the miracles that unfold at our feet and under the skies every day and night? These are beautiful, inspiring, exhilarating questions and they underpin this book, which is a glowing compendium of intelligent wonder.

Steve Morton is our guide in this quest, an admired CSIRO scientist, a renowned ecologist and a gifted writer, and he is introducing us to his home, the beautiful and diverse arid lands of Australia. Australian Deserts: Ecology and Landscapes is about two-thirds of the continent, an astonishing and vast region, and everything that lives in it.

And we glimpse our guide too from time to time: a human in his chosen and beloved setting, relishing a desert dawn, attending a pit-trap, sharing a cup of campfire tea with colleagues, or driving at dusk on the saltbush plains, his forearm resting on the open window when a raspy cricket, large, slim and stylish in tawny colours, lands on his arm. Steve and the handsome insect exchange a glance before the cricket sinks its jaws painfully into his skin. As he fights the pain and fights to keep the car on the road, Steve can’t help admiring the poise, attitude and éclat of that rascally raspy.

Admiration is a strong emotion in this book. This is science with a heart. The natural world elicits Morton’s appreciation and awe. And he accommodates mystery. He is often happily astonished: when describing masses of grasshoppers shooting up into the jet stream and flying halfway across the continent, he exclaims, “who would have believed such a thing?” It’s “a life history,” he says, “that seems like science fiction.”

There is tenderness, too, in the author’s relationship with other forms of life, a warm regard for his fellow creatures and the miracles of survival they daily perform. He describes desert ecologies with rapt affection and pries into the personal lives of plants and animals with delicacy and respect. He is careful not to be sentimental or anthropomorphic, but he does use his imagination and literary skills to project the reader into the experience of other living things: we are offered X-ray vision so that we can see inside river red gums, underground radar so that we realise how much life is busy beneath us, and time-lapse imagery so that we can appreciate the workings of evolution. We are even enabled to sit between the wings of a grey teal in flight.

Weeping mulla mulla growing among feathertop spinifex and shrubs regenerating after fire in the Tanami Desert. Mike Gillam

There is a kind of autobiography of a desert ecologist that can be gleaned from the pages of this book. We see the author in his late teens out with his dad admiring merino sheep and talking to a farmer on the Hay Plain. The youth is distracted from pastoral talk by male brown songlarks in a frenzy of breeding display; he becomes captivated by their soaring and plummeting, by their singing at full throttle to the female birds.

Young Steve hears their call, too, and soon he is lured away from his destiny as a farmer. And later at university we see him having a Eureka! moment in his first-year biology practical class when he peers into a microscope at the profuse life to be found in the abdomen of a termite. He shouts with glee at the sight of such a vigorous diversity of organisms. In that moment, he decides to become a biologist, and he has felt grateful to termites ever since.

Although Steve Morton is a particularly fine individual of the human species, this book is not about him. His modest appearances on the surface of the text are as fleeting as those of the burrowing frog after rain. But the warmth of his curiosity and the joy of his wonder suffuse the book.

He is not the only human who appears in this text. There is a strong sense of an intellectual community, of the collegiality of ecologists and bush scholars; there is an international fellowship of the field and the laboratory, of the lecture hall and the tea room. Every insight depends on others; knowledge is collective and organic. It advances by being shared and tested; it relies upon teamwork, upon long-term observation in the field, upon a robust scientific culture. This book glows with pride at the collective achievement of ecologists in Australia over decades.

And it glows too with respect for the knowledge and teaching of Aboriginal peoples. It is wonderful to read an ecology of Australia that is so plainly and profoundly indebted to the ecological wisdom of First Nations peoples. Here is the kind of respectful confluence of traditions of knowledge that so many people have been striving for, especially in Alice Springs.

It’s not just about supplementing Western science with Aboriginal insights; rather, it’s about recognising — as this book does — the primacy of Aboriginal understanding and management of Country and making that deep knowledge the foundation for all ecological inquiry. The result is immensely heartening and quite beautiful, a respectful integration of Aboriginal and settler philosophies, united in their awe of the land, nature and the elements.

There are three further ways in which this book might be honoured in the traditions of science and literature. First, it enacts an ecological vision. As I read this book, I truly begin to understand what it is like to think and see like an ecologist. So Australian Deserts is not just about a vast, enchanting region, it is also about a particular way of seeing the world in all its vibrant connectedness. Science leads to philosophy which leads to poetry, and insights flow the other way too, from art to ecology. From now on, if people ask me what an ecological vision means, I will give them this book.

Second, Australian Deserts is a remarkable contribution to two centuries of Australian desert literature. Here I can only briefly invoke an impressive lineage of which Morton is very conscious: writings by Ernest Giles, Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen, Cecil Madigan, Ernestine Hill, Hedley Finlayson, Alice Duncan-Kemp, Francis Ratcliffe, Ted Strehlow, Alan Newsome, Isabel McBryde, Dick Kimber, Peter Latz, Kieran Finnane, Tim Rowse, Mike Smith, Barry Hill, Eleanor Hogan, Mark McKenna, Margaret Kemarre Turner, Rod Moss and Kim Mahood, to name just a few. This constant pulse of scholarly and literary reflection coming from the heart of Australia has changed national understandings and identity, and Morton’s book embraces that conversation and adds to its richness.

Much of the early desert literature was about searching and disappointment, about expectation and failed dreams, but Morton writes as someone who is joyously, ecstatically at home, intellectually and emotionally fulfilled by the ecology and landscapes of arid Australia. And Aboriginal peoples appear not as strange or other but as respected teachers, their ancient and continuing cultures the embodiment of what it means to read and love Country.

Third, Australian Deserts, although primarily a scientific work, is also a book-length piece of nature writing. Morton is an exquisite writer. Part of the pleasure of reading this book is the sheer elegance and precision of every sentence. There is a formal grace to his prose, a quiet majesty to the intricate portrait he weaves. Literary exactitude is, in his hands, a scientific instrument, an essential tool in his quest to create holistic understanding.

Morton is educating us in a more precise language about deserts, and tutoring us in a different sense of time, not just of deep time but of slow time. For desert life is patient and so must we be. The author reminds us that at times of climatic stress, “the country is waiting rather than dying.” Without us being told explicitly, we come to understand that an ecologically intact landscape tends to be beautiful.

Thus, I would place Australian Deserts in another lineage, an international bookshelf of nature writing where science and literature coalesce felicitously. On that shelf can be found Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Richard Nelson’s The Island Within, J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine, Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, George Seddon’s Landprints, and Barbara York Main’s study of the Western Australian wheatbelt, Between Wodjil and Tor.

Australian Deserts is destined to become a classic for this combination of scientific vision and literary poise, and because there is a further dimension of magic in it. Mike Gillam’s photographs of desert life and landscapes are, quite simply, extraordinary. They are no mere illustrations of the text, although they do perform that role superbly. They offer a parallel vision that complements the micro and macro scales of the prose. The book is subtitled Ecology and Landscapes, for “ecology” invokes science and “landscapes” invokes art. But “ecology” also suggests intricacy and “landscapes” implies vastness. Mike Gillam’s photography works on both levels; indeed, it is one of his conjuring tricks to make an aerial landscape photo look like a view through a magnifying glass and a close-up ground portrait look like a view from the air. There is a powerful ecological message in that, about systems and patterns across all scales of a landscape.

Gillam’s pictures are painterly photographs, high-art in the poetics of colour and light, yet they are also scientifically precise and stunningly intimate. They bring you eye to eye with insects and animals; Mike must have learned the patience of the deserts to capture such portraits. Such are the fruits of obsession. Mike Gillam on Australian deserts deserves the recognition accorded to Olegas Truchanas and Peter Dombrovskis on Tasmania’s Southwest.

This is a book that will bring learning, joy and inspiration to generations of humans, and greater compassion for our fellow creatures. It may also help us to live here with deeper respect and understanding, and with a keener awareness of beauty, wonder and complexity in this magnificent land. •

Australian Deserts: Ecology and Landscapes
By Steve Morton, with photographs by Mike Gillam | CSIRO Publishing | $59.99 | 304 pages

The post Ecology of extremes appeared first on Inside Story.

Mike Smith (1955–2022), a great Australian archaeologist, died in Canberra on Sunday 16 October. As his family announced, “he put down his tools and hung up his hat.” A week before his death he was walking his beloved dog, writing a scientific paper, riding his recliner-bike around Lake Burley Griffin, converting cabbage from his garden into kimchi and no doubt cooking his famed custard tarts. He was a warm, witty, courteous and deeply learned scholar and scientist whose research and fieldwork changed the way Australians understand the recent and deep past of their continent. His book, The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts, published in 2013, is a powerful and enduring encapsulation of his life’s work; my review, first published in 2013, appears below.
— Tom Griffiths

Crouched in the red sand, handling a stone artefact with an arc of blue desert sky above him, Mike Smith is at home. This connoisseur of deserts, who revolutionised our understanding of the human history of Central Australia, has a discerning eye for the distinctive character of Australia’s Red Centre. His new book, The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts, published in March by Cambridge University Press, is the most important exploration of Australia’s ancient human history since John Mulvaney’s The Prehistory of Australia was published forty-four years ago.

“The discoverers, explorers and colonists of the three million square miles which are Australia,” Mulvaney wrote in his revolutionary opening sentence, “were its Aborigines.” He was writing at the end of the 1960s, a decade that he called “the deluge,” “the golden years,” “the Dreamtime” of Australian archaeology. Australians had finally confirmed that they lived on a continent with a truly ancient human history and suddenly found themselves gazing into a dizzying abyss of time.

Settler Australia has a history of ambivalence about intimations of Aboriginal antiquity and adaptability. Colonists were reluctant to acknowledge the depth of belonging of a people whose continent they had usurped. This means that any broad understanding of the human antiquity of Australia is a relatively recent and dramatic event that rested on the twin revolutions of professional archaeology and radiocarbon dating, both of which emerged in local practice in the 1950s and 1960s. Since that time, archaeological dates for human occupation in Australia have deepened from 13,000 years before the present (secured by Mulvaney at Kenniff Cave in Queensland in 1962) to over 30,000 years at Lake Mungo by 1970, to over 40,000 years at several sites by the 1980s, and then a likely 50–55,000 years determined by Rhys Jones, Mike Smith and Bert Roberts at Malakunanja II in Arnhem Land in 1989. “No segment of the history of Homo sapiens,” wrote Mulvaney, “had been so escalated since Darwin took time off the Mosaic standard.” It turned out that “the timeless land” was actually replete with time – and dynamic with human history.

Mike Smith’s career unfolded during this period when settler Australia was coming to grips with the deep Aboriginal past – and one of the archaeological revelations of the mid to late 1980s came from his own excavation at Puritjarra in western Central Australia. Smith had arrived in Australia from Blackpool, England, in 1961, aged six, the son of “ten pound” British migrants. For a few months during his primary school years, his father’s work took young Mike to remote Ceduna, the last major settlement before the Nullarbor Plain, with a population that was mainly Greek and Aboriginal. In this town of sand and cinder-block houses, Mike remembers collecting lizards and playing in rusty cars. He began to develop a taste for arid Australia: “the smell of the country, that light, the sense of openness and adventure.” Although he knows Australia as few do, Smith has never lost his British accent and has been known to treat it humorously as a “speech impediment.”

In late primary school he made a conscious decision to pursue a career in archaeology. He had corresponded with staff at the South Australian Museum about his reptiles, and by the age of fifteen he was asking to join a museum dig at Roonka on the Lower Murray and then one led by Hungarian émigré Alexander Gallus at Koonalda Cave in the Nullarbor. Carrying buckets at dig sites enabled him to meet the well-known archaeologist Rhys Jones, “a very inspirational man” who was happy to “talk to a kid.” By the time Mike came to the Australian National University in 1974 to study archaeology with John Mulvaney, he already had substantial field experience and was “hooked on Australian work.” In an interview for the National Library of Australia last year, he recalled the excitement of this period: “There were new discoveries every six months or so. And this combined with my own personal exploration of the continent. I was interested in geography; I was interested in the structure of a continent. And archaeology was my means of travel as much as anything else.”

Soon after finishing a masters degree, he got a job as field archaeologist at the Northern Territory Museum in Darwin where his “amazing brief” was “to engage in the field survey and excavation of Aboriginal and Macassan sites in the Northern Territory.” By the beginning of 1982 he was keen to move his base to Alice Springs, for the Red Centre had got in his blood. Ceduna had played a part in seducing him to aridity, but so too had visits to the South Australian Museum, where he gazed, fascinated, at “those older museum displays of Arrernte ceremonial costumes: the big, conical, feather-down headdresses with the feathers glued on with blood.” They seemed to depict a society that was not just exotic but totally alien, and yet the setting was his own continental backyard, that great alluring heart of desert that was part of the geographical imagination of South Australians. He glimpsed the mysterious world captured in Songs of Central Australia by the anthropologist T.G.H. Strehlow, and in the writings of Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen. He realised that “there was a rich, exotic Aboriginal cultural and political system out there. Central Australia is where I wanted to be.”

Smith wanted to test the generally accepted belief that Central Australia had been occupied by people only after the end of the last Ice Age. He needed a site that would make full use of his stratigraphic skills and surgical precision, a site that would be a “palimpsest of different deserts,” of past climates, geomorphic processes and cultural systems. He searched for years. The desk he inherited in Alice Springs had a pile of slips of paper in a drawer, one of which noted the existence of a large cave near Mount Winter in the Cleland Hills. Nothing more than that, but it was a vital clue. “But it took a lot of time to work out quite how to get out there and also where to go,” he recalls. Finally, with the help of historian Dick Kimber and rock art scholar Grahame Walsh, Smith was able to get to the remote Cleland Hills.

It was 3 August 1986 and they had just one morning to search sixteen kilometres of the range for the great hollow of a cave. Kimber walked south and Smith walked north. Mike walked and walked, and finally came round a corner of the outcrop, and then he saw something. “I could see these shadows at the base of an escarpment and it looked like it could be something quite big,” he wrote later. “So I walked over and there was this absolutely huge rock shelter, I mean enormous! A big opera shell structure. I have not seen anything like it since; it is absolutely the most remarkable site. I knew that was the site, it matched the description. It was the site that would warm any archaeologist’s heart. I knew this was a site that would give me a good sequence.”

“A short time later I met Mike,” Dick Kimber recorded. “He was elated. He had found the cave.” Smith had found Puritjarra, the site that would occupy much of his archaeological attention for the next quarter-century.

After Lake Mungo, Puritjarra is the single most important archaeological site in the Australian desert – not simply because of its intrinsic values, but also because of the time invested in its analysis. Thanks to Mike’s enduring commitment, it is one of the most carefully documented and dated sites in Australia. Puritjarra deepened the chronology of human history in the centre of the continent from 10,000 to 35,000 years, a period at least as long as modern humans have occupied Western Europe. Modern Australians began at last to realise that they were the inheritors of a human saga of global significance, a drama in which people survived Ice Age droughts in the central Australian deserts and managed to sustain civilisation in the face of massive climate change. Puritjarra is a place that Australians should revere.

Smith’s new book, which was launched at the National Museum of Australia in March, tells the story of Puritjarra – but also of all Australia’s arid lands. It explains and analyses the social and environmental history of the largest area of desert in the southern hemisphere. In reality, inland Australia is made up of a variety of deserts with great natural diversity – it is a vast region of drylands, dune fields, stony plains, ephemeral rivers, salt lakes and desert uplands, all quite different from the deserts of southern Africa, South America or North Africa. Smith’s book is a product of his life-long commitment to understanding this unique region. He has worked on an outback sheep station as a roustabout, hiked and driven the country as a field archaeologist, walked with a string of camels through remote country west of Lake Mackay and in the Simpson Desert, and dug carefully into desert sands. He sees himself as “holding the region up to the light like a gemstone, turning it around and watching its personality refracted in different ways.” This is a scientific work that is also literature.

There have been many outstanding studies in Australian archaeology in the half century since Mulvaney’s book; in fact, I feel we are blessed, as Australians, to have so many gifted archaeologists to guide us in our quest to understand the deep past of this continent. But Mike Smith’s book is notable for its careful absorption, acknowledgement and encapsulation of all the scholarship that precedes it. Through his synthesis, which is built on the foundation stone of his own original archaeological research, he makes us see Australian human history anew.

Smith was a student of Mulvaney and, like him, is a cultural historian as well as an archaeologist. Both these men see archaeology, with its palaeo-environmental data and its science of stratigraphy, as ultimately a humanities discipline. Although Smith established some of our oldest dates of human occupation, he believes that the best way to demolish the “timeless” metaphor that stalks ancient Australia is to piece together a complex, contoured history of social and environmental change from the first arrival of people in Australia to the present. A nuanced narrative of change through millennia ultimately conveys depth better than dates. In The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts, Smith works from the ancient past forwards and from the ethnographic and historical present backwards, and he produces a rich history of Australian humanity.

As well as connecting Australians to the human exodus from Africa, he proposes an Australian history of constant social change such that, for example, “much of the fabric of desert tradition” encountered by Europeans might be no older than 4000 years. It turns out that the classic ethnographies of a “timeless” people actually described desert societies that had survived, and been transformed by, an environmental roller-coaster and were undergoing accelerating cultural change. The deep past is shown to echo powerfully in the contemporary cross-cultural history of people, politics and possession.

In 1996, reflecting on the Australian time revolution, archaeologist Denis Byrne wrote a brilliant essay called “Deep Nation” for the journal Aboriginal History, in which he meditated on what it means for a settler nation to embrace as its own the past of a culture it once rejected as a savage anachronism. Byrne analysed how the discourse of depth – which is such an appropriate and seductive metaphor – has sometimes inadvertently led to archaeology’s disconnection from the living Aboriginal present and to an essentialism of a timeless, traditional Aboriginal past. Byrne argued that, “if archaeology were to cease concerning itself with the nation’s desire for depth, it might rise, as it were, to the surface.” By “surface,” he meant that relatively horizontal (post-1788) terrain “where duration is measured in terms of generations rather than millennia.” Such practice would cease to locate real Aboriginality in the pre-colonial past, and would refuse the obsession with cultural purity. Writing almost two decades ago, Byrne did not foresee, perhaps, how quickly this apparent binary might be transcended, and how effectively the depths and the surface might be united in one remarkable vision.

Mike Smith’s career and oeuvre help us to think through these challenging and exciting dilemmas of our time. He sees himself as part of the generation of archaeologists who picked up the baton from John Mulvaney and Rhys Jones and completed the basic archaeological exploration of the continent: “in terms of finding the corners of the room, that was a job that my generation finished, completed.” He is also part of the first generation of Australian-trained archaeologists. And he feels privileged to have been among the last to have travelled and worked with Aboriginal people who grew up in the bush without major contact with Europeans. His reflective practice offers us an enabling window onto archaeology in the period of escalating human timescales and resurgent Aboriginal politics.

Known affectionately at the National Museum as Dr Deep Time – a man so enamoured of stratigraphy that he got a gravedigger’s certificate through TAFE to learn the ins and outs of timber shoring – Mike has also sifted the surface sands of his beloved deserts with meticulous historical care. In an earlier book, Peopling the Cleland Hills (2005), he gives us a remarkable modern history of a frontier, drawn from documents, memories and conversations-in-place. And he finishes The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts with a cultural history of the last millennium. He believes it is important to retain a feeling for the contemporary cultural landscape that swirls around the sites he studies, and so in Peopling the Cleland Hills he uses Puritjarra as a place from which to view the modern social exchange and disruption generated across Kukatja country by the European invasion.

Although his focus in that book is the last century-and-a-half, there are tens of thousands of years of history implied in his gaze. Rather than following large-scale events themselves, pursuing them off-stage, as it were, Smith keeps us grounded in place and we see them flicker past or we feel the ripple of their distant impact. There is a kind of Aboriginal patience in this earthed archaeological view – in this Ice Age inheritance, this steady, embedded watchfulness over particular country. We can sense in that book, more explicitly than in any of Smith’s other work, how intimately and even spiritually he has come to identify with the desert and its modern people. This is surely a source of the powerful poetic vision that illuminates his science.

The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts fits within a grand tradition of Australian desert literature of which Mike Smith is keenly conscious: Ernest Giles, Baldwin Spencer, Frank Gillen, J.W. Gregory, C.T. Madigan, T.G.H. Strehlow, H.H. Finlayson and Francis Ratcliffe, to name a few. A lineage of desert authors and titles is invoked in this study and every issue is elucidated through an intellectual history of its origins and evolution. You only have to talk with Mike Smith for a few minutes to know his magic with words, phrases and metaphors. It is no surprise that his book glows with poetry – I mean the poetics of hard-won hard facts beautifully presented, the poetics of disciplinary insight and logic, and the poetics of lucid prose.

Recently Smith donated his “Desert Collection” of books to the library of the National Museum of Australia. There they are shelved separately in a beautiful room. And Smith’s book now slips into the left-hand end of the top shelf. It is there at the very apex of a spine of ideas and words, a sweet acknowledgement of the donor. But the book is also, symbolically, the sum of that collection, for it is a culmination of it, a distillation of all that has gone before – and more.

Smith has written The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts for several audiences: for the world archaeological community, for his fellow Australians, and especially for the people who welcome him in their desert country. He has worked with three generations of the Multa and Tjukadai families responsible for the Cleland Hills. In his 2012 National Library interview, Mike had this to say to his Aboriginal friends: “This is a rich history. It is something that sits next to the Dreaming. It doesn’t displace it, it doesn’t replace it, but it’s a rich history here, it’s something to be proud of… It’s been my privilege to work on this history, but in a sense it has also been my gift.”

The American archaeologist Richard Gould, whose important work at the Puntutjarpa rock shelter in the Western Desert in the late 1960s is described in Smith’s book, is quoted on the back cover of The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts, declaring it “a ‘must’ for anyone seriously interested in Australian cultural history.” He’s right. And note that Gould does not use the words “archaeology” or “prehistory” or “Aboriginal.” I think there is a kind of coming of age of a settler nation in being able to say that this is, quite simply, a landmark work in Australian cultural history.

Mike Smith begins and ends the book with the Arrernte ceremonies performed for Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen in the summer of 1896, those “exotic” rituals which first fascinated him as a boy visiting the South Australian Museum. He calls the ceremonies “a watershed event in anthropological literature, a profound intellectual exchange between elite members of two very different societies.” He explains at the end of the book that he has tried to approach the 1896 ceremony from the other side, “reconstructing the long history that shaped the world of the Arrernte elders sitting across the ceremonial ground” from the observing Europeans. This is the other side of the frontier in a whole new sense. In 1981, Henry Reynolds wrote a revelatory book about the often-violent encounter between Aborigines and settlers on Australia’s grasslands, and he used that metaphor as his title. Here the archaeologist Mike Smith, with rigorous science and inspired humanism, imagines the other side of the frontier not just in space, but in deep time too. •

The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts
By Mike Smith | Cambridge University Press | $37.95 | 400 pages

The post A landmark work of Australian history appeared first on Inside Story.

Greg Mullins’s account of the Black Summer in Firestorm is therefore significant and timely. Mullins is a former NSW fire and rescue commissioner who gave almost four decades of service as a firefighter before returning to the Terrey Hills RFS brigade, which he had first joined as a teenager. He is now an eloquent member of the Climate Council and well known as the guy who in early 2019 led the prescient request from fire leaders to the prime minister for consultation, resources and action on emissions. Morrison refused.

The firefighter is the antithesis of the prime minister. While Morrison holidayed in Hawaii, Mullins put his body on the line to save property and lives. He is compassionate, learned and practical, serves the national interest and recognises the dire threat of climate change. He does hold a hose, mate, and that’s why his account of Black Summer has particular interest.

Mullins’s story begins in “the good old (predictable) days.” Born in 1959 in semirural bushland on the northern outskirts of Sydney, he grew up with a father who was a volunteer firefighter. Young Greg heard his dad’s stories from the fire front as well as the reflections of revered old-timers about firefighting operations.

Firestorm is partly a homage to his father, Jack Mullins, and a tribute to his gift of bush lore and wisdom. When Jack died aged ninety-three in 2018, his memorial service was announced by three long blasts on the old fire siren. But it was the end of an era in another way, too: a year or so later, Black Summer would definitively rule a line across the past, declaring that as far as bushfire in Australia is concerned, history is no longer a guide to the future.

When I started writing about forests and fire more than three decades ago, I often said that “local history is your best survival guide.” Old-timers knew the worn paths of historical flame, knew the likely direction of the most serious threat and knew the fire ecology of their particular forest. But today even they can be surprised. Firestorm tells of the dawning of the disturbing realisation that we are entering a new era. For Mullins, the climate change penny started to drop when, after more than two decades as a volunteer and then career firefighter, he was caught unawares in the bush.

It was December 1993 and, despite his experience, he didn’t see a bad fire season coming. There had been good rains in November and New South Wales wasn’t officially in drought. But in early January 1994 he was suddenly smoked out of a family bush camping holiday and summoned back to work to help deal with an unexpectedly terrifying time, the worst fires in the state’s history to that date in terms of property loss.

“The 1994 fires were unprecedented,” writes Mullins, acknowledging that the word is now starting to lose its meaning. They “really grabbed my attention.” Even old firefighting hands like his father had not seen this one coming. “The weather was not behaving as it always had.” The fast-changing scene was confirmed by the 2002–03 alpine fires, which were started by lightning and burned through two million hectares of country. They brought home to Mullins that the frequency and length of major fire seasons was changing.

Prior to Black Summer, Mullins acknowledges, Victoria was the state in Australia most affected by bushfires and on the front line of increasing bushfire risk: it had experienced the fatal days of Black Thursday 1851, Red Tuesday 1898, Black Friday 1939 and Ash Wednesday 1983. Then in 2009 Black Saturday unleashed its fury.

In the days afterwards, as the human death toll mounted to 173, Greg Mullins and his NSW colleague Shane Fitzsimmons flew to Melbourne to provide moral support to a “shocked, demoralised command team” overwhelmed by feelings of powerlessness in the face of such a violent, uncontrollable, unstoppable firestorm, a blast akin to a nuclear explosion. Many of those firefighters and leaders are still struggling to come to terms with what happened that day.

Black Saturday brought about a fundamental reset of national fire prevention, mitigation and firefighting doctrine. As Mullins reports, a new, overt focus on “primacy of life” made evacuations far more common. Also, there was acknowledgement that on some days firefighters would be able to do little more than convey information and warnings.

Black Saturday also launched a serious conversation about whether fires might be associated with climate change. Mullins was ready to speak about it in 2009 and did so. But as a senior public servant he “quickly learned that speaking publicly about climate change was out of bounds.” He was told “in no uncertain terms to keep out of the climate change debate and stick to fighting fires.”

The 2013 fire season along the east coast, especially Tasmania, unnerved him. He sees it now as a further wake-up call. It was not an El Niño summer yet the season was super-charged anyway. With the norms of weather and climate changing, what would an El Niño–driven fire season look like in these conditions? Yet it still seemed unlikely that New South Wales would soon experience life-threatening fires and property losses on a scale like those in Victoria and Tasmania. As Mullins explains, “we had never experienced the confluence of drought, weather and fuel conditions capable of producing such firestorms.”

Victoria is the firestorm capital of Australia. The most frightening and fatal firestorms have all roared out of “the fire flume,” as historian Stephen Pyne calls the region where hot northerly winds sweep scorching air from the central deserts into the forested ranges of Victoria and Tasmania. Firestorms are bushfires of a different order of magnitude; they cannot be fought; they rampage and kill. In 2019–20, the firestorm came to New South Wales.

Greg Mullins gives a personal, thoughtful, harrowing account of his work at the myriad fire fronts throughout the Black Summer. Tried and true firefighting techniques were no longer working and “pyro-convective events” (fire-generated lightning storms), once rare, erupted frequently. He was constantly in the bush working beside dedicated teams he admired, releasing people from smoke-filled homes and always ready to use his “firefighter’s master key” (his boot to kick a door in).

Black Summer, explains Mullins, wasn’t really a summer but a fire season that lasted half a year, from July to late February and early March. Australia was burning from the end of winter to the end of summer, from Queensland to Western Australia, from the Adelaide Hills to East Gippsland, from the NSW south coast to Kangaroo Island, from the Great Western Woodlands to Tasmania. Everywhere, suddenly, bushfire was tipping into something new.

New South Wales experienced six days of Catastrophic Fire Danger (the new level invented after Black Saturday), twenty-two days of Extreme Fire Danger, and seventy-two of Severe. Fifty-nine Total Fire Bans were declared.

As spring edged into summer and the fires worked their way down the Great Dividing Range and turned the corner into Victoria, people who remembered Ash Wednesday and Black Saturday braced themselves. January and February are traditionally the most dangerous months in the southern forests. But this time central Victoria’s good winter rainfall and wetter, cooler February prevented the flume from ripping into full gear. Therefore an unusual aspect of Black Summer was that these “Great Fires” did not explode out of the firestorm forests of Victoria and Tasmania.

This was a major reason why the death toll for such extensive and enduring fires was relatively low: they didn’t break out in the most fatal forests. Another reason, as Mullins acknowledges, was that Black Saturday introduced a new survival policy: to leave early rather than stay and defend. Early evacuation thus became the enforced strategy of authorities well beyond the original firestorm forests. The experience of Black Saturday powerfully shaped the management of Black Summer and undoubtedly saved lives.

That recent NSW experience of a firestorm impressed itself on the national imagination. Greg Mullins has used that word as the title of his book. It’s a good homegrown word, much better than the American term “mega-fire.” It captures the distinctive ferocity of a weather event intensified by its own frightening physics and chemistry. It describes a quite different phenomenon from a bushfire. And the full manifestation of a firestorm is still to be found in the flume, in the highly combustible tall ash forests of Victoria and Tasmania where it takes its most deadly form. If I were to make one criticism of this book it would be that, like much fire management literature, it is insufficiently attuned to these regional and ecological differences.

But Greg Mullins is understandably focused on national policies, and he addresses both fire management and climate change. Firestorm finishes with recommendations — short-, medium- and long-term — about how “we must stop the climate emergency becoming a climate disaster.” And at the heart of the book is a calm, reasonable and utterly scathing account of the federal government’s failures before, during and after Black Summer.

In early 2019 Mullins started calling former fire chief colleagues — a stellar cast of experienced senior fire officers from the states and territories — and asked whether they would come together to form a group called Emergency Leaders for Climate Action, or ELCA. In Firestorm, the government’s response to these civic-minded, courageous experts has been carefully recorded, and it is worth detailing it here.

The prime minister rejected ELCA’s requests to meet (he was “too busy”), dismissed their calls for strategy and resources, did not respond to their offers of briefings, refused bipartisan action, fobbed them off to ministers who fobbed them off to staffers, stood by while his deputy called them “time-wasters,” misled the public about the level of government response, abided false personal attacks on ELCA members by the Murdoch press, and was altogether so consumed by the busywork of spinning, dissembling and gaslighting that neither the national interest nor the welfare of fire-ravaged communities ever seemed within the vision of the man occupying the highest office in the land.

That is my condensation of the damning evidence given in Firestorm. Mullins, however, is always courteous, patient and constructive. But consider that this is how the Australian prime minister treated our most revered public leaders at a time of national crisis, a crisis that remains with us. Not to mention the report that not one cent of the $4.7 billion of federal funding promised for bushfire recovery after Black Summer has been spent. And remember also that this do-nothing federal government has done everything possible to frustrate climate action.

There is an election coming and I hope you read Firestorm before you vote. •

The post Dispatches from a firestorm appeared first on Inside Story.

Suddenly you stumble upon a great presence. A massive fibrous foot rears out of the leaf litter, searching for clear air and sunshine as it rises, now pale-trunked and straight as a pole, to a distant, high canopy. This upper realm it shares only with its own kind, their heads in the mist — or is that smoke? You have met the monarch, Eucalyptus regnans, the Mountain Ash.

This remarkable forest is close to Melbourne, just an hour and a half from the MCG. It is a magical kingdom where Earth’s tallest flowering plant soars to heights approaching one hundred metres and where, at its feet, is found a ferny understorey of cascading waters and dancing lyrebirds.

This precious ecosystem on the edge of Australia’s southern metropolis is evoked and celebrated in The Great Forest. Written by distinguished forest scientist David Lindenmayer and illustrated with stunning photographs by Sarah Rees, Chris Taylor and Steven Kuiter, this new book reminds us that the towering forests of ash are both awe-inspiring and fragile. We are living through the moment when the future of this immensely old and delicate ecosystem is hanging in the balance.

As Lindenmayer says, “there is perhaps nothing more extraordinary than an old-growth Mountain Ash forest.” He lovingly describes the magical environment in which he has worked for four decades, mapping and understanding the evolution of the forest and tracking the endangered Wollert (Leadbeater’s possum), one of Victoria’s faunal emblems. In the understorey of the Great Forest you might find 10,000 different gene sequences for fungi and soft tree ferns that could be 1000 years old. And at the foot of the world’s tallest flowering plant is the world’s tallest moss (reaching fifty centimetres). Everything is straining towards the light.

Long-term ecological studies require immense personal dedication and institutional support, and deliver precious insights and great public benefit. Australians should feel deep gratitude for the work that Lindenmayer and his research team have been doing since the 1980s from his base at the Australian National University.

The Mountain Ash is not only a majestic eucalypt, it is also a distinctive one. For the first fifty years of its life it can grow a metre a year, reaching similar heights to the giant redwoods of North America but in a quarter to half the time. When mature its girth can exceed thirty metres. Old trees shed tonnes of bark every year and dangle streamers of bark designed to take fire into the canopy. The Mountain Ash is unusually dependent on its seed supply for regeneration — and it needs a firestorm to crack open those seeds high in the crowns of the trees and to cultivate the saplings successfully. Ash-type eucalypts generally grow in even-aged stands; they renew themselves en masse. These magnificent trees have evolved to commit mass suicide once every few hundred years, on the hottest, windiest days after long drought. And when they burn, they do so with atomic power — as the Black Days (Thursday, Friday, Saturday…) of Australia’s recent fire history testify.

The continent’s weather pivots dramatically here between cold Antarctic fronts and hot northerlies from the centre. What kind of organism profits from this combustible edge, growing fast on the wet, cool bounty of the Southern Ocean but drawing also on periodical incursions of fiery breath from the arid, continental inland? A magnificent tall, wet fire weed.

Since European invasion, firestorms have become more frequent. Fires are essential for regeneration of the forest, but if fire returns before the young trees have produced seed, the species can be eliminated. This fragile long-term balance has been destabilised by clearing, logging and climate change.

But Indigenous peoples in this region lived with firestorms too. Aboriginal mosaic burning, which was applied to so many drier woodlands across the continent, is sometimes wrongly assumed to have been used in the wet Mountain Ash forests too. For example, in his popular, prize-winning book Dark Emu (2014), Bruce Pascoe argued that Aboriginal peoples managed Mountain Ash forests with “a mosaic pattern of low-level burns” and that wild fires in the forests affected by Black Saturday “were largely unknown before the arrival of Europeans.” But this cannot have been the case, for ash forests would have been destroyed by frequent fires, and low-level burns are not feasible in such a wet ecosystem.

Wurundjeri, Taungurung and Gunaikurnai peoples used the tall forests seasonally and probably burned their margins, maintaining clearings and pathways along river flats and ridgetops. They were familiar with the forest’s firestorms and would have known the dangerous days.

The opportunity to walk in an old-growth Mountain Ash forest — an experience familiar and beloved to our recent forebears — is becoming a rarity. As Lindenmayer explains, old-growth forest once comprised 30–60 per cent of the Mountain Ash ecosystem, and now it makes up just 1.2 per cent. That is a horrifying statistic. The loss has been caused by industrial-scale logging and an accelerated cycle of fire. The two are inextricably related: logging operations make forests more prone to high-severity fire. And logging large old trees after a fire, so frequently done, can make the habitat unsuitable for many wildlife species for up to two centuries.

As a result of these changes and incursions, the Mountain Ash forests of Victoria’s Central Highlands are now classified as critically endangered under the International Union for Conservation of Nature. We are fast losing an ecosystem that is both precious and productive. Old-growth forests support rich biodiversity, furnish nesting hollows for animals, store large amounts of carbon and generate high water yields. The tall trees, many of them in closed catchments, milk the clouds and deliver an unusually high-quality fresh water supply to the city. Water from these forests is worth more than twenty-five times the commercial value of their timber.

The Great Forest is an exquisite book that should alert people to the majesty of this environment. Readers will delight in Chris Taylor’s photos of rock and heathland on the Baw Baw Plateau and his panoramas of the Cathedral Range (Nanadhong), Sarah Rees’s rendering of delicate montane fens and her subtle compositions of air, light and water in Wurundjeri Country, and Steven Kuiter’s gorgeous portraits of a pink robin in rainforest and a powerful owl with its (beheaded) prey. The book seductively invites you into the sensory worlds of tree canopy, granite tor, fern bower and leaf litter. I’ve walked many gullies and ridges of the Great Forest but this book revealed more glorious secrets to me.

A dawalin (the Taungurung word for waterfall) during a storm in the Toolangi Forest on Taungurung Country. Chris Taylor

The splendour of the book is reminiscent of the imagery and advocacy generated in the 1970s and 80s about the forests of southwest Tasmania. The photographs of Olegas Truchanas and Peter Dombrovskis came to define a region threatened by unbridled hydro-electric development, distilling its majesty and ecological integrity for city audiences. Their photos of wild rivers and luminous rainforest, panoramas of peak and range, and insect-eye portraits of pebble and leaf enabled people to inhabit these remote places — and to fight for them. The Great Forest is a book in that tradition. It offers beauty, science and advocacy in defence of an ecosystem under attack.

The book pays respect to Country, beginning with a Statement of Sovereignty from Lidia Thorpe, the first Aboriginal senator for Victoria, and locating photos and events in Wurundjeri, Taungurung, Gunaikurnai and Bunurong Countries. This constant education in language and territory invokes not only the deep past of this place but also its enduring ecological and cultural coherence.

Giving this vast, diverse ecosystem a single name — “The Great Forest” — is also powerful politics, making it simpler to celebrate and defend. In 2001 I chose the name Forests of Ash for my book about the same environment, a title that united ash and fire, ecology and history. But “The Great Forest” has the advantage of being both complimentary and singular. It brings back into parlance the nineteenth-century name given to the Great Forest of South Gippsland, rugged tracts of Mountain Ash country that farmers fought with axe and fire over a hundred years ago. It also ties the book to the decade-long campaign to create the Great Forest National Park, which proposes to link, extend and upgrade existing reserves to ensure better protection for the tall trees and all the life they harbour.

Both campaign and book depict the Great Forest as proximate yet unknown, as “hidden in plain sight.” We are told that the forest is on Melbourne’s doorstep but few know it is there; it remains “largely unappreciated.” This argument heightens our sense of discovery and the feeling that we are appreciating a secret just in time. Although there is clearly truth in this, it underplays two centuries of settler awe, affection and advocacy. The book understandably presents a sharp contrast between the long-term care by Aboriginal custodians and the “brutal and catastrophic” impacts of European colonisation. Scientists tend to enforce this opposition, thus simplifying the environmental sensibilities of both Indigenous and settler cultures. The newcomers compromised the natural values of ecosystems so severely that scientists often depict settlers in purely negative terms, as “disturbances.” But there is another story about this forest that might be told, one that is barely hinted at here.

Victorians have long known and loved this forest. From the beginning, it quickly became part of their identity. Colonial Victorians knew they lived among tall gum trees: residents became known as Gumsuckers as opposed to Cornstalks (New South Wales), Bananalanders (Queensland), Croweaters (South Australia) or Sandgropers (Western Australia). “Fernmania” and “wildflowering” took hold of the populace, and excursionists and picnickers made raids into the Great Forest. Naturalists and bushwalkers came to know and love every peak and gully. There were sponsored searches for the tallest trees, and Victorians boasted of their heights at intercolonial and international exhibitions. Beloved ancient giants were given names similar to those bestowed on Aboriginal individuals identified as “the last of the tribe”: “King Edward VII,” “Uncle Sam” or “Big Ben.” Pilgrimages were made to their great buttresses — an impressive photo of the entire village of Fernshaw gathered at the foot of Furmston’s Tree in 1933 is included in the book. International visitors to Melbourne were taken to see the tall trees and to hear the lyrebird; Californian conservationist John Muir had to be shown the towering rival to his celebrated redwood. Noted colonial photographers J.W. Lindt and Nicholas Caire — antecedents of The Great Forest photographers — brilliantly captured the magic of fern gullies and forest giants. Many of their images hung in railway carriages, and Lindt sold 25,000 prints of the Black Spur area alone in the 1880s.

Small-scale sawmillers felt awe for the forest even as they cut it down. Workers at bush sawmills lived in the heart of the Great Forest in small, remote communities that women and children might escape only once or twice a year. When firestorms bore down upon them, as they did increasingly with the incursions of sawmilling, these vulnerable families cowered in primitive underground dugouts. When the royal commission into the 1939 fires held hearings in forest communities, it was foresters, sawmillers and bush workers who patiently tutored Judge Leonard Stretton on the distinctive characteristics of the Mountain Ash forests. University botanists, schooled overseas, didn’t know nearly as much as the local bushmen.

It was not until the late 1940s that an ecologist began to “pry into the personal life of E. regnans,” as he put it. That was David Ashton (1927–2005), a gentle botanist, artist and poet who conducted a fifty-year experiment in the Mountain Ash forests after they were severely burnt in the Black Friday fires of 1939. He worked at Wallaby Creek in a cathedral of tall trees seeded in a great fire in the summer of 1710, a century before European arrival (he counted growth rings). The well-named Ashton discovered the essential role of intense, fast-moving crown fires in the regeneration of Mountain Ash, and revealed that the conditions that renew the tall forests are the very same ones that conjure a firestorm from hell for any humans in its path. But he also found that frequent fire was devastating to the future of the ash. Ashton is not mentioned in this book, but he was Lindenmayer’s outstanding predecessor. They are the two brilliant, dedicated ecologists of the Great Forest.

In the 1920s and 30s Mountain Ash became Victoria’s most sought-after building timber. Tramways snaked into inaccessible gullies, bringing timber to the railheads. Sawmilling destroyed the forest and accelerated the incursions of severe fire, but it was also a local, family economy with strong links to the communities of the bush.

Later in the twentieth century, multinational companies in league with government scorched and smashed the forest for export and woodchips. This was a different era of industrial-scale clear-felling. Many of the old sawmillers recognised that their industry now operated without restraint and they felt the loss. A bunch of dedicated enthusiasts set about documenting the “timber tramway” era of forest sawmilling and became ardent champions of both the natural and cultural heritage of the forests. History and natural history are not necessarily in opposition. They can come together to defend the Great Forest today.

The Mountain Ash forests are pillars of Victoria’s identity. When Melbourne opened its new museum in the Exhibition Gardens in 2000, it chose to place the Great Forest at its heart. There at the core of Melbourne Museum is the Forest Gallery, a living outdoor space focusing on the tall Mountain Ash forests of Victoria. It has trees, shrubs and ferns, live animal exhibits, flitting birds and cascading water.

The “producer” (yes, that was his title) of the Forest Gallery, Luke Simpkin, called it a “shop window” on the magnificent tall forests. During planning it was called “The Gallery of Life,” for it aimed to overturn the notion of a museum as a place of dead things extracted from drawers and cabinets. It was also envisaged as the symbolic keystone of the new institution, connecting the “science” displays to its left and the “history” exhibitions to its right, reminding visitors how knowledge comes together in place, in a whole, living environment.

The Forest Gallery is cool, refreshing and evocative. During the vaccination rollout in Victoria in the spring of 2021, the Exhibition Building vaccination hub opened an overflow centre in the museum, next to the Forest Gallery. The nurse looking after my daughter said she was delighted to have its green, watery coolness nearby: “I take my breaks in there, go for a walk, and reset.” This little city satellite of the Great Forest is doing its job.

The secret revealed by this book is not that the Great Forest exists, but that it is being lost. In the Central Highlands there has been a massive decline in the area of old growth in the past twenty-five years. The Victorian government’s decision to end native forest logging in 2030 is welcome but too late. Lindenmayer convincingly argues why it must end earlier, preferably by 2024. For a start, a decade’s supply of commercial timber just isn’t there. Furthermore, current logging in the Central Highlands is both uneconomic and destructive: it is leading to further loss of large trees and the decline of animal populations, and creating an even more fire-prone landscape. Carbon storage and water production are much more valuable to the state than exporting woodchips. Victoria would save between $110 million and $190 million annually if logging stopped today.

Logging frequently breaches the logging laws and codes that do exist. For example, three-quarters of current logging operations in the Upper Goulburn water supply catchment alone are in breach of codes of practice. In May last year the Federal Court, in a scathing judgement, found VicForests in breach of its obligations under the Central Highlands Regional Forest Agreement in no fewer than sixty-six coupes. The Great Forest ends with Chris Taylor’s photos of recent logging operations. They are not sensational but documentary, and are carefully interpreted for readers so that we understand how logging operations are breaking the law and why the long-term effects are devastating.

Challenging the forest industry requires courage, for it does not play nicely. Its corporate spokespeople smoothly dispense spin. In the southeast forests of New South Wales in the 1980s, state forestry officers permitted woodchipping of giant trees dating from the sixteenth century while blithely assuring the public that no old-growth forests were being logged. Similar deceptions have been perpetrated in Victoria.

When you take the industry on, as Lindenmayer has done with solid science and careful long-term monitoring, it sledges you. Industry lobbyists and sections of News Corp have made personal attacks on the scientist’s reputation. This year the Victorian County Court forced two timber industry advocates to retract their comments and apologise. In 2020 more than a hundred Australian and international scientists wrote to the Victorian government expressing their “shock and dismay” at the comments of Monique Dawson, CEO of Victoria’s logging agency, VicForests, who refused to accept Lindenmayer’s published opinions or acknowledge him as an authority. Corporate Australia doesn’t want to hear inconvenient truths. Meanwhile a precious ancient ecosystem crashes and burns in our lifetime.

Australia’s forest wars, like its climate wars, have been debilitating. Facts are constantly met with entrenched denial. Vested interests delay sensible, urgent action. In a world tipping into runaway biodiversity loss and climate change, we can now see clearly that the people defending old-growth native forests have been both heroic and right. I am filled with admiration and gratitude for the First Nations peoples, the scientists and activists, the photographers and artists, the historians and storytellers who know that the future of all creatures depends on the health of these forests. Many of them live close to the trees and are defending culture and community as well as ecology. A Great Forest National Park will strengthen Indigenous land management, water production, carbon capture, fire safety, biodiversity, the tourist economy and local wellbeing. The tall trees make us feel puny, but we will decide their fate. •

The post Why we need a Great Forest National Park appeared first on Inside Story.

One of Australia’s finest landscape painters, she was an extraordinarily gifted artist: versatile, productive, bold, subtle and profound. Our appreciation of her artistic achievement will only grow with the years. The intensity and beauty of her work is breathtaking, whether it be a panorama of central Australian desert ranges, an Antarctic iceberg, a dark industrial landscape or an exploding oil platform.

She was renowned as the artist of the largest commissioned work in the Australian parliament, the twelve metres by three metres Red Ochre Cove (1987) which hangs in the main committee room. Beneath its luminous presence, which features a shaft of light that references Tom Roberts’s Opening of the First Parliament of Australia (1903), our politicians and bureaucrats are routinely forced to reveal their failings. During the televised reports of Senate hearings on the nightly news, you can lift your eyes from their humiliations and gaze instead into the exhilarating otherworld of Mandy Martin’s art.

Mandy Martin, Red Ochre Cove, 1987, oil on canvas, Parliament House, Canberra. Click to enlarge

Mandy’s early works were on paper and often in the form of political poster art; later she took to oil painting and produced sensitively observed landscapes, often on very large canvases. Her mother, Beryl Martin, was a watercolourist and her father, Peter Martin, a professor of botany at the University of Adelaide. Years of accompanying her father on scientific field trips honed Mandy’s eye for ecological detail. From the 1990s she brought together her political and ecological sensibilities in a powerful series of “environmental projects,” as she called them.

Guy Fitzhardinge, whom she married in 1996, who brought to their partnership a deep knowledge of the land and its management, became an essential and enabling collaborator. As well as being a beef farmer, Guy was a director of Bush Heritage Australia, a member of the Commonwealth Threatened Species Scientific Committee and a director of Meat and Livestock Australia, among many other public roles.

Martin produced such a rich and varied oeuvre that it is impossible to encompass it here. But her environmental projects are worthy of special notice, and it was my good fortune — along with many other writers, scholars and scientists — to be invited to contribute to them. Mandy and Guy’s home in Wiradjuri Country near Mandurama, with its sweeping views across white box woodlands towards Mt Canobolas and Orange, became a salon, a place of art, nature, productivity and good conversation.

There was a fine beef herd in the paddocks, sugar gliders putting on a nightly show in the gums, superb parrots flitting past like darts, Mandy’s art on the walls, the latest literature on Guy’s shelves, a white box log in the fireplace, a great leg of hogget in the oven, a cherry pavlova on the table and gatherings of people passionate about the land and its future.

Mandy, always zinging with electric energy and fun, had a flair for creating this chemistry on tour as well: her artist’s caravan would unfold itself — alongside her famous ironing-board easel — in some of Australia’s most remote landscapes. Multidisciplinary conversations enabled by the art would then break out around the campfire and under the stars, leading ultimately to new, rich insights and significant literary, artistic and political outcomes.

Shadows lengthen as Mandy Martin finishes her day’s work back in camp at the Mulligan River, Cravens Peak Reserve, 2009. Tom Griffiths

Mandy’s imagination was already turning inland in the late 1980s, but from the mid 1990s she launched a triptych of projects that ventured beyond the Darling River in northern New South Wales to the edge of the Simpson Desert. Each of them — Tracts: Back o’Bourke (1997), Watersheds: the Paroo to the Warrego (1999) and Inflows: the Channel Country (2001) — involved a fieldtrip, a travelling gallery exhibition and a published booklet and were supported by Peter Haynes as director of the Canberra Museum and Art Gallery. I was invited to join the last two as a writer and was thus given a rigorous education in the aesthetics, history and politics of the Australian inland.

Guy Fitzhardinge seems to know everyone across outback Australia and so we travelled from homestead to homestead, walked the paddocks, engaged with the ecology and listened to the locals — under their verandahs, in their kitchens and by their firesides. He shares Mandy’s conviction that conservation is an urgent national priority, believing that productivity, ecology and aesthetics have a beautiful relationship and that you need people on country to look after it. As well as being an innovative farmer, he has a doctorate in environmental sociology and the ability to talk to people from all walks of life.

Mandy’s art grew out of her passionate engagement with both landscape and people; thus her painting was intensely social and self-consciously historical. People rarely featured in her landscapes but human feelings and beliefs framed them. She saw herself in a lineage of explorer-artists (especially Ludwig Becker, who travelled with Burke and Wills), and so planned “expeditions” and painted a series, numbering the canvases in the sequence of a journey.

Country and conversations energised her creativity, and the public character and momentum of an expedition placed her under daily pressure to produce. She relished having to sculpt her art out of the circumstances of the travelling day; it had to be swift, opportunistic and impressionistic, alert to mood and moment, light and sky, lunch and dinner.

Her creativity was visible and public and social, the dogs and children played around her feet and an impromptu painting lesson for a nine-year-old was conducted on the side. Mandy painted as we ate, as the billy boiled or under threat of dusk. And she also painted under command. For it was her deliberate strategy on this trip to ask landholders to choose her sites and scenes. She encouraged local people to take her to their special places and allow her to paint them.

Thus her art often depicted beloved scenes, places of significance to inhabitants. This generated further pressure, of course. Her hosts had expectations, especially about the portrayal of favourite spots. They would review the progress of a painting over her shoulder or with a grave sense of ceremony at the end of the day.

I remember how one gravelly voiced grazier of the Channel Country, Sandy Kidd, paced like a restless beast around the finished canvas of his favourite waterhole as it lay on the concrete floor outside his home in the fluorescent light after dark. He had even graded the track to the spot that day to ease the artist’s way. By the waterhole that morning, sitting on the newly graded earth where a deadly snake had just slithered, he looked around with pride. “I wouldn’t call the king me uncle in this place,” he announced. “I couldn’t catch a cold here.” Later, as we awaited dinner at his home, he handed us beer cans spattered with blood from the meat chiller.

Finally, the moment had come to see what the artist had done. With drink in hand, Sandy circled the finished canvas, approaching it from every angle and looking at it from the corner of his eye as if trying to take it by surprise. In a Shakespearean stage whisper, he muttered, “This intrigues me, this does!” Then, nervously gesturing towards the painting as if it were alive, he declared, “This puts emotion into me. I come over all emotional looking at that. The Channels, eh? I didn’t know I loved them so much till they tried to bugger them up.”

In 1996, Mandy and Guy both spoke at a scientific workshop held nearby in Windorah, where local landholders, Aboriginal people and scientific visitors offered “an ecological perspective on Cooper’s Creek.” The workshop was coordinated by locals and responded to the environmental threat posed by plans from Currareva station to develop irrigation for cotton farming. The community came together impressively in defence of their wild rivers — they surprised themselves just as Mandy’s painting surprised Sandy Kidd.

Mandy Martin, Coopers Creek on Currareva Station, 2001, oil, ochre, pigment/linen, 90 x 330 cm.

Crusty pastoralists admitted to emotions. The mayor of the Barcoo Shire, Bruce Scott, used words like “braided” and “anastomosing” and “ephemeral,” adapting the words of urban professionals to advocate the special attributes of their water system. One Cooper pastoralist, full of genuine wonder, called the channels “anastomazing.” And they are! The Cooper, Diamantina and Georgina are the three great rivers of the Channel Country, flaring out into myriad braided channels, revealing an intricate web of arteries across a vast landscape. Aerial photos of the terrain look like microscope slides of organic tissue.

This is a boom-and-bust ecosystem, an arid land animated by waterflows from elsewhere, a place where monsoonal rain falling hundreds of kilometres away to the northeast periodically floods down dry channels, bringing a spectacular pulse of life to the plains and a precious, intense productivity. The flush of water occasionally reaches all the way to the saltpan of Lake Eyre, a continental rain gauge. Constituting almost a fifth of the Australian landmass, the Lake Eyre basin is the largest inland draining system in the world. Aboriginal people hold up the open palm of their hand to represent the basin, their fingers signifying the rivers that drain into it.

You need science, art and imagination to understand an ecosystem of such scale. In winning the battle of the Cooper at the turn of the millennium, Mandy Martin’s art was as important as Richard Kingsford’s surveys of river birdlife or Chris Dickman’s long-term studies of desert marsupials or Bruce Scott’s regional political advocacy or the Gorringe family’s testimony of deep Aboriginal attachment. They all successfully argued for the importance of “going with the flow” in arid Australia, and they did so by bringing together science and art, ecology and emotion, economy and history. Channel Country pastoralists found themselves beginning sentences with the words: “I’m not a radical greenie, but…”

In 2010, further field trips to the Channel Country and new interdisciplinary work with fifty local and visiting experts culminated in the publication of a large and beautiful book, Desert Channels: The Impulse to Conserve (edited by Libby Robin, Chris Dickman and Mandy Martin). Martin’s canvases — designed in four sets of four and presented as gorgeous interludes between essays — were all painted on location at Ethabuka and Cravens Peak on the eastern edge of the Simpson Desert, and this time she deliberately chose “ordinary or unsensational places to paint, places encountered by chance rather than design.” She wanted to capture the accidents of nature and the intricacies of ecology, to help people feel “the sensuousness of texture.”

Mandy Martin, S-Bend on the Mulligan River, Toko Range, Cravens Peak Reserve 2, 2009, pigments/ochres/acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 cm.

Mandy was striving to generate a new vocabulary and palette suited to the arid zone. Aesthetic evaluation, she argued, should be valued alongside scientific assessment, and both rely upon processes of sampling and re-sampling, consistent methodology and the patient accumulation of data. Mandy painted four canvases in sequence in each location, tramping back and forth between the different viewpoints, labouring for up to ten hours a day in the searing sun.

Martin was a researcher and a theorist, an artist-scholar, an esteemed speaker at international environmental history conferences and an adjunct professor at the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University. South African environmental historian Jane Carruthers, who contributed to Mandy’s environmental projects, wrote of how the artist can partner the historian by fostering “interdisciplinary collaborations between the written and visual,” empowering others to think visually “and even to produce art.” Martin drew out the artistic potential of all her collaborators.

Great art breaks down barriers and opens minds, liberates people to see and feel in new ways. It is an effective political tool because it transcends politics. Mandy’s opening trio of environmental projects focused on settler lore and aesthetics, on the wisdom as well as failings of imported environmental visions in Australia. Her painting practice mobilised and elaborated traditions within the history of art: plein air painting, artists’ camps and documentary and scientific expeditionary art. Her work connected in this way not only with the likes of Ludwig Becker, Sir Thomas Mitchell, Conrad Martens and Eugene von Guérard, but also with the camps of the Heidelberg School, the multi-disciplinary expeditions of Russell Drysdale and John Olsen, and the immersive materiality of John Wolseley.

Did she relish the gendered intervention of her ironing board? Surely this early practitioner of feminist art did. Her ironing board was her stage, a place of theatre erected in the middle of the camp from which she could survey the scene and interact socially with her team, always with an eye for the comfort and interests of others. She directly addressed the landscape, like a conductor with her score. The horizontal board was perfect for the splash and wash of colour, the deft sketch of detail, and the urgent and fluent capturing of raw material and impressions which she later refined in her studio. She would use the sand at her feet, grind ochres, work blown dust and pollen into the paint and build layers from the substance of the place in which she stood.

Keenly conscious of how the land she painted was already layered with representation, Mandy often inscribed and painted words on her canvases that conjured connections to these cultural histories. Perhaps they were Becker’s words or Mitchell’s evocations of the seventeenth-century Italian painter Salvator Rosa (his favoured lens for the new land), or the latitude and longitude of the place, or some topographical annotations, or descriptions of its geology and vegetation from contemporary scientists and scholars. In this way she brought her painting into direct dialogue with science and literature, a conversation also enacted by her fieldtrips.

Mandy Martin, Westerton Ram Paddock 2, 2001, oil, ochre, pigment/linen, 90 x 165 cm.

David Malouf wrote in 2002 of her conscious cultural layering and Mandy, in turn, wrote in 2013 of how she and fellow artist David Leece were influenced in their choice of prospect by their shared reading of Malouf. Malouf perceived that the ambition of the literate European explorers of Australia was “to gather these new lands into a world of feeling that would be continuous with the culture they had brought with them.” Martin honoured that quest and built upon it, but she also took it in radical new directions.

Increasingly, she sought the guidance and collaboration of Indigenous artists on Country. In 2004, environmental historian Libby Robin, archaeologist Mike Smith and ecologist Jake Gillen travelled with Mandy and Guy to Puritjarra, an ancient rock shelter in the red sandstone Cleland Hills, 350 kilometres west of Alice Springs. Puritjarra is an extraordinarily significant place that, from the mid 1980s, deepened the chronology of human history in the centre of the continent from 10,000 to 35,000 years and provided evidence that people managed to sustain civilisation in the central deserts during the last ice age.

This expedition to such a remote site was a cross-cultural experiment, not just in bringing together art and science, but also in collaborating with the Indigenous owners, Ikuntji artists from Haasts Bluff. Their traditional knowledge, interpreted in acrylics on canvas especially for the project, was brought alongside Martin’s “European” vision where it generated a respectful dialogue about aesthetics, economy and history in a place of national significance. The paintings by Narputta Nangala Jugadai, Daisy Napaltjarri Jugadai, Molly Napaltjarri Jugudai, Anmanari Napanangka Nolan, Eunice Napanangka Jack, Colleen Napanangka Kantawarra, Alice Nampitjinpa and Linda Ngitjanka Naparulla are visually stunning and environmentally precise about their home.

Mandy, the visiting artist, painted her own breathtaking panoramas of the range and also collaborated with each of her visiting team members to produce multi-panelled canvases inflected with their distinct visions: archaeological, historical, pastoral, botanical. The boldness of this collaborative intervention in our national cultural life, captured in an exhibition at the Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs and the book Strata (2005), was remarkable.

Further ambitious, cross-cultural ventures followed. In 2007, renowned Kimberley artist Janangoo Butcher Cherel invited Mandy to paint alongside him in Fitzroy River Valley Country: “It led to one of the most extraordinary working relationships I have ever been lucky enough to experience,” remembered Mandy. On the Puritjarra project, the Ikuntji artists had done their painting at Haasts Bluff, but here Mandy was shoulder to shoulder with Mangkaja artists painting the same landscapes at the same time of day. The following year, three generations of Cherels came out to Painters Rock on Jalnganjoowa (Fossil Downs) to continue this journey into memory, country and the alchemy of art.

Southwest of Fitzroy Crossing is a big desert lake named Paruku (Lake Gregory), a World Heritage wetland in northwest Australia and “a human home of great antiquity,” a setting that geomorphologist Jim Bowler had long seen as a northern echo of his investigations into ancient human history at Lake Mungo. During 2011 and 2012, a project team of fifty artists, scientists and Walmajarri people from the Mulan community worked together on the Paruku Indigenous Protected Area beside the lake.

Alongside Mandy Martin, the curators and editors of the project were artist and writer Kim Mahood (who had a long association from childhood with Paruku and the Tanami), desert ecologist Steve Morton (who researched fire ecology in the Tanami and worked with Anangu people on the Uluru Fauna Study), and anthropologist John Carty who has lived and worked with Mulan people since 2002. Other visiting contributors included Guy Fitzhardinge, Jim Bowler, archaeologist Mike Smith, American writer and curator Bill Fox, ethno-ecologist Tanya Vernes, conservationist David Rickards, and creative artists Laura Boynes, Alexander Boynes, Faye Alexander, David Leece and David Taylor.

To draw together such a team was extraordinary in itself, but to do so on Country in a productive relationship with the Indigenous owners shows the sheer power of art, and of great artists, in energising genuine collaboration. Morton, Martin, Mahood and Carty wrote in their introduction to Desert Lake: Art, Science and Stories from Paruku (2013) that Paruku resonated with the most important questions of contemporary Australian life: “How are we to live with our shared history, our shared environments, our shared homes, in difference and respect? And how do we tell these stories together?” The Walmajarri people and artists welcomed and worked with the visitors, not only guiding the project, but redirecting it in several crucial ways. They had faith that multiple perspectives would generate “a kind of truth, a type of honesty about how things are in Australia now.”

These three innovative cross-cultural art projects focused in turn on deep archaeological perspectives, contrasting aesthetic visions, and social and ecological belonging. The next such project — known as Arnhembrand — brought art to bear on contemporary environmental challenges in caring for Country. Guy Fitzhardinge was chair of the Karrkad-Kanjdji Trust, which supports traditional owners in land management and cultural conservation in the Djelk and Wardekken Indigenous Protected Areas in western Arnhem Land. He knew that community members ranked “empty country” as the most severe threat to the maintenance of healthy country. His own research had for years critiqued the separation of social systems from ecosystems that underpins much Eurocentric thinking. In 2013 Mandy Martin was approached to work with Bininj people in western Arnhem Land as she had with Walmajarri people at Paruku, and in 2015 she held a drawing workshop supported by Djelk Rangers who saw the opportunity to tell stories about the cultural and land management work they were doing.

By 2017, nearly eighty Bininj people had become involved as performers and artists working with Martin and fellow Balanda artists Alexander Boynes, Laura Boynes and David Leece. Paintings, video works and a commissioned woven mat were created, and a mixture of Bininj and Balanda techniques were used. Mandy described the joy of watching the Bininj artists prepare their traditional bush brushes from speargrass slashed from the seafront and then deploy them with fluid precision. The team also used “the latest fluorescent Anthropocene pigments” mixed with traditional ochres to tell novel, confronting stories about invasive species, new fire regimes and changing climates.

As the project historian Billy Griffiths put it, “buffaloes, pigs, feral cats and cane toads have trampled, chewed, rubbed and wallowed their way across a delicate ecosystem… In the absence of traditional burning, fire, too, had become feral. The cultural landscape had transformed into a modern wilderness.” The project work, which was exhibited at Australian Galleries and published as Light — Stone — Fire (2017), has been archived by the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art where the director Bill Fox (a brilliant interpreter of Martin’s work) saw parallels in challenges faced by traditional Indigenous communities around the world, “whether it is the Inuit of Nunavut in the Canadian Far North, the islands of Vanuatu, or the scattered settlements of Arnhem Land.” Fox sees his museum as preserving information about how to achieve resilience in the face of change “and passing it down from generation to generation, and from place to place in order that we might all survive.”

After each of these exhilarating trips away, Mandy and Guy would return to their home amid the undulating white box woodlands, perched with its view northeast towards Orange. Winking at night on their horizon, bordering their property and expanding every year, was the Cadia Hill gold mine, the largest in the southern hemisphere. Mandy’s lifelong critical engagement with industry was now taking place in her own backyard.

True to form, her relationship with the mine owners was honest, forthright and constructive — and mediated through art. She completed a series of one hundred small canvases of the Cadia region, fifty of them depicting the local Belubula River in a golden palette using river sand and natural pigments, and the other half portraying the mine in a copper palette, using tailings from the dam and sulphide concentrate from the mine’s sag mill. She worked with Wiradjuri artists, and collaborated on canvases with neighbouring Indigenous artist Trisha Carroll. She launched further interdisciplinary projects combining art, science and storytelling that focused on the local mining landscape: The Lachlan: Blue-Gold (2003), Land$cape: Gold & Water (2003) and in 2016 a broader retrospective entitled Homeground, in which Mandy reflected on twenty years living in the Central West and selected twenty of her paintings of the region (out of more than 200) for exhibition.

As a boy, Guy would explore the rocky twists and turns of the Belubula River, whose name captures the sound of a gurgling, flowing stream, and he grew up knowing and romancing the traces of past mining in the landscape. But Cadia Hill was different in its sheer scale of mining and earth-moving and also in its amorphous international corporate elusiveness. In a beautiful essay for the Land$cape catalogue, Guy reflected that he now had “a neighbour who I do not know and probably will never know” and whose process of wealth creation lay far outside the local ecosystem or community. Nevertheless, he was determined “to explore and enlarge what we do have in common.”

Mandy, with fierce commitment, used her art to humanise the corporate face of the mine so that she could engage with it. And the argument she and Guy made through their work was that “the actual value of the Cadia region landscape is aesthetic, not material, and that the natural values of the river and native habitat if preserved, would in the long-term, outweigh the value of gold extracted from the mine.” It is a simple statement that is incontrovertibly true — if one can see long-term, can value the more-than-human, and can understand that Country needs people.

While plumbing the depths of her local region, Mandy was also prosecuting global environmental issues. Human survival in the face of massive anthropogenic climate change was a vital and urgent concern of hers for decades. In Australia, business and the arts have moved into the vacuum left by federal government denial of climate change, as Libby Robin has analysed, and are creating new partnerships such as a series of biennial Climarte Festivals, the first of which was held in 2015.

Mandy, working with Alexander Boynes and composer-musician Tristen Parr, created a series of stunning, panoramic performance pieces that combined traditional oil painting with video projection and a music composition. In Luminous Relic, a factory belching smoke gradually gave way to a collapsing Antarctic ice shelf, and in Rewriting the Score a Gondwanan fern forest morphed into an open-cut coalmine that became ravaged by fire. This piece ended with Parr, wearing a mine worker’s hard hat, poignantly playing his cello in a landscape of fern, coal and fire. These performances are visual enactments of chaos theory: time and landscapes collapse before your eyes and the globe becomes whole, elementally. Standing in that gallery in Morwell in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley in 2019, shoulder to shoulder with locals, I listened to workers moved by art who were feeling their way towards a new politics.

Martin had first painted the Yallourn Power Station in the Latrobe Valley in 1991 and here she was, a quarter of a century later, returning to the land of brown coal to deepen her critique. It is testimony to the coherence of her career. Her art began as a radical commentary on industrial and corporate power, drawing on the responses of European Romantic poets and artists to the industrial revolution to portray contemporary industrial incursions upon the Great South Land. She explored the links between the dark, satanic mills that emerged in the late eighteenth century and the vulnerable, beautiful landscapes of Australia today. As Mandy made these explorations from the 1980s, the grim implications of anthropogenic climate change burst upon us and made those links manifest in the very air we breathe.

We might reasonably say, therefore, that Mandy’s art foresaw the full horror of climate change. Her canvases from the early and mid 1980s pictured chimneys, mining residue and industrial plants in sublimely beautiful settings and they prompted us to ask: are they abandoned? is this the past or the future? is that smoke or cloud in the sky? are those mountains natural or terraformed by industry? Martin was already investigating the blurred line between nature and culture; she was preparing herself for the Anthropocene. Science eventually caught up with her and she was ready. The Sublime is both beautiful and terrible, grand and grotesque; it has a violence at its heart that threatens everything. When Mandy painted an exploding oil platform, it was both a magnificent form of terrorism and an objective commentary on fossil-fuelled cupidity.

Mandy Martin, Oblivion, 2019, pigments, acrylic and oil on linen, 200 x 200 cm. RLDI

And it is also wonderful art. When Dorothea Mackellar wrote of her love of the wide brown land in her poem My Country (1908), she evoked “her beauty and her terror.” Living on the land Mandy knew those Australian extremes, the supreme skies at sunset and the aching earth in endless drought. As an artist in thrall to the Romantic Sublime, she explored the edge between awe and fear and her paint dripped with passion. As an environmental scholar she was sensitive to delicacy and complexity, urgency and deep time, and the fragility of the planet’s predicament, the beauty and the terror. As a human being, she was warm, funny, intelligent, loving. Mandy Martin was a remarkably original, courageous and generous Australian artist whose vision of our land, and of its past and future, is inspirational. •

The post The beauty and the terror appeared first on Inside Story.

Like many people, I look back on four decades of Ken’s gentle, inquiring, compassionate kindness. He encouraged me in every job I’ve ever had and he responded to all my books — with postcards, letters, emails, warm words, a smile, a puzzle, some wordplay, a telling question, a review. When I voyaged south, we exchanged emails to and from Antarctica. Ken and his wife Amirah welcomed my family to ANU and Canberra, where we shared a devotion to the Australian Dictionary of Biography and its staff and to the idea of national collaborative scholarship, to the excitement of history as a vocation shared inside and outside universities.

All these endeavours were enhanced by Ken’s consideration, made more significant by his attention, nudged along by his questions, illuminated by his sweet insight. I offer this personal testimony simply because it is typical: Ken did the same for so many people, helping us to know who we are as scholars, writers and thinkers in Australia. He created a generous fellowship of like minds. It is Ken’s benevolent influence that permeates this book and that brings us together tonight.

But this book is much more than a tribute. It is scholarly, reflective, critical, contextual and expansive. The book offers a masterclass in historical thinking, intelligent living, generous scholarship, fine writing and critical citizenship. Its authors create a rich kaleidoscopic portrait of Ken, but also of the craft of history in Australia in the last seventy years. Reading and savouring this book is a great way to renew one’s sense of vocation as a historian, writer and thinker engaging with the public and situating oneself thoughtfully in one’s place and time.

Born in 1929, Ken was of a generation when his coming of age coincided with the great expansion of universities, so he was inducted early and easily into academic life — and he clearly loved it, relishing its autonomy and freedoms. But he was never just an academic, perhaps never even primarily an academic. It’s surprising to realise that about one who was so early a professor and so naturally an academic leader. But Ken’s only boyhood ambition was to become a journalist, and he almost did become one. And in some senses he always was one anyway, for it was a calling he pursued in parallel with, and sometimes against the grain of, his academic life. From the late 1950s, he was the Adelaide correspondent for the new fortnightly paper Nation; he enjoyed “moonlighting” for the paper — literally so, for the pieces were usually written in the evenings and posted at midnight.

Ken was a media junkie: he provided commentaries on the press, he was “enraptured” to be carrying a press card when he reported for the Canberra Times and Nation on the fiftieth anniversary pilgrimage to Anzac Cove, he looked for opportunities to contribute to broadcasting and he wrote histories of the ABC. He was always “looking for a way to communicate with audiences outside universities.” Ken reminisced that “I would like to be read by the people I went to school with. And by my parents. And by my children.”

His book The Australian Colonists: An Exploration of Social History, 1788–1870 (1974) was richly illustrated, designed to reach a popular readership. His leadership of the bicentennial history project, Australians (eleven volumes, 1987), and his championing of the innovation of “slice history” — which involved writing intimately about one year in people’s lives — were, among other things, experiments in writing for the broadest possible audience. And they were also a kind of provocation to his fellow academics to lift their eyes to the horizon, to imagine a public beyond the university. Inglis believed that “slicing” encouraged authors “to be more self-conscious about our prose than is general among academic authors.”

Ken studied and respected popular historical consciousness, and he championed history wherever it was done well. This was part of what drew him to love and support the Australian Dictionary of Biography and its nationwide fellowship of historians from all walks of life. Although he became a research professor, much of his own writing was commissioned: by newspapers, by urgent circumstance, by a hospital (Hospital and Community: A History of the Royal Melbourne Hospital, 1958), and by the Australian Broadcasting Commission (This Is the ABC, 1983). His work in Papua New Guinea, especially as vice-chancellor there (1972–75), demonstrated his commitment to the public role of the university in forming a new nation. He was what my generation called a public historian, but one who worked from within a university, and his sense of the university was a noble public institution not a corporate one. “Public” was an honoured word in Ken’s lexicon.

Many of Ken’s intellectual instincts and social convictions came together early in his career in his intensive, political writing about Rupert Max Stuart, an Arrernte man who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1959. Ken wrote his book The Stuart Case (1961) very quickly; it was both quality journalism and contemporary history, a courtroom drama in narrative form for a wide readership. He was a participant observer, an actor, a witness to the unfolding action, a journalist and a historian. He volunteered to be the unpaid clerk in the courtroom collating the transcript of evidence as it spilled from the stencilling machine. Thus he had what he called “a ringside seat, or rather a seat inside the ring, at the bar table.” In a compelling chapter about the case in this book, Bob Wallace and Sue Wallace explain that Ken’s writing was “a significant factor in averting Stuart’s hanging.” Ken was also embarked on an intriguing literary odyssey, for he was writing true crime — we can see The Stuart Case as an early example, if you like, of a genre of literary non-fiction with which we are now more familiar, a precursor of John Bryson on Lindy Chamberlain, Helen Garner on Joe Cinque and Chloe Hooper on The Tall Man, and even pre-dating by half a decade Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966).

Ken ended his book on the Stuart case with a reflection on civil society, comparing Australia in the early 1960s to Hungary or South Africa, and concluding that “the line from Australia to a police state is long.” “It is nevertheless,” he warned, “continuous.” The case he analysed reminded him that “the free society is a precarious achievement, depending as much on the absence of seriously divisive issues as on allegiance to liberal principles among holders of office.” One reads those words in Australia in 2020 with a frightening realisation that something has now broken, that we are much further along that continuous line than when Ken wrote. Historians should — and I think do — monitor that continuum, registering slippage in contextual detail; otherwise we lose our freedoms without realising it and miss the chance to fight for them. This is another way in which the work of Ken Inglis continues to inspire us.

Sometimes Ken’s journalism was in tension with his work as an academic and his standards as a historian. Following his reportage on the Stuart case, conservatives on the University of Adelaide council attempted to block his promotion. And when he tried to write the fiftieth anniversary Anzac pilgrimage as a book of history, he baulked at what he could not bring himself to say. Bowing to the sensitivities of the diggers might be acceptable in his journalist’s dispatches from the Mediterranean, but not — he felt — in a considered history of the event. Martin Crotty tells this story in the collection under the title of “The Book That Never Was.”

Ken’s habit was to be a sympathetic observer of past and present: detached, respectful and curious. His propensity for “being there,” for being a witness, underpinned his predilection for ethnography, which from the 1970s became a powerful influence on historians. As ever, Ken was ahead of the game thanks to his first wife Judy Betheras, who was an anthropologist, and also because of his eight years in Papua New Guinea living among other, very different cultures. In this collection, Shirley Lindenbaum makes the case for Ken as “an anthropological historian,” and Marian Quartly identifies his bicentennial “slicing” — with its explication of time and its focus on the texture of everyday life — as an invitation to ethnography.

As an undergraduate, I was taught by Greg Dening who, like Ken, drew inspiration from the writings of the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Also like Ken, Dening regularly observed Anzac Day, taking his students to the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance to practise ethnography. Graeme Davison was there too at the dawn service, and one can see how an interest in monuments and ceremonies, ritual and language, the topography of time and space, illuminated the work of these three great historians. Graeme writes about “Ceremonies of Life and Death” in this book, and explores Ken’s quest to understand Australia’s distinctive “civil religion” and the sense of the sacred built around the war dead, a mission that culminated in Sacred Places (1998).

Ken’s interest in monuments and ceremonies was what attracted me to him, and our first exchange was about observing Anzac. Although we had not yet met, I sent him my account of Anzac Day in Beechworth in 1979 and he replied with a succession of encouraging postcards. He introduced me to his friend Stephen Murray-Smith, who published my essay in Overland. The Anzac Day that I described as a twenty-one-year old was both meaningful and melancholy, a poignant dying ritual, and the diggers I spent the day with knew that the event would die with them: “it would dwindle away eventually, this Anzac business. It was sad to think so, but the young people of today don’t really understand what it’s all about, they don’t realise the hardships.” Yet within a decade the ceremony was resurgent. As Bill Gammage writes in this collection, he and Ken didn’t foresee that reinvigoration either. One of the fascinations of this volume is the way it traces Ken’s steady, lifelong inquiry into war and society — from saluting the flag at North Preston State School in the 1930s to the publication of “The Anzac Tradition” in 1965 to The Australian Colonists in 1974 to Sacred Places in 1998 to Dunera Lives in 2018 and 2020 — all played out against a rapidly changing landscape of modern Australian warmongering. In the 1960s Ken set out to rewrite Australian history by working backwards and forwards from the Anzac landing in 1915; yet while he was writing during the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Anzac Day was itself changing. This is the double dance of the historian and Ken maintained his balance with elegance and grace.

One of Ken’s subtlest and most enduring influences on Australian historical scholarship came through his love of language. He was a lucid, precise, wonderful writer who took the linguistic turn early and encouraged close attention to the history of words. In 2007 he gave a brilliant Allan Martin Lecture at ANU on Speechmaking in Australian History, beginning with the words “Men and Women of Australia!” In the course of his own speech, he “turned for enlightenment to Benjamin Franklin and Monty Python” and confessed that like most academics (and perhaps most Australians) he was “nearly all voice and no body.” The 2016 gathering in honour of Ken upon which this book was based was called A Laconic Colloquium, and Craig Wilcox in Observing Australia (1999) called him “a vernacular intellectual.” Jay Winter ends this book with an essay about “Ken Inglis and the Language of Wondering,” where he gives thanks for “the rhetorical posture of his prose,” the leaning back, the sympathetic gaze, the quizzical expression of “I wonder.”

For years, I used a 1990 essay Ken wrote on “Historians and Language” in my honours teaching; it began with a short unreadable paragraph he composed with phrases gleaned from years of examining PhD theses, and then he proceeded to rewrite it, word by word, seeking brevity and clarity. It was a kind of magic he was performing, shared with generosity and wit. In a review Ken wrote for a newspaper of a book of mine, he noted that I used the word “perhaps” quite often. I wasn’t sure then if it was a compliment. But having read this book called I Wonder — which explores Ken’s speculative intelligence and compassionate questioning — I’m now confident Ken saw it as a virtue. He was a naturally modest man and his insights were offered for reflection and debate; although he was humble, his curiosity was tenacious and life-enhancing. This is a warm, loving book that not only honours Ken but illuminates a generation of historical scholarship, enabling us to see a great historian at work and play, constructing an oeuvre across a whole life. I come from this book invigorated. There is work to do, urgent work, scholarly work, public work. Ken Inglis would expect us to do it — and to help one another to do it. •

Tom Griffiths spoke at the launch of “I Wonder”: The Life and Work of Ken Inglis at Readings Carlton on 10 March 2020.

“I Wonder” is edited by Peter Browne and Seumas Spark and published by Monash University Publishing. Inside Story readers can purchase a post-free copy at a 20 per cent discount here by using the code PUBGEN20. You’ll be asked for the code on the third page of the ordering process.

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I don’t use that term “unprecedented” lightly. In 2009 I resisted its use to describe the Black Saturday firestorm, for that fire had the features of a phenomenon Victorians knew all too well. Black Saturday was the latest in a lineage of frightening, fatal firestorms that have roared out of “the fire flume,” as historian Stephen Pyne calls the hot northerly winds that sweep scorching air from inland Australia into the forested ranges of Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania. In that region, bushfires strike every year, firestorms every few decades. Firestorms are bushfires of a different order of magnitude; they cannot be fought; they rampage and kill. The years of the great Victorian firestorms are burnt into the memories of bush dwellers: 1851, 1898, 1919, 1926, 1932, 1939, 1962, 1983 and 2009. These dates with their death tolls are the signature of a distinctively deadly fire region, produced by a cocktail of weather, topography and trees.

The firestorms are intensified by particular species of trees — the mountain ash and the alpine ash — that conspire to create a raging crown fire that kills and reproduces the whole forest en masse and takes people with it. These tall ash-type eucalypts need a hot, fast-moving crown fire to crack open their seeds, upon which their regeneration uniquely depends. Firestorms in these normally wet mountain forests erupt only after long droughts and they concentrate whole summers of fire and anxiety into single, violent events. The ecology of the forest depends on firestorms, so we know they happened also under Aboriginal ecological management. In the last two hundred years, the cultural history of the forest has exaggerated and intensified this natural rhythm.

In 2009 it was the familiarity of the Black Saturday firestorm that horrified me. The event was clearly exacerbated by climate change, but the recurrent realities were more haunting. As I wrote at the time, “the 2009 bushfires were 1939 all over again, laced with 1983. The same images, the same stories, the same words and phrases, and the same frightening and awesome natural force that we find so hard to remember and perhaps unconsciously strive to forget.” As a historian of the fire flume, I was disturbed by Black Saturday’s revelation that we had still not come to terms with what we had already experienced.

The long fire season of 2019–20 is continental in scale and has a whole new character. In an article for the Australian on 4 January, Gerard Henderson used the history of the Victorian firestorm to dismiss claims of novelty for this season’s fires. We have to be much more discriminating than this. One cannot talk about fire without being deeply attentive to locality, ecology and history. It is dangerous to generalise across ecosystems and fire regimes, as Victorians found on Black Saturday. There were so many deaths at home that day because people living in a distinctively deadly fire region had been reassured with a national survival strategy: that staying and defending was a genuine option in those extreme conditions. Such advice may have worked in many woodland areas, but it was a death sentence in the firestorm capital. It is essential for our survival and our culture that Australians learn a fine-grained, local language of fire, such as Aboriginal Australians developed over millennia.

The arrival of Europeans on the continent from the end of the eighteenth century catapulted the country into a spiralling, accelerating fireball of change. Global warming is the latest force to transform Australian nature, following continental drift, the ice ages, the firestick, cultivation, pastoralism, clearing, industrial agriculture and urbanisation. Human-caused climate change is transforming our continent before our eyes, in our own lifetimes. Droughts are becoming more frequent and severe, rainfall patterns are changing permanently, water is being trucked to inland towns, species are being pushed to extinction, and forests that evolved to burn are experiencing fire of different intensity and frequency such that some are no longer forests.

This summer, coming after severe drought and more record heatwaves, has tipped fire patterns into widespread rogue behaviour. It’s not unusual for Australians to have smoke in their eyes and lungs over summer — the great fires of 1851, 1898, 1926, 1939 and 1983 are remembered also for their weeks of smoke and for the black leaves of warning on lawns and in swimming pools. In the 1920s and 30s, bush workers on the watch for fire learned to identify fresh smoke in the acrid forest air. In 2002–03, the alps burned for months before culminating in their sudden defining invasion of Canberra on 18 January.

There is much that we are experiencing today that we can find also in patterns of the past. But the smoke is worse, more widespread and more enduring, the fires are more extensive and also more intense, NSW fires are behaving more like Victorian ones and some Victorian fires are more like those north of the border, and the “Border Fire” symbolically erased the boundary anyway. Australia has been burning since August, from Queensland to Western Australia to Kangaroo Island to Tasmania, from the Adelaide Hills to East Gippsland, in the Great Western Woodlands and up and down the eastern seaboard. And the Victorian fire season, where most lives are generally lost, is only just beginning.

Victorians always give their firestorms names, generally after the day of the week they struck. There are enough “Black” days in modern Australian history to fill up a week several times over — Black Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays — and a Red Tuesday too, plus the grim irony of an Ash Wednesday. The blackness of the day evokes mourning, grief and the funereal silence of the forests after a firestorm. This summer will leave a black legacy, but there is no single, culminating event and no end to anxiety and fear, no defining day and no day-after yet. Individual Black Days have fused in a Savage Summer. •

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These two images of Seddon — the professor of everything and the Man from Snowy River — are not as contradictory as they may at first seem. Professors are generally of something quite specific — even of accounting these days — and they preside over scholarly disciplines and social systems that discourage movement across them. To be a professor of everything is to be undisciplined. It is to be a maverick and a show-off; it is to elevate ideas over method, reality over abstraction, wit over earnestness. These are Australian bush virtues.

Seddon considered himself an intellectual more than a scholar. Being undisciplined, or temporarily disciplined, was his preferred state. In some senses he didn’t want to steep himself for too long in any one academic discourse, because his aspiration was not so much to master it as to reconnoitre (or even pre-empt) it. He enjoyed coming at things obliquely. That was the source of his originality. And it was perhaps an awareness of this that kept him moving, geographically and academically. Seddon was lured by the challenge of new fields in which to apply his adaptable intellect, and propelled by an uneasiness about becoming mainstream. The more one knows, or is expected to know, the harder it is to be cheeky. In the spaces and tensions between scholarly disciplines lies the freedom to be original. But one can’t dwell there; you have to keep moving.

Seddon’s family kept him moving from the moment he was born. His father was a bank manager and took jobs in various country towns in northwestern and central Victoria: Berriwillock, Romsey, Heathcote, Mildura, Nhill, Horsham. His adult life maintained the pattern on a larger canvas: Melbourne, England, Portugal, Canada, Perth, the United States, Sydney, Melbourne, Venice, Perth. His academic behaviour, as we have seen, was just as nomadic: English, geology, philosophy, history, environmental science, Australian literature. The first kind of mobility is common in academia, the second almost unheard of.

Academia — a wonderful word that concatenates arcadia, dementia and media — is international in orientation. In Australia at least, publishing or presenting overseas still has more clout than performing locally, and many Australian academics know Europe better than their own state. Seddon was an unusual academic in that he always knew where he was. “I’m a catchment boy,” he said. “I like to know where the rivers run.” Bushwalking was his favourite recreation. He fell between two stereotypes (or perhaps he straddled them). One is the intellect that is organic — that is emotionally and physically attached to one place and derives insights and meaning from that place. The other is the mind that develops through restlessness and, in becoming international, becomes almost placeless. Seddon presented a rare combination of the two: he was able to move easily in an international scene and say things of relevance to many places — he acquired Portuguese, Spanish, French, German and Italian, and in English he spoke with what he hoped was a “placeless accent” — yet he regularly invested creative energy in one place, and wanted to get to know it, physically and intellectually, from the inside.

This paradox was resolved, or at least accommodated, in his passion for gardening. Wherever he went, Seddon cultivated the soil and, quite literally, put down roots. The gardens he created have the same mixture of influences he carried himself: historical traditions that have to be respected, a dash of international style and a commitment to intimate native associations. He was determined to foster gardening habits that were frugal, ecological and local. His intensive local and regional studies — of Perth (with David Ravine), the Swan River, the Snowy River, and his own suburb of Fremantle — were his gardening writ large. They were the big backyards of his urban existence. In the 1970s, when Seddon was founding director of the Centre for Environmental Studies at the University of Melbourne, he became a key player in premier Rupert Hamer’s reconfiguration of Victoria as “The Garden State.”

His instinctively comparative mind was fascinated by contrasts of scale: he wrote in Sense of Place that “the world is now our toxic oyster” and he characterised the global village and the rebirth of regionalism as the tension between “jet-set and parish pump.” Seddon challenged the comfortable wisdom of “the tyranny of distance” and suggested we think of Australia as “a small country with big distances.” His work made strong connections between gardening and environmental history, putting the backyard into the national narrative, observing for example that “domestic lawn is one of the major irrigated crops in Australia.” An enthusiastic review of his 1997 collection of essays, Landprints, in the Sydney Morning Herald was even entitled “Backyard Solutions to Save the World.”

It would be easy to suggest that Seddon’s gardens and his regional studies were his response to city living and to a life of mobility, a sort of displacement therapy with its origins in a peripatetic childhood. (Even his birth certificate is dislocated. It says that he was born in Sea Lake, whereas it should have paid tribute to the nearby and otherwise little-celebrated Mallee township of Berriwillock.) Perhaps Seddon’s habit of attaching himself to place — and such a conscious, intellectual form of attachment — was his way of compensating for the social disorientation he experienced. He talked often of “orienting” himself — or, like the good naturalised Western Australian that he became, of “occidenting.” His strongest childhood memories were of landscape — the giant red gums of the Murray River and the damp volcanic undulations of Ballarat, where he went for secondary schooling — and he recalled the social stratification of country towns, where a bank manager’s family drifted somewhere in the middle tier of the professional hierarchy, with the doctor and lawyer above, the clergy and headmaster below. He experienced the marginality of boarding at a distant private school and of doing a compressed university degree at the end of the war. He then left Australia at the age of twenty-one to explore and work in Britain, Europe and America, to become a kind of occidental tourist. “I did all my youth very young,” he recalled.

Arriving in Europe was a revelation. Reflecting on his passage to England through the Mediterranean, he wrote: “This was the world of my schooling, yet I was experiencing it for the first time; the world where I was born and have lived most of my life, I have had to learn for myself.” He discovered that his education was upside down and that he had allegiances to both Europe and Australia. In Europe he encountered the sources of the concepts of harmony, proportion and composition that were deeply embedded in his aesthetic training, and he began to explore what was both enabling and disabling for an Australian working in these inherited cultural traditions.

Much of Seddon’s thinking and writing was to grow out of this dialogue across hemispheres, this self-consciousness as an “antipodean,” as Peter Beilharz observed in his review of Landprints. Seddon’s intellectual fellow travellers included Bernard Smith, the author of European Vision and the South Pacific (1960), Keith Hancock, the Commonwealth historian who was famously in love with “two soils,” and Joe Powell, a British-born Australian historical geographer who studied the fate of European images in the New World.

Seddon had two consuming passions: landscape and language. He was expert at reading landscapes and weeding the garden of words, and he believed in the practical insights that language offers to landscape design. Landprints united earth and paper in its title and was illustrated with inscriptions of nature and culture: concentric and radial sheep tracks, the feeding patterns of small crustaceans, the lines of middle-class Melbourne suburbia oriented to the compass. Seddon sought to master the grammar of landscape. He was interested in the history of words and loved playing with them.

And words opened doors for him. He recalled his two years as an English master at Winchester College, England, in the early 1950s, as “one of the most intense periods of my life.” In this setting, where “trained minds” were acquired by studying Latin and Greek, he felt “more alive than I have ever been before or since.” He found the college community to be “inclusive, deeply humane and deeply serious, committed to human decency, scholarship and ideas.” “But it was also exuberant, exhilarating, full of fun… I have never since been in a community of people who so loved their language… who delighted in its every inflection and richness and absurdity, and played with it, tossed it back and forth, as a precious toy.” He wrote to a fellow teacher there: “I saw myself [at Winchester] as socially disadvantaged in some ways — I didn’t have an upper middle class or aristocratic background — but the one entry to that society was verbal dexterity, wit. I could make people laugh and they could make me laugh.”

Seddon had an impish sense of humour, light and occasionally savage, as scathing as it could be self-deprecating. At Winchester he came under the spell of Walter Oakeshott, headmaster of the college from 1946 to 1954 and a notable scholar of medieval literature. Seddon had access to the college’s collection of medieval manuscripts, including the famous Winchester manuscript of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur discovered by Oakeshott. He also relished the opportunity to work with the headmaster on a notebook of Sir Walter Raleigh’s that contained preparatory material for his History of the World. All Seddon’s early mentors — Jack Dart, headmaster of Ballarat Grammar School, “the first person I met for whom intellectual inquiry was a passion,” Nonie Gibson (later Dame Leonie Kramer) and Ian Maxwell at the University of Melbourne, and Oakeshott at Winchester — were ardent teachers and scholars of literature.

Seddon described himself as having “a literary intelligence,” one that finds exceptions to the rule, argues from the particular to the general and is philosophical rather than theoretical, speculative rather than abstract. His linguistic bias made him interested in metaphors, especially in the language of science. To strengthen his understanding, he enrolled part-time in undergraduate biological and earth sciences while lecturing in English at the University of Western Australia. With the help of study leave, he completed an MSc and PhD in geology at the University of Minnesota in 1964–66. This lover of poetics found himself studying geology right at the time that it was embracing plate tectonics, a dramatic paradigm shift for the discipline. He found that geology shared with English “the taste for particularity, the delight in the infinitely varied living earth.” Geology deepened his sense of time — Fernand Braudel, master of la longue durée, thus became his favourite historian — and strengthened both his empiricism and pragmatism. Seddon’s geological imagination enabled him to suggest that, from an agricultural point of view, a useful question to ask a continent was “Did you have a good Pleistocene?” It was a question that Australia failed.

I can’t help but see George Seddon as part of a masculine tradition of nature and landscape writing in Australia that goes back to the nineteenth century, one that celebrates country childhoods and explores tensions between the city and the bush, the field and the academy, and the amateur and the professional. Writers such as Donald Macdonald, Charles Barrett, R.H. Croll, Alec Chisholm and Crosbie Morrison promoted Australian nature and landscape to the general public through newspapers, books and, later, radio. They identified an informal bush education as the source of special moral and physical virtues, and advocated a combination of indoor and outdoor learning, of intellect and feeling, science and romance. Seddon once wrote an essay entitled “In Praise of Country Boys,” exploring the practical and political benefits of a country upbringing. He was more scholarly than any of these predecessors, but he shared their combination of vernacular and learned wisdom, their fascination with the determinism of place, their love of the essay and occasionally their scepticism about “armchair theorists.” He was eager, for instance, to assess the likelihood of ancient Aboriginal occupation of parts of the Snowy River gorge by drawing on his own experience of camping there, his intimate canoeist’s knowledge of where the sun falls and the wind blows.

He was himself very much a country boy. “Boyish” is one of the words I would choose to describe Seddon. It is a term now out of vogue, but in the early traditions of Australian nature writing, there could be no more positive an adjective. Macdonald, Barrett and Chisholm wrote “Notes for Boys” as well as “Nature Notes” in early-twentieth-century Australian newspapers. “Boys” was, for them, expressive of a sort of freedom and emotional irresponsibility that they hankered after for life. In “Notes for Boys” they passed on bush lore, martial instruction and the sense of a sacred male camaraderie that thrived in the open air of Australia. “Boyhood,” and a country boyhood at that, was the ideal of this masculinist culture.

Although Seddon did his youth very young, it stayed with him. Perhaps it was the benefit of having a long-lived mother. Seddon in his seventies still had a spring in his step and a youthful air, and he loved being cocky and cheeky, at once infuriating and lovable. He refused to be politically correct. His prose was manly, his metaphors often masculine. Robyn Williams wrote of Seddon’s “intellectual physicality” and Sam Pickering of his “muscular” prose. This was partly Seddon the field scientist coming through, his commitment to a vigorous outdoor inquiry, but it is also the “boy” testing himself and revelling in his sensuous engagement with nature.

But if Seddon in this sense brought echoes of an early twentieth-century culture unfashionably into the beginning of the twenty-first, he was also, in many ways, ahead of his time. Seddon was a connoisseur of landscape, of its surface forms, the arrangement of its features, its felicitous routes of passage, yet he was able also to plumb its depths and mysteries, to analyse it formally and technically. Whereas his approach may have been received initially as a novel contribution to environmental planning, historical geography or landscape architecture, it came to be celebrated as a forerunner of environmental history. By subtitling his 1994 book on the Snowy River “An Environmental History,” Seddon recognised this shift in his concerns and invoked a lineage he admired, one that embraced Keith Hancock’s Discovering Monaro (1972) and Eric Rolls’s A Million Wild Acres (1981).

Searching for the Snowy was like them in its scholarly devotion to, and creation of, a region, and in its integration of scientific, literary and anecdotal sources. Also like them, it featured the author in the landscape and offered a subplot of discovery, of searching, setting a modern, personal exploration alongside the earlier ones recounted. As Seddon put it: “The basic form of the river, perhaps appropriately, is that of a giant question mark.” And so was his book. It began with the confession that writing about the Snowy was “hard going,” largely because of the challenges posed by environmental history, a mode of inquiry demanding a new kind of literary and scientific integration. As with Hancock and the Monaro and Rolls and the Pilliga, it is the relationship between Seddon and the Snowy, between person and place, that is so intriguing. The three authors explore ways of knowing a tract of earth, ways of coming to possess it, materially, economically, intellectually and emotionally. They want to own it, not in the sense of dominating it but of belonging to it, of learning to identify and live with it. Instead of the illusion of Australia’s apparent “empty spaces,” Seddon yearned for the “fine detail of our land [that] was celebrated by those who came before us.”

“Sense of place” had long been an everyday phrase with Romantic origins, but Seddon gave it Australian substance and academic currency. He acknowledged that Sense of Place (1972) was his best-known book in Western Australia and described it later as “an old-fashioned regional geography.” But what made it distinct and prophetic was its concern not just with physical patterns but with the imaginative apprehension of the land, and the fact that both perspectives appear in the one book. It is subtitled “A Response to an Environment,” and this was a further novelty, for the book was an emotional as well as scientific document, a personal search for identity and belonging through the use of observation and research, through science and history.

Seddon’s self-revelatory foreword to that book explains how, upon his return to Perth after six years away from Australia, he felt cheated: “The country was all wrong… This wasn’t what I had come back for; where were the ferntree gullies, the high plains, the trout? All the plants scratched your legs… you couldn’t take a running stream for granted. It was slowly borne in upon me that I wasn’t an Australian at all, but a Victorian.”

In Seddon’s later years, the study of place — how it’s constructed and understood, and what connects people to it — returned as a primary concern of social scientists. And in the same period, local history assumed new significance as a means of decentring orthodox and national histories. The homogenising effects of international mobility and global commerce renewed questions about what constitutes local distinctiveness, and elicited a new curiosity about the resilience and power of place.

“Place” also came to have particular significance in postcolonial societies where it denotes territories that are often still contested, where settlers are still coming to terms with a land that is theirs but not theirs, that is neither the Old World nor a sanctioned indigenous inheritance. In an Australian polity percolating with contested native title politics and green sensibilities, local history acquired a new moral and environmental edge. In the decades after the appearance of Seddon’s book, “sense of place” became a fashionable term that sharpened into political questions of “belonging.” As he himself observed in 1995, the phrase had come to invite the question: whose place?

Seddon the antipodean turned Australian histories upside down, thus righting and reorienting them. He helped to generate the new environmental narratives that emerged in late-twentieth-century Australia in place of the imported, imperial accounts of origins, those views from outside that looked longingly to distant shores. The discovery of deep time — biological and human — entailed a journey into the continent itself, an “inside” view that demanded a truly indigenous history; it meant abandoning the narrative of the nation as a footnote to empire. Plate tectonics literally undermined Australia’s history of original isolation. It revealed that the island continent only became a separate entity in the recent geological past and that most of the country’s fossil history is cosmopolitan. It focused the attention of Australians on a geological genesis in the southern hemisphere, followed by a relatively brief, formative journey north. From the 1960s, archaeological research took Australia’s human history back into the Pleistocene, bringing geological time and storytelling into an exciting and unexpected convergence. George Seddon, that ebullient offspring of English and geology, delighted in articulating and elaborating this revolution.

Judith Brett has argued that academics rarely write convincing prose because the bureaucratic organisation of their working lives and the institutionalisation of knowledge into disciplines makes it very difficult for them to take writing seriously. It is, she suggested in 1991, often against the grain of their jobs to communicate with people outside their discipline or with a wider public. That Seddon was such an elegant writer is another unacademic thing about him. It was Brett who, as editor of Meanjin in 1986, published his first thoughts on the Snowy, the essay that brought his work forcefully to my attention. Seddon’s restlessness, as we’ve seen, freed him of some of the shackles identified by Brett. It’s why his natural medium was the essay, which after all is an essai, an attempt, a trial. The essay is a prose form that enables movement, subjectivity, a lightness of touch, a brave synthesis, and sometimes sacrifices substance for stimulation; Seddon mischievously called the essay “sub-academic.” It’s a form that allowed him to find heaven in a grain of sand, range across traditional boundaries of knowledge and parade his cleverness in an entertaining way. Seddon was Australia’s most distinguished landscape essayist, our equivalent of Britain’s W.G. Hoskins and America’s J.B. Jackson.

Among the many fruits of academic restlessness is that no one really owns you — but nor do they necessarily celebrate you. Seddon’s vision has enduring significance today: he made life better, planners more thoughtful and landscapes more beautiful; he helped us see our country from the inside. He was a maverick, an original. He was steeped in the classics and planted in the earth; literature and place were combined creatively in his chemistry. In his boyish way he encouraged us to “wag school” from time to time, to climb fences, to play, and to challenge what we read with what we feel, hear and see. •

This is an edited extract from the introduction to George Seddon: Selected Writings, edited by Andrea Gaynor, released last month by Black Inc.

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To some, Dark Emu seemed to come out of nowhere, but Pascoe’s latest book, Salt: Selected Stories and Essays, helps us to see how it grew from the author’s life experience and earlier storytelling. I’ve been a follower of his work since the early 1980s, when I read his fiction and subscribed to the literary magazine he edited and published with Lyn Harwood, Australian Short Stories. When Dark Emu was published in 2014, Bruce became a household name and many readers encountered him for the first time. One of the pleasures of Salt is that it weaves his earlier fiction writing together with his now-celebrated nonfiction. We meet — or rediscover — the pre–Dark Emu Pascoe, and we’re reminded that this powerful voice itself has a history.

Pascoe is a writer but also a performer, an orator, a dedicated storyteller in the old style. I’ve sat with Bruce on a stage and found myself captivated by his careful, humble manner of speaking and gruff bush charm; he has a natural charisma and a mischievous wit. Earlier this year I was in a university lecture hall packed with hundreds of young people who had come out on a dark winter night to listen to the author of Dark Emu, and they were enthralled. You could have heard a pin drop. At the end of the speech the crowd erupted in an ovation for several minutes. Whatever Bruce Pascoe is saying, Australians clearly want to hear it now. And he has responded generously to the call, touring the continent tirelessly these past few years, accepting invitations to speak to audiences of all kinds in both city and bush. Apparently indefatigable in his early seventies, he reminds us of the enduring power of book and speech in the digital age.

In Salt he tells again and again of his realisation and dismay that Aboriginal history has been so systematically left out of Australian history. He discerns, as did John Mulvaney in the 1950s, W.E.H. Stanner in the 1960s and Judith Wright, Bernard Smith and Henry Reynolds in the 1970s, a wilful blindness, a Great Australian Silence, a complacent denialism about Aboriginal achievement. It is so persistent and embedded that it seems we have to keep rediscovering it, as if for the first time. Pascoe, a university graduate and schoolteacher, rails against the history he was taught and the texts he studied; his cry of betrayal is akin to Reynolds’s question (and book title), Why Weren’t We Told? (1999). There is an eloquent ire that informs Dark Emu and it suffuses Pascoe’s speaking and writing with the passion of a preacher.

Side by side with the public story of betrayal and revelation about Aboriginal history is Pascoe’s own journey into his Indigenous identity. Recently Andrew Bolt and Quadrant attacked Pascoe’s identification as a Bunurong, Tasmanian and Yuin man, wielding family trees like weapons. But Pascoe has long written with honesty and humility about what it means to be a pale-skinned Australian who has come to identify as Aboriginal: the forgotten branches of the family tree, the past conversations that suddenly make sense, the renewed connections with community.

“My insight into Aboriginal Australia is as abbreviated as my heritage has allowed,” he wrote in 2012. “It is as if I have been led at night to a hill overlooking country I have never seen.” In another essay in Salt he accepts scrutiny of his identity, reflecting that “clinical analysis of genes says I’m more Cornish than Koori.” But he explores his connection in a whole book about Aboriginal heritage, identity and belonging called Convincing Ground: Learning to Fall in Love with Your Country (2007). There he analyses the “suffusion of Aboriginal genes into the white population,” the identity of “people of broken and distant heritage like me” and how that “trace of blood doesn’t mean much unless you want it to.” Pascoe’s personal discoveries illuminate his investigations of the nation’s past.

The epigraph at the beginning of Convincing Ground reads: “This is not a history, it’s an incitement.” Dark Emu has gained traction from the self-professed marginality of its author and the impression that Pascoe’s revelations are also the nation’s. Kaz Cooke welcomed the book as “an elegant act of defiance,” and some of its power does come from being oppositional. Dark Emu has certainly reached new readers and awakened people, and the book has a strong analytical emphasis that I will soon address.

But what interests me here is the sense that Pascoe has had to fight against the grain of Australian historical scholarship to make his case. This is an angle that the media understandably loves. For example, Richard Guilliatt’s fine recent portrait of Pascoe in the Australian is titled “Turning History on Its Head” and promises to show how “academic conflict accidentally turned Bruce Pascoe into our most influential Indigenous historian.” It begins by describing Pascoe’s “long-running conflict with academia” and explains how one such confrontation over a cup of tea spurred him to write Dark Emu.

Disagreement is frequently a provocation of good books. But the implication here is that Pascoe’s crusade has been lonely and resisted. In Salt, he tells of “senior historians” who told him that “every primary document in the Australian history trove had been thoroughly examined; there was nothing new to be discovered.” I don’t believe any historian could believe or say such a thing; it would be a repudiation of their craft. My point is that the blindnesses and complacencies that Pascoe rails against are the same silences and lies that Australian historians have been collaboratively challenging for decades now. It’s a job that will never finish. Pascoe is primarily bridling at an older form of history, the history he learnt at school and university fifty years ago.

We could tell an alternative story of revelation, one that is more complex and collective. It would portray a collaborative political and intellectual endeavour across more than half a century, a concerted scholarly quest by black and white Australians to dismantle the Great Australian Silence. For the Silence itself has a tenacious history: it tightened its grip on the narratives of the emerging nation in the late nineteenth century, drawing a veil across frontier violence and underpinning the poetics and politics of White Australia. It was a great forgetting that was made up not only of silence but also of white noise. A cacophony of national history-making overwhelmed Indigenous testimony and the “whisperings” in settlers’ hearts, and it hardened into denialism — denial of the depth of Aboriginal history, denial of Indigenous sovereignty and land management, and denial of bloody warfare on Australian soil. The cult of sacrifice in overseas war — the Anzac legend — was essential to the denial of war at home.

Denialism persists today in culture and politics, as we see daily. But scholarship began to confront and overturn it from the 1960s as archaeologists, anthropologists and historians — increasingly working with Indigenous scholars and communities — worked their way into the traumatic oral testimony, the records of colonial conquest and bureaucracy, and the deep archive of the earth. It was — and continues to be — a protracted revolution in understanding, always challenged by reactionary denialism. Bruce Pascoe’s work is a further, marvellous elaboration of this great revolution in understanding the history of this country.

Pascoe does go some way towards acknowledging this modern scholarly context, for Dark Emu is thick with reportage and quotation, drawing on nineteenth-century sources and also citing the work of scholars such as Norman Tindale, Harry Allen, John Blay, Beth Gott, Jeannette Hope, Tim Allen, Rupert Gerritsen, Bill Gammage, Rhys Jones, Jim Bowler, Tim Flannery, Ian McNiven, Dick Kimber, Peter Latz, Deborah Rose, Harry Lourandos, Lynette Russell, Paul Memmott and Eric Rolls. He might have added the likes of Sylvia Hallam, Marcia Langton, Bill Jackson, Stephen Pyne, John Mulvaney and Isabel McBryde. But no account is given of how these historical insights have developed collectively over many decades to overturn earlier understandings. This inspiring story has been downplayed in Dark Emu.

What is novel about Pascoe’s work — and also surprisingly old-fashioned — is his explicit, analytical emphasis on the idea of agriculture. Aboriginal peoples, he argues, were farmers and bakers, the world’s first; they accumulated surpluses and lived in villages; they gathered seeds and harvested crops. Pascoe is consciously using the proud words the invaders used about themselves, words that justified dispossession — farming, villages, crops — and here he finds them in colonial descriptions of the original inhabitants of Australia, who he is keen to show were not “mere hunter-gatherers.” This is meant to be provocative and it is. With these words Pascoe detonates a primary European rationale for the conquest of Australia. The myth of “nomadism” was blown away by an earlier generation of scholars, as was the idea of “terra nullius”; then terms such as “hunter-gatherer” or “agriculturist” came to be seen as simplifying. But Pascoe wants to revive those categories triumphantly: Aboriginal peoples, he argues, were farmers.

This argument really matters in the history of Australia. It mattered from the moment the newcomers arrived and it still matters today — witness the recent conservative attacks on Pascoe and the critique of his work by those behind the website “Dark Emu Exposed,” who, significantly, self-identify as “a collective of Quiet Australians.” Agriculture is at the front line of the ideological war about the British colonisation of Australia. As literary historian Tony Hughes-d’Aeth has argued, “agriculture in Australia is a religion — it is as much a religion as it is an industry.” That’s why Pascoe has taken it on, digging out mentions of Aboriginal hayricks and stooks, crops and villages from the journals and diaries of explorers and colonists, no less, the very “sources upon which Australia’s idea of history is based,” as he puts it. Pascoe thus draws his evidence from the words of the legendary “firsts” in white history-making and shows how they saw more than we knew and sometimes more than they knew themselves.

This revisionary work is, I think, vital. We don’t understand enough about how Aboriginal peoples used and honoured this land for millennia. In spite of half a century of eloquent activism and scholarship, most Australians still grossly underestimate the sophistication of Indigenous culture, technology and governance. The popular embrace of Pascoe’s work suggests that many are keen to learn.

And these early witness accounts of how Aboriginal peoples managed the land are precious and fascinating. They invite a subtle reading, a cultural history that is attentive to both sides of the frontier. When Thomas Mitchell or Charles Sturt identified “hayricks” and “stooks,” their imperial eyes were observing features that they did not expect to see in the land of the “savage” — and they were also using the language of their own English rural culture to evoke the landscape of home, which they missed and hoped one day to remake in this strange land. There is prejudice, surprise and nostalgia distilled in these words. They deserve our close attention and open-minded analysis.

I understand why Pascoe has deployed the template of agriculture. He is turning a political tool of oppression and disdain into a case for dignity and respect. Archaeologist Rhys Jones did the same thing in 1969 when he coined the term “fire-stick farming.” It was a brilliant provocation and remains a foundational insight. But I think it’s a mistake to treat the concept of agriculture as a timeless, stable, universal and preordained template, to apply a European hierarchical metaphor, an imperial measure of civilisation, to societies that defy imported classifications. One of the great insights delivered by that half-century of scholarship is that Aboriginal societies produced a civilisation quite unlike any other, one uniquely adapted to Australian elements and ecosystems.

Pascoe often over-reads the sources — and for what purpose? To prove that Aboriginal peoples were like Europeans? Dark Emu is too much in thrall to a discredited evolutionary view of economic stages, a danger that Pascoe himself acknowledges in the book: “We have to be careful that we are not deciding on markers of civilisation simply because that is the historical path followed by Western civilisations.” Not only does this risk simplifying the surprising ingenuity and flexibility of Aboriginal economies; it also plays into the hands of conservative critics who are always ready to mobilise centuries of stereotypes about “Stone Age nomads.”

Two scholars are especially acknowledged by Pascoe in making his argument about agriculture. One is Rupert Gerritsen, whose book Australia and the Origins of Agriculture was published in 2008, and the other is Bill Gammage, author of The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, a bestselling history of Aboriginal land management published in 2011. Gerritsen’s work, richly referenced, reminds us how long the debate about foragers or farmers has been going on in the scholarly literature, and he often draws on the same evidence as Pascoe (as Bruce acknowledges). Gammage’s book won wide acclaim and a popular readership but also drew criticism, especially from ecologists and archaeologists.

Pascoe and Gammage are often cited as making a similar argument, and they do both tend to homogenise the diversity of Aboriginal societies, ecologies and histories in their quest for a national saga. But their books are distinct in important and interesting ways. For example, Gammage argues that Aboriginal peoples “farmed in 1788, but were not farmers. These are not the same: one is an activity, the other a lifestyle.” He persists with careful distinctions: “Many people did live in villages, but most only when harvesting”; “they did not stay in their houses or by their crops”; “they lived comfortably where white Australians cannot.” Different Aboriginal societies used a range of practices throughout Australia, cultivating a wide variety of ecologies. And when Europeans brought their version of agriculture to Australian shores, it often didn’t work — and it’s in retreat in many regions today. The Indigenous alternative — in all its many forms — was grounded in a knowledge of Country. A strong dimension of Dark Emu’s popular appeal is the practical inspiration it offers for caring for the land and cultivating native perennial plants; Pascoe has himself invested in the bush foods industry.

A scholar’s reaction to Dark Emu can therefore be mixed. First there is surprise that large sections of the reading public are still unaware of scholarship that has been brewing since the 1950s, but there is also gratitude for a book and a voice that awakens people. There is concern that archaic evolutionary hierarchies should be revived just when we thought that such a northern-hemisphere mode of thinking had been transcended in Australia. There is criticism of hyperbole and of evidence being simplified or overblown. And there is admiration for the sheer bravura of a man on a mission, a gifted Australian writer whose work has struck a chord with the public and whose words — written and spoken — are inspiring and empowering Australians, black and white. The new book, Salt, reminds us of the storytelling muscle, poetic depth and moral seriousness of Bruce Pascoe, and of his role as a public intellectual who has wrestled for decades with the idea of Australia. •

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Apollo 11 was a magnificent technological feat that also stirred a common humanity. There were times when the sheer wonder of leaving our planet to land on another world transcended the grubby, aggressive cold war politics that fuelled the space race. The plaque left on the moon depicted the two hemispheres of Earth and assured the solar system that Apollo 11 “came in peace for all mankind.” But nationalism was the mud on their boots, and they tramped it in.

A few hours after the first moonwalk, an uncrewed Soviet spacecraft, Luna 15, crash-landed on the moon, thus giving the Americans a satisfying first spike on the graph of their newly installed lunar seismometer. Luna 15 took the space race to the finish line, for it was designed to retrieve Russian samples of moon rock before the Americans could return with their own.

The rhetoric of space exploration was so future-oriented and cold war politics so competitive that NASA underestimated the power of looking back. In 1968, the historic Apollo 8 mission launched humans beyond Earth’s orbit for the first time, out and across the void and into the gravitational power of another heavenly body. For three lunar orbits, the three astronauts studied the strange, desolate, cratered surface below them and then, as they came out from the dark side of the moon for the fourth time, they looked up and gasped:

Frank Borman: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, that is pretty!

Bill Anders: Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.

They did take the photo, excitedly, and it became famous, perhaps the most famous photograph of the twentieth century, the blue planet floating alone, finite and vulnerable in space above a dead lunar landscape. Frank Borman said: “It was the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life.” And Bill Anders declared: “We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

In his fascinating book Earthrise (2010), British historian Robert Poole explains that this was not supposed to happen. The cutting edge of the future was to be in space; Earth was the launch pad not the target. Leaving the Earth’s atmosphere was seen as a stage in human evolution comparable to our amphibian ancestor crawling out of the primeval slime onto land. And now, “after thousands of years of life on this planet” (declared the Los Angeles Times) “Man has broken the chains that bind him to Earth.” Humans had left the realm of solids and gases for gravity-free, oxygen-free space, for a new frontier and a beckoning future. The weightless astronauts, even in their clumsy spacesuits, were liberated. Furthermore, their new dominion was seen to offer what Neil Armstrong called a “survival possibility” for a world shadowed by the nuclear arms race. In the words of Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear (sometimes hilariously confused with Buzz Aldrin), the space age looked to infinity and beyond!

So the power of the view back towards Earth took NASA by surprise. A few years later, in 1972, a photo taken by the Apollo 17 mission and known as The Blue Marble became one of the most reproduced pictures in the world, showing the Earth as a luminous, breathing garden in the dark void. Earthrise and The Blue Marble had a profound impact on environmental politics and sensibilities.

Within a few years, the American scientist James Lovelock put forward “the Gaia hypothesis”: that the Earth is a single, self-regulating organism. In the year of the Apollo 8 mission, Paul Ehrlich published his book The Population Bomb, an urgent appraisal of a finite Earth. During the years of the moon missions, British economist Barbara Ward wrote Spaceship Earth and Only One Earth, revealing how economics failed to account for environmental damage and degradation, and arguing, like Ehrlich, that exponential growth could not continue forever. Earth Day was established in 1970, a day to honour the planet as a whole, a total environment needing protection.

Then, in 1972, the Club of Rome released its controversial and enormously influential report The Limits to Growth, which sold over thirteen million copies and went into over thirty translations. In their report, Donella Meadows and Dennis Meadows wrestled with the contradiction of trying to force infinite material growth on a finite planet. The cover of their book depicted a whole Earth, a shrinking Earth. Shrinking the Earth became the title of a 2016 book by the American environmental historian Donald Worster about modern humanity’s ill-fated quest for endless growth and how the view of Earth from space initiated a change in consciousness comparable to the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions.

When the Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard looked up from the lunar surface and regarded the Earth high in the sky, he was struck by “that thin, thin atmosphere, the thinnest shell of air hugging the world.” He looked at his home in the blackness and felt its extreme fragility, and he wept.

In the fifty years since Apollo 11, we’ve learned a lot about that precious atmosphere. Earth systems science emerged in the second half of the twentieth century and fostered a keen understanding of planetary boundaries — thresholds in planetary ecology — and the extent to which the human enterprise is threatening or exceeding them. The same industrial capitalism that unleashed carbon enabled us to extract ice cores from the poles and construct a deep history of the air. At least we now understand our predicament even if we are perilously slow to act. The blue planet is suffering the sixth great extinction and a climate emergency. The fossil fuels that got humans to the moon now endanger our civilisation. But fifty years after Apollo 11, we might hold onto the idea that the space race also unexpectedly quickened our race to save the Earth.

Last week I watched Todd Douglas Miller’s fiftieth anniversary documentary, Apollo 11, and was mesmerised by the real footage and voiceovers, and felt all the anxiety and suspense even though I knew what would happen next. The surviving 65mm footage surpassed all the efforts of Hollywood (in the 2018 film First Man) to represent the awesome power of the Saturn V rocket launch. I was moved by how mechanical and brittle was the whole grand enterprise. They were shooting at a moving target in a machine with 5.6 million moving parts. As the astronauts boarded the spaceship and the countdown proceeded, technicians were fiddling with a leaking liquid hydrogen valve on the rocket below them. In the Houston control room, slide rules were used dexterously. When Armstrong stepped out for the moonwalk, he bumped and broke a switch that was crucial to the operation of the ascent engine, and it was fixed with a ballpoint pen. The lunar module, Eagle, was a tinfoil Tardis. These vulnerable humans were camping at the edge of the universe.

I was twelve at the time of the Apollo 11 voyage and found myself in a school debate about whether the money for the moon mission would be better spent on Earth. I argued that it would be, and my team lost. But what other result was allowable in July 1969? Conquering the moon, declared Dr Wernher von Braun, Nazi scientist turned US rocket maestro, assured Man of immortality. I followed the Apollo missions with a sense of wonder, staying up late to watch the Saturn V launch, joining my schoolmates in a large hall with tiny televisions to witness Armstrong take his Giant Leap, and saving full editions of the Age newspaper reporting those fabled days. I’m reading them now: “Target Moon — here they come,” “Here we go round the Moon,” “Down to the Moon — Spacemen set for walk into history,” “Apollo hurtles for home — Nixon will see that big splash.”

Other news was pushed to the margins: about senator Edward Kennedy leaving the scene of a fatal car crash at Chappaquiddick Island, about the latest “light casualties” in Vietnam, about the immigration minister (Mr Snedden) welcoming a significant rise in the number of refugees settling in Australia, about the arrival of seven Nauruans in Australia for eye operations, about efforts to save the Great Barrier Reef from oil drilling. One telecommunications company took out a full-page advertisement comparing Neil Armstrong to Captain Cook and thus the moon to Australia as “yet another unknown where intrepid man has now trod.”

But the legendary cartoonist Les Tanner depicted the two astronauts sitting on the moon gazing at Earth and saying: “Funny — it looks like one world!”

Apollo was an astonishing extrapolation of the military-industrial complex, of a cold war superpower blasting even into space. Thus with the eyes of the whole world upon them, with a moment of unity in their grasp, the Americans planted their national flag on the moon. It was the next phase of colonisation, the new frontier, an affirmation of the future. Everything was simulated and rehearsed in advance, every possible problem imagined and solved before it could happen. The day before the launch the crew were still in simulators, practising the future. But NASA did not foresee Apollo’s greatest legacy. It could not imagine the radical effect of seeing the Earth. •

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Since his disappearance in the surf — his body never to be recovered — theories and mysteries have abounded. Why did Holt casually enter such turbulent water? Was he showing off to his mistress, who was watching from the beach? Could the prime minister have been the victim of an assassination plot? Was it an act of suicide by a depressed man? Was he a spy who had a secret assignation with a Chinese submarine offshore? Had political treachery forced him to desperation or listlessness?

Harold Holt is remembered more for his death than for his life. But he had a long and distinguished parliamentary career that culminated in January 1966 when he took over the prime ministership. He had been Robert Menzies’s treasurer and became his anointed successor after sixteen years of conservative rule. Although he was only fourteen years younger than Menzies, he seemed to represent a new generation of leadership. He helped turn Australia diplomatically towards Asia, began to dismantle the White Australia policy and oversaw the successful 1967 referendum that removed discrimination against Aboriginal people from the Australian Constitution. He was a gregarious man who also enjoyed solitude, and he seemed to embody the swinging sixties. He relished spearfishing in the open ocean and was photographed in his wetsuit and snorkel at the surf beach with his bikini-clad daughters-in-law.

Long, boring parliamentary debates offered him a chance to practise holding his breath.

Holt and his wife Zara had a holiday house at Portsea near The Rip at the mouth of Port Phillip Bay. The Rip is the tumultuous stretch of water where two domains meet: the mass of water that comes in and out of the bay as a tide, and the heave and swell of ocean that has come all the way up from the Antarctic. The writer Barry Hill, who lives on the other side of The Rip from Portsea, in Queenscliff, has observed that “the two seas in the act of meeting and exchange create a turbulence as dangerous as anywhere in the world.” It is possible, he says, to see the bay’s water flow upwards as it exerts its will to escape over the southern swell. The turning of the tide in such a place is a moment of danger. It was here — just outside the bay and within the governance of The Rip — that Holt loved to go spearfishing, often alone.

Every Christmas, my parents would take my brother and me for a two-week holiday at Sorrento, where we would hire the basement flat of a house with a vast garden. A regular highlight of the holiday was a trip to Point Nepean, which has since become a national park but was then the site of an operating quarantine station and thus closed to the public. But my father was a Commonwealth public servant at the Government Aircraft Factory and applied each year for a quarantine pass, which we would solemnly present to the soldiers at the gate.

Once that gate was opened, we drove into a magic, mysterious world that was all ours to explore: the limestone buildings of the historic station, lonely beaches and sandy staircases, military bunkers and underground tunnels, catacombs and gun emplacements, and the fort that boasted the first shot fired in the British Empire in the first world war, a shell directed across the bows of a German ship attempting to leave the bay. My brother and I played freely in this sand-and-stone labyrinth, and never saw another soul. Later and rather unnervingly, when the national park was established, signs appeared beside walking paths, declaring: “Beware! Unexploded ordnance. Keep to the path!” Sometimes we would stand, windblown, at the end of Point Nepean, looking out across the tumultuous Rip where we could discern the bones of a sailing ship that had once foundered there, still visible in the jaws of the bay. Appropriately, it was the wreck of the Time.

One day, late in 1964, we presented our quarantine pass at the gate and proceeded into our remote, elemental playground, but this time we were surprised to find another car parked above Cheviot Beach. There was a man sitting alone in the front seat, waiting. When he heard our car, he appeared to wriggle back into his wetsuit and then got out to greet us. My parents exclaimed, “Good God, it’s the treasurer!” I didn’t know what a treasurer was but I suspected it was someone precious. Harold Holt looked cold, damp and famished. He explained that he had locked his keys in the boot of his car and asked if we could give him a lift back to his Portsea home, where he had a spare set. He had gone swimming in the early morning and appeared to have been waiting some hours. It was now early afternoon.

Mum hopped into the back seat with her boys, and our wet skindiver slipped into the front seat beside Dad. We drove the four or five kilometres back to Portsea while I discreetly scrutinised this “treasurer” who wasn’t very good with his keys. On arrival at his home, Holt disappeared inside while we waited in the car. Some time later he reappeared, dressed and devouring a huge sandwich, his first food since dawn. Zara was there, and a son, but Holt did not appear to have been missed. His long absence, skindiving alone at one of Victoria’s most dangerous beaches, had not apparently caused undue concern. He told us that his son would now drive him back to the car and invited us inside his home. My parents, reluctant to impose, declined. We left Mr Holt, eating ravenously and juggling a huge bunch of keys, wondering which of them would let him back into his car.

On the drive back through the quarantine gates and out along the headland, I remember my parents talking animatedly. They had just read The Rulers (1964), an analysis by journalist Don Whitington of Menzies’s long conservative reign, in which Holt, “the logical successor,” was pictured in skindiving gear holding a fish for the camera, with the caption: “Holt — fishing in deep waters.” That image had just materialised in our car, still dripping. Mum and Dad were incredulous that anyone, let alone the treasurer of the Commonwealth, would dive alone on such a perilous stretch of coastline.

My father was a keen body surfer and had introduced us boys to the ocean as soon as we could potter about in the froth. The relentless roar of the surf is one of my earliest memories. Dad would watch us carefully, keeping an eye on the weather and the tide, and taught us how to read a beach and look for currents. On this occasion, as we drove back out to Point Nepean, he spoke passionately of the renowned dangers of Cheviot Beach. He stood with us on the cliff and pointed out the rocks that shaped the three gutters that sucked water off the beach into the turbulent, heaving holes of bull kelp that lay just offshore. He feared for Holt. Thus I learned that there were rips as well as The Rip.

Three years later, when our television program was interrupted by a news flash from that very beach, we shared the shock of the nation but also felt somehow implicated. Shocked but unsurprised. The prime minister was missing. I felt that my father had predicted it.

The police report into the disappearance of the prime minister was completed within three weeks, while there was still some hope that a body or remains might be recovered. The inquiry determined that it was an accidental death by drowning. The report dwelt on the “ordinary domestic pattern” that witnesses disclosed and the good spirits of the prime minister in his final days. There were statements from fishermen about the currents and from Holt’s doctors about his health. It was appallingly simple: the man had misjudged his favourite medium.

But in the decades since, alternative theories have proven irresistible. By the end of 1967, Holt was under increasing pressure from Vietnam war protests and political scandals; on the morning of his death, he had a mysterious phone conversation with his treacherous treasurer, Billy McMahon; after his disappearance, police officers secretly removed papers from his briefcase at Portsea; Mrs Marjorie Gillespie, the Portsea neighbour and “family friend” who had accompanied Holt to Cheviot Beach, was also his lover. Serious, sinister and salacious as these facts might seem, none of them has revealed motives for Holt’s death or suicide. Holt had a record majority in parliament; McMahon was renowned for his scheming (and his use of the phone); the papers were removed from Holt’s briefcase at the behest of the governor-general, Richard Casey, who had written confidentially to Holt about McMahon; and Mrs Holt later claimed that Harold had many mistresses over a long period.

The most sensational conspiracy theory, set out in a book called The Prime Minister Was a Spy (1983), is that Holt worked for the Chinese government and was evacuated in a submarine before his identity could be revealed. But the chief source of the allegation, Ronald Titcombe, has been described as a “professional con man,” and the author of the book, British novelist Anthony Grey, believed that all life forms on earth were genetically engineered by an advanced extraterrestrial civilisation. The spy theory was coolly dismissed as a complete fabrication by Tom Frame in his fine biography, The Life and Death of Harold Holt (2005).

So let us return to the salty reality of the sea, to the cold, famished treasurer who could be absent half a day without raising his family’s concern, to the prime minister who loved the solitude, beauty and risk of the ocean and whose chief relaxation and touchstone of reality was the underwater world. Let us pay attention to the elements rather than to political intrigue or spurious informants.

Harold Holt did love the sea, as his gravestone declares, and as the Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Centre bizarrely honours. His colleague Paul Hasluck, not a fan, actually wrote (without intended irony) that Holt’s greatest asset was his “buoyancy.” But Holt almost drowned twice in the year before his death, the worst occasion at Cheviot Beach when he turned purple and was rescued by companions. He constantly tried to build the strength of his lungs: Zara would sometimes come into the bathroom and find him face down in the water. Long, boring parliamentary debates offered him a chance to practise holding his breath.

Holt was not a swimmer so much as a diver. It was the watery depths that he loved, and they were opened up to him by snorkel, wetsuit and flippers. His friends considered him just an average surface swimmer; if he wasn’t equipped to dive he would generally just have a short dip to cool off. When Zara was told the awful news that he was missing, she asked, “Do you know if he was wearing his sandshoes or his flippers?” On being told that it was probably his sandshoes (as indeed it was), she replied, “Oh, he’s gone!”

When Sunday 17 December 1967 dawned, Holt rose early, walked into the kitchen, looked out the window and remarked to his housekeeper that the weather was puzzling. Local fishermen later testified that “the weather conditions were very bad” and that there were “very rough seas and surf.” Westerly winds were blowing with gusts of fifty to sixty kilometres per hour and there was “a strong flood tide travelling through the heads due to the high westerly winds.” There would have been a strong rip in Cheviot Bay due to the conditions. The nearby Portsea Ocean Beach, normally busy on a Sunday in summer, was closed for the day.

Holt, together with Marjorie Gillespie, her daughter Vyner and friend Martin Simpson, and another guest of the Gillespie family, Alan Stewart, drove in two cars to the old fort at the end of the peninsula to watch the British yachtsman, Alec Rose, come through the Heads. Rose was single-handedly circumnavigating the world in Lively Lady and felt the strength of the currents against his hull that day. After a few minutes viewing the distant yacht and the huge waves rolling in along the coast, Holt’s party decided to have a dip before lunch and drove back to Cheviot Beach. The day was hot and sultry and Holt was concerned about the weather. As they made their way down onto the beach, they observed that the tide was unusually high, and as they picked their way along the narrow remnant of sand, their legs were battered by heavy driftwood in the surf, mainly planks used on ships to secure cargo. There was so much timber in the water that a navy search-and-rescue vessel was later damaged by the buffeting beams.

High water that day was at 11.32am, and it was now approaching noon. The tide was turning. Mrs Gillespie and Alan Stewart said that the sea was higher than they had ever seen it at that beach. Martin Simpson waded cautiously in and retreated after feeling a strong undercurrent. Stewart also went in knee-deep but felt a “tremendous undertow.” Holt reassured them: “I know this beach like the back of my hand.” Having changed into his swimming trunks behind a rock, but still wearing his sandshoes, Holt walked into the water and, without hesitation, plunged in. The observers on the beach thought that he was swimming calmly and steadily away from the shore. But what they saw was a man who could not find a foothold in the unexpectedly deep water and was being swept out by a rip. As his skindiving companion Jonathan Edgar testified, “He would have been intending to swim out about ten to fifteen yards, stand up, brush his hair, and just swim back into the beach.” He had wanted a quick dip after the hot walk down the sand dunes. Holt’s political colleagues considered him impetuous, and he was often reluctant to admit when he was in trouble.

Holt had a recurring shoulder ailment about which he had recently seen two doctors. Sometimes he needed drugs to control the pain. Doctors had advised him to rest his shoulder, but he had nevertheless played tennis the preceding afternoon — although his movement had been a bit restricted and he was below his usual form. Marjorie Gillespie, his lover, told police that the shoulder disability meant that he “could not do an overarm stroke when swimming.” From the beach she watched him drift steadily away from her “like a leaf being taken out.” She could see his head above the water but rarely an arm. Across the breakwater she saw him enter a roiling turbulence and suddenly he was gone.

It is the habit of humans, especially political commentators, to underestimate nature. If my childhood memory has anything to offer, it is to remind us of the awesome power of the sea and the ordinariness and predictability of this Australian beach tragedy. ●

The post How Harold Holt was lost appeared first on Inside Story.

Fortunately, Patricia Karvelas, who has often reported Indigenous issues, gave the backdoor announcement the attention it merited. On RN Drive last Thursday, which she noted was the anniversary of the Uluru handback, Karvelas applied a blowtorch to Indigenous affairs minister Nigel Scullion and gave a platform to Noel Pearson. Pearson spoke with such fluent, eloquent anger that his quoted words, virtually unedited, constituted the editorial of the Saturday Paper. “There is no recognition or reconciliation under this prime minister,” he declared. “Malcolm Turnbull… has consigned himself to a footnote even before he’s left the parliament.”

It was not just that the government rejected the call for an Indigenous voice; it was the way it was done. Indigenous leaders were treated discourteously and the process the government itself had initiated was treated with disrespect. The prime minister declined to make the announcement himself and the news was quietly released to the media amidst uproar about other issues. It is dismaying to see a government “put out the trash” under cover of its own dysfunction.

The government had already pre-empted public discussion of this esteemed outcome of a decade of consultation. Within days of the release of the Uluru Statement in late May, Barnaby Joyce had falsely characterised it as a call for “a third chamber of parliament.” Turnbull’s press statement did the same last Thursday and Nigel Scullion peddled that line in the media, constantly using the term “third chamber.” Gabrielle Appleby explained in Inside Story last week why that line is false and why the proposal is far from radical, and Indigenous leaders have calmly reiterated that it is a voice, not a veto — a voice to parliament, not a voice in parliament.

The government’s view is that an Indigenous voice to parliament would be unacceptable to the Australian people. When Karvelas asked for the evidence, Scullion said, “Well I don’t need evidence to do that. We have done a lot of polling. We have done a lot of polling. Not on this particular matter because it was never a matter that was contemplated.” Yet a poll released this week reveals that over 60 per cent of Australians do support a change to the Constitution to set up a representative Indigenous body to advise the parliament. So although the government was determined to foist a postal vote on us about an issue that parliament has the power to decide (same-sex marriage), it refuses to seek a vote on a constitutional issue upon which only the people can decide. Barnaby Joyce does, however, support a referendum to deal with his personal failing to do citizenship paperwork.

It shouldn’t surprise us that Turnbull doesn’t have the ticker. We need to stop treating him as a thoughtful, liberal man constrained by his right-wing rump, a leader whose promise is always about to be realised. He has never delivered. His poor political judgement led the popular cause of republicanism to defeat. When he finally seized the prime ministership and gained the power to deliver a republic, he shrivelled in the glare and found the idea too ambitious. The Uluru Statement, he declares, is also “too ambitious.” Malcom Turnbull has ambitions only for himself, not for the nation.

Following the government announcement last week, Noel Pearson wrote that ten years of his life flashed before him, a decade of hard work towards recognition. And there came also to his mind, as for many of us, “the long history of Indigenous advocacy in this country.” For more than 200 years, the Indigenous people of this country have patiently petitioned white politicians and their institutions. A shocking pattern emerges: the more respectful and successful the Indigenous consultations and statements, the more likely they are to be undermined or betrayed by government. It seems that our white political institutions are still uncomfortable with Indigenous strength and success.

Take, for example, the story of Coranderrk in the Yarra Valley of Victoria. In the 1850s and 60s, reeling under the invasion, the ngurungaeta (leaders) of the Kulin people petitioned to be given some of their land to farm as compensation for their loss of country and resources. They were first allotted land in the Acheron Valley, which was promised “ever should be theirs,” and they worked it enthusiastically until rival white farmers forced them off. Led by Simon Wonga and William Barak, they then went in search of another “promised land,” walking across the mountains to the Yarra flats to establish Coranderrk near present-day Healesville.

There, they built huts, cleared and worked the land, produced and sold craft, and by 1867 were grinding flour from their own grain and cutting timber at their sawmill. These Aboriginal farmers won gold medals at Royal Agricultural Shows, and scarcely a year went by when hops grown at Coranderrk did not command the highest price at the Melbourne markets. Many white settlers envied their productivity and politicians were amazed yet annoyed by the determination of the Coranderrk residents to manage their own affairs.

The sinister process by which this Aboriginal success was undermined and betrayed has been carefully documented by historians. So has the decade and more of Aboriginal rebellion against this second dispossession. William Barak emerged as a patient supplicant to the invaders’ conscience. He led Coranderrk residents in a respectful campaign of delegations, strikes, protests, petitions and letters to the press expressing their concerns to the Victorian government and public. He and other leaders frequently walked the sixty kilometres from Coranderrk to the Victorian parliament to pay their respects and make their case to an institution they were implored to trust. They wore their best clothes on the long walk and some carried their shoes in their hands. Nevertheless, in 1886 sixty residents were ejected from Coranderrk, in 1893 half the reserve was excised for white farmers, and in 1924 the settlement was closed. Tragically, this story has been repeated across the nation, and we saw its echoes last week in the government’s trashing of a long process of invited and respectful Indigenous negotiation.

When, in September this year, Malcolm Turnbull refused to greet Aboriginal man Clinton Pryor outside parliament after his 6000 kilometre Walk for Justice across the continent from Perth, the writing was on the wall for the government response to the Uluru Statement. But once again Turnbull is on the wrong side of history — a footnote indeed — for there is a popular momentum for justice and recognition that will sweep him aside. ●

The post Compounding a long history of betrayal appeared first on Inside Story.

In later years, Bolton was to look back on this period of his life – around 1981 – as a time when his confidence in his academic career was renewed. In the previous decade he had harboured some self-doubt about his capacity to be a national historian of the stature of his successful contemporaries Geoffrey Blainey and Ken Inglis. He felt his scholarly recognition had stalled, and he was also a bit dissatisfied with the impact of his earlier books. But Spoils and Spoilers was a shot in the arm: it was widely and positively reviewed, and it had span, as Keith Hancock would have put it. It was a national history, a grand narrative, a synthesis. And at about the same time as Spoils and Spoilers was published, Bolton was approached to be general editor of a five-volume Oxford History of Australia to anticipate the 1988 bicentenary.

As a further endorsement of his stature, he was appointed in late 1981 as the foundation head of the Australian Studies Centre at the University of London. Bolton was always grateful for the opportunity to write Spoils and Spoilers, for, as he recalled, it “really got me back into productivity.” He was fifty when it was published, and the book boosted his confidence about tackling Australia-wide questions; it also carried a message about national self-confidence.

Geoffrey Bolton was born into the middle of the Depression years and had strong childhood memories of a society struggling with poverty and unemployment, of people knocking at the door looking for work; such experiences would shape his historical curiosity and compassion. He grew up in a Perth suburban neighbourhood that he remembered as a lively, face-to-face community, with home deliveries by horse and cart. Some of his earliest memories were of domestic spaces, including the chooks, almond tree and grapevine in the family’s productive backyard, though he also vividly remembered horse teams from an early visit to the wheatbelt.

Bolton’s grandfather had taken up farming in Pingelly in 1912 and the family maintained connections with the region throughout his childhood. But he never seemed to regret his suburban upbringing. Visitors to Perth’s Hyde Park can press a button at a heritage installation to hear the voice of Geoff as an elderly man, recalling how his childhood self saw the islands in the park’s lakes as sites of imagination, places where exciting things might happen. His early experience of the urban domestic and material world as lively and absorbing infiltrated many of his histories.

Spoils and Spoilers was a culmination of years of experience and thinking. As a postgraduate student, influenced by Fred Alexander’s Moving Frontiers, Bolton had set out to apply Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis to the Australian setting; in the early 1950s he worked in the Kimberley while researching a master’s thesis on the history of pastoralism. So at the age of twenty-one he found himself in remote rugged country looking at the land, talking to the people and pecking away at his typewriter, getting to the station journals before the white ants did, talking to the old hands before they died. He took the fieldwork seriously, staying in the region for more than three months. He didn’t want to be seen as “just some young bloke trying to take a winter holiday.”

Nineteen fifty-two was a drought year, there was scalded country, erosion on the watercourses, and cattle feed was scarce; Bolton became interested in the unintentional changes to the land as a result of white settlement. He was also fascinated by the local technologies and skills developed by settler Australians as they grappled with the distinctive environment of the northwest. This admiration for settler ingenuity fuelled his emerging conviction, elaborated in Spoils and Spoilers, that many environmental problems arose from the tendency to privilege imported ideas and models over locally derived knowledge and solutions.

In 1954 he won a Hackett Fellowship that enabled him to trade the limestone of the University of Western Australia for the sandstone of Balliol College, Oxford. There, like Fred Alexander and Keith Hancock before him, he read History. Hancock at this time was the director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies within the University of London. As a student, Bolton had heard about Hancock and read his books, and he “devoured” Hancock’s autobiography Country and Calling when it came out in 1954. He later called himself a “disciple” of Hancock’s, and even his half-century of devotion to the Australian Dictionary of Biography can be seen in part as a kind of tribute to a creation of Hancock’s.

As he left for London, Fred Alexander and a local doctor, Bruce Hunt, provided Bolton with personal introductions to Hancock. The two historians had much in common. Hancock had experience at the University of Western Australia, having worked as an assistant lecturer there in 1919 under Edward Shann, who encouraged him to develop his interest in land use. During those lively days Hancock was also introduced to the Western Australian flora by his housemate Desmond Herbert, an acquaintance from his Melbourne schooldays who had recently been appointed government botanist of Western Australia.

An interest in the land always permeated Hancock’s work and over time, as “environment” emerged as an object of public concern and activism, these themes became more pronounced in his writing. His Australia (1930), though principally an analysis of the cultural, political and economic life of the nation, included a much-quoted section which, in the vein of George Perkins Marsh, railed against the environmental damage wrought by colonial economic development: “in the second half of the nineteenth century tree murder by ring-barking devastated the country on a gigantic scale,” he wrote. Bolton would later take the “invaders’” hatred of trees, identified by Hancock, as a basis for a chapter of Spoils and Spoilers.

Bolton was completing his DPhil when Hancock asked him to take up a research fellowship at the Australian National University in Canberra, where Hancock had recently been appointed director of the Research School of Social Sciences and Professor of History. It was a nourishing environment in which to develop interdisciplinary scholarship. One model was the Wool Seminar, convened by Hancock from 1957 to 1959. Scholars from a range of disciplines – history, economics, geography, political science and the natural sciences – came together to discuss wool, which interested Hancock not only because of its economic importance, but also because of “its talismanic value as an index of Australian distinctiveness.” Bolton later observed that the Wool Seminar “revived and kindled that interest in environmental history already foreshadowed in Australia” and which distinguished much of Hancock’s later scholarship.

In 1959 Bolton also found himself on another northern field trip, with “environment” as a sub-theme of a regional study; he had been commissioned to write a history of North Queensland by the North Queensland Local Authorities Association. Published in 1963 as A Thousand Miles Away, this project helped to sustain Bolton’s broad interest in relationships between people and place. In a preface, he argued that settlers arrived in North Queensland at a time when Australians:

had not yet learned to understand their environment. The result was a prodigal waste of resources… It was only when the newcomers had learned to adapt to their environment, to husband their land and cooperate in planning its development, that permanent white settlement in North Queensland was assured.

The dual theme of settler environmental understanding and adaptation would feature centrally in Spoils and Spoilers. By the mid 1970s, however, Bolton regarded A Thousand Miles Away as engaging insufficiently with environmental issues. In a telling reflection on the way in which understandings of the category “environmental” were being clarified – and narrowed – at that time, he suggested that the lack of attention paid to environment in A Thousand Miles Away put him “no further forward” than the approach of economic historian Edward Shann thirty years earlier. From a contemporary perspective, the value of “land use” studies as environmental histories is clearer.

After Bolton’s return to Western Australia in 1966, his old boss and mentor began to research an environmental history of Canberra’s mountain hinterland. Published in 1972 as Discovering Monaro, Hancock’s book also used the concept of “land use” but drew additionally on botany, forestry and ecology, thus anticipating the cooperative alliance of historians and ecologists that would flower in the “forest history” of the 1980s. Hancock’s work, written in the midst of an archaeological revolution (Australia’s Pleistocene human past was confirmed in the 1960s), was quick to integrate deep time into a regional narrative and to incorporate insights into Aboriginal burning regimes by archaeologist Rhys Jones. Manning Clark, writing in the Bulletin, considered Discovering Monaro “the first significant look at our past through what might be called the ‘pollution or ecology window.’”

In the same year, Bolton completed his social history of the 1930s Depression in Western Australia, A Fine Country to Starve In. In following the distinctive responses of the Western Australian community to a global crisis (and donating all royalties to two charities) it conveyed Bolton’s keen sense of social justice, but environmental themes were not prominent.

But this was a time when environment could not readily be ignored: the Western Australian government had recently established an Environmental Protection Authority, which had immediately acted to prevent development of an alumina refinery in the Swan Valley. Environmental campaigns, including the Great Barrier Reef, Little Desert and Lake Pedder, were making headlines nationally.

It was in this climate that Bolton joined forces with his undergraduate friend David Hutchison at the Western Australian Museum to produce a study of “European Man in Southwestern Australia,” published in 1973. Drawing on the work of local and regional historians and historical geographers, it comprised an early survey of the environmental history of the southwest and a call for further research. While giving a nod to the “subtle environmental awareness” of Discovering Monaro, it was a work of synthesis that would not be followed up with a deeper, more engaged study of Bolton’s native region: whereas the retired Hancock, raised in Gippsland, had pursued his fascination with and desire for attachment to country in Monaro, Bolton was to return to his suburban roots in his first retirement project, a detailed history of the street in which he was raised.

In 1973, on taking up the foundation chair of history at Murdoch, the new “bush university” in the southern suburbs of Perth, Bolton received funding from the US State Department to travel around the United States and see how American Studies was taught there. During this visit he met with Roderick Nash, who in 1970 had launched a course at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in “American environmental history.” Though Nash was later criticised for his parochial neglect of foreign precedents, from the English and French as well as geographers and anthropologists, Bolton was impressed by his efforts to develop the area as a sub-field of American history, later describing him as “the leading environmental historian – young and bright.”

Bolton himself was always quick to acknowledge the pioneering work of Australian historical geographers, who for years had colonised ground ahead of the historians. Graeme Wynn has characterised the late 1960s as a time of introspection and some pessimism among historical geographers in Australasia, in response to the challenge of developing more quantitative and theoretical approaches. However, the early 1970s saw a flourishing empirical scholarship in the field. Perception, evaluation and transformation of land were key themes, evident for example in the work of Keith Moon and Michael Williams on the South Australian landscape, Les Heathcote on arid lands, and Jim Cameron on early colonial Western Australia. In Sydney, Dennis Jeans produced the first book-length historical geography of colonial New South Wales, while in Melbourne Joe Powell commenced a study of land policy in nineteenth-century Victoria.

On his return from the United States in 1974, Bolton attended a conference convened by the environmental scholar George Seddon as part of the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere program. In the proceedings, he mused:

It would be particularly useful if some intrepid scholar were to venture upon a history of Australians acting upon their environment. Such a book would be bound to attract much criticism in detail, but given the right use of written, oral, and photographic material, it would be a stimulus and a necessity. Then we might follow the American examples and introduce the teaching of Australian environmental history in a number of Australian universities.

Bolton would be that “intrepid scholar,” though the teaching preceded the textbook by five years. The historical geographers’ interest in environmental perception was prominent in the Australian Environmental History course he launched in 1976: the brief handbook entry lists “European man in 1788 – preconceptions about landscape” and “Australian visions of Australia” among the areas covered. A second-year course with no prerequisites, it was designed for the kinds of students attracted to the new university in Perth, for Murdoch was consciously innovative and multidisciplinary and many of the students who took the course were studying the environmental and biological sciences. The different perspectives of the science and arts students led to frequent debates, making it what Bolton called “a good lively subject.” The course had legs, running with its original title until 2010 and then onward with a new one.

It began by considering “Aborigines and their effect on the environment.” Aboriginal people didn’t figure prominently in Bolton’s work on the Kimberley: he’d had little contact with them in his youth, and during his fieldwork he felt hampered by his lack of ease with Aboriginal informants. Yet, as he later recalled, he returned from the Kimberley having “learned respect for Aboriginal capacity.” In the mid 1970s this perspective nurtured his interest in recent work on Aboriginal environmental impacts, from Rhys Jones and John Mulvaney in the east, to Duncan Merrilees and Sylvia Hallam in the west. He saw Aboriginal people as key agents in environmental change, anticipating Bill Gammage’s later work in his claim that “the whole of Australia was their farm, and it was a farm which they exploited with care for the needs of later generations.” But he was careful to reject the static and essentialising “ecological Indian” stereotype, pointing out that some prehistoric Aboriginal practices may have led to environmental impoverishment.

Bolton’s conviction about the importance of Aboriginal agency was strengthened by Tom Stannage’s invitation to contribute a chapter on twentieth-century Aboriginal–settler relations to A New History of Western Australia. Bolton worked on this in parallel with Spoils and Spoilers, using WA Aborigines Department records to show how Aboriginal people were not “passive victims” but had often mobilised to provide for their own needs in the face of state exclusion and neglect. The two projects were mutually supportive; both contributed to Bolton’s trajectory of increasing support for Aboriginal rights and later reconciliation, as well as his confidence in the utility and significance of his own historical work.

The invitation to write Spoils and Spoilers came from Heather Radi, a historian at the University of Sydney and a friend of Bolton’s, who was commissioning books for a new Allen & Unwin series of thematic histories on “The Australian Experience.” Radi knew of the environmental history course and, as Bolton later recalled, “it always concentrates the mind if someone says that, ‘We want you to do this and here is a contract.’” Always intended to be a general survey, the book drew on the material gathered for the course, as well as new research. Written partly while Bolton was a visiting fellow at Cambridge, but mostly in a small, tranquil cottage in an orchard near the southwest town of Balingup, it was dedicated to the Murdoch staff and students who participated in the course’s creation.

Curiously, given Bolton’s earlier work, the north of Australia received scant attention in the text, though these experiences of regional and rural history had familiarised him with the most useful types of primary source material. Michal Bosworth, then working on her own groundbreaking environmental history school textbook, which was also published in 1981, unearthed many of the images.

The title of Spoils and Spoilers is enigmatic. It is a phrase that evokes plunder and pillage; a dual sense of destruction and theft in an ongoing conflict between settler Australians and the land. It appears to mark out the work as a declensionist narrative of fall from ecological harmony and abundance, unredeemed by hope. This is, however, at odds with the book’s content, which is rather more balanced and optimistic.

How might we account for this dissonance? The initial working title, appearing in 1977 when the book was contracted, was “Man-made Australia.” As the book neared production in March 1980, Heather Radi looked forward to seeing Bolton with a manuscript and new title; by June it was still undecided, with publisher John Iremonger asking Bolton and Radi, “Has a small muse of fire ascended the brightest heaven of invention and brought you both back a title?” Radi then wrote to Bolton, with some exasperation, that “no one yet seems to have agreed on a title!”, finishing the letter with her hope that they would arrive at a decision between “Cutting down building up” and “Tearing down and building up: Australians making their environment.”

Those versions, invoking both destructive and creative impulses, more accurately reflect the tone of the book than the final title, which emerged sometime in the following two months. In August, while Heather Radi was visiting Perth, Bolton wrote to Iremonger, “The choice of title and sub-title seemed alright to me, so I have not bothered to write about that.” In his reply, Iremonger had Spoils and Spoilers as the subject line, and indicated that he was glad Bolton liked “the final choice of title.” It seems that the title was the publisher’s and while Bolton’s feelings on the title appear lukewarm, he declined to contest it.

Early sales of Spoils and Spoilers were “extremely encouraging,” with more than 800 copies sold in the first two months. Reviews appeared in a very wide range of publications, from Perth newspapers to the Bulletin and the American Journal of Environmental Quality. Reviewers generally saw the book as significant and timely, with the notable exception of George Seddon, discussed below. Having set out to write a book with popular appeal, Bolton would have been pleased with the review appearing in the Daily News, Perth’s “underdog” newspaper for afternoon commuters, which deemed the book “one of the most valuable, stimulating and important Australian books to appear for some time.”

Of all the reviews, that was the only one to identify an “overriding theme” of hope. By contrast, the reviewer for the West Australian portrayed it as an unremitting tale of devastation, ignorance and greed, of settler Australians’ hatred of the land. Most reviewers were struck by Bolton’s gloomy prognosis for the future – of increasing exploitation in a period of economic downturn and steadily degrading urban environments under increasing population pressure – and it appears this coloured their interpretation of the text as a whole.

In an era of proliferating and increasingly obvious environmental challenges, most reviewers acknowledged the book’s importance and utility: this was a history from which we could – indeed, needed to – learn. The Queensland History Teachers’ Association newsletter declared that the subject matter of Spoils and Spoilers “should be central to every course in Australian history or social studies,” while Keith Hancock expressed his hope, in a private letter to Bolton, that the book would “have some impact on the policy-makers.” Reviewers also appreciated its “readability,” achieved through evocative and clear prose, with Edmund Campion for the Bulletin particularly emphasising its literary qualities.

The principal academic reviewers were geographers: Dennis Jeans found it “difficult to think of a more insightful overview” of the forces shaping urban environments over time, while Murray McCaskill was impressed by its “apt and challenging generalisations.” Both criticised the book for its lack of attention to international contexts, though this was no impediment to the sole North American reviewer, a bureaucrat in the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, for whom parallels between the Australian and North American experiences were self-evident.

Other academic reviews were spread across the disciplinary spectrum, from Pacific studies, political science and history to environmental management. The multidisciplinary dimensions of the book were part of its innovation in the new field of “environmental history.” In his integration of ecological perspectives, Bolton was influenced by Hancock’s Discovering Monaro. From the 1960s, ecology had gained power as both a science and a metaphor, and ideas of community, webs and relationships became influential in environmental and social thought. In the writing of his late classic in environmental history, Hancock had walked the paddocks of the high plains with soil scientists, botanists and foresters, and one of his heroes was Baldur Byles, a forester who gathered evidence of soil erosion on his hands and knees and passionately advocated the protection of the mountain water catchments from grazing cattle. In Spoils and Spoilers Bolton referred not only to “land” and “nature” but also to “ecology”and “ecosystems,” and he brought a keen attention to the inter-relatedness of climate, soil, biota and humans – although Hancock wrote to Bolton saying he would have liked to have seen more about soil chemists and agricultural botanists.

By contrast, Geoffrey Blainey’s book A Land Half Won, published in the same year as Bolton’s, was more geographical than ecological and was less responsive to the environmental politics of the time. When Bolton later reflected on the course he taught at Murdoch in the 1970s, he said, “I wasn’t preaching, but some of [my students] did become very green in their thinking.”

Venturing across the science–humanities divide got him into trouble too. Bolton’s friend George Seddon, who had a doctorate in geology, wrote a highly critical review of Spoils and Spoilers which consisted mostly of carping about geological and biological errors made by this trespasser from the humanities. Seddon considered the national historical synthesis to be “premature,” but that was exactly Bolton’s challenge. Bolton himself was generous about Seddon’s inspiring body of work and even his “caustic wit” – and he happily acknowledged the disciplinary breadth and promiscuity of Seddon’s intellect. Seddon’s books Swan River Landscapes (1970) and Sense of Place (1972) were highly original studies, Bolton noted, that built on a tradition of topographical essays in English literature that might be said to go back to Gilbert White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, first published in the year of the French Revolution. Bolton explained that it was “a genre which before the coming of photography required the combination of literary grace and a sharp eye for natural phenomena.” He valued Seddon’s combination of scientific observation with “the good old-fashioned art, the Augustan art, of connoisseurship of landscape.” Bolton and Seddon shared an interest in combining studies of the natural and built environments and in scholarship that enabled intelligent environmental stewardship. Bolton approvingly quoted Seddon’s definition of ecology as “the science of good housekeeping.”

This points us to another, neglected source of strength in Spoils and Spoilers. Bolton drew on an organic, local, vernacular tradition of writing often overlooked by academics. This is what he appreciated about Seddon’s work, for he saw him as working in that nature-writing tradition. So we find Bolton invoking on the first page of Spoils and Spoilers the zoologist Hedley Finlayson, whose book The Red Centre, published in 1934, was one of the great pieces of Australian nature writing; we find him drawing on Francis Ratcliffe, whose 1938 book Flying Fox and Drifting Sand was of the same lineage; and we find him starting a chapter with the feisty zoologist Jock Marshall and his “fine angry title,” The Great Extermination: A Guide to Anglo–Australian Cupidity, Wickedness and Waste (1966).

In an assessment of environmental history influences in Western Australia, Bolton honoured two naturalists who closely observed and described intimate seasonal changes in plant and animal life. One was Vincent Serventy, whose book Dryandra (1970) described a eucalyptus woodland reserve in 1934, and the other was Barbara York Main, an arachnologist whose book Between Wodjil and Tor (1967) became a celebrated piece of scientific prose poetry about the wheatbelt. Bolton was always a strong advocate of local and regional history – that’s where his own career began – and he saw environmental history as a natural development of that literature of place.

Spoils and Spoilers therefore grew out of Bolton’s strong advocacy for local and regional history, which was part of his “view from the edge,” part of his identity as a Western Australian. His doctoral thesis at Oxford had focused on a populace marginal to Britain, the Anglo-Irish of the eighteenth century, and his histories of the Kimberley and North Queensland were both studies (as he put it) of “a frontier society on the margin of white Australian civilisation.” In a 1999 memoir, Bolton elaborated his “Provincial Viewpoint” as being more than geographical; it was also “a habit of mind” that was expressed in an awareness of diversity, fidelity to grassroots sources and a mistrust of bold generalisations. He made fun of his younger self as “a bigoted empiricist.”

Bolton certainly liked to build his arguments from the ground up and was thus intellectually inclined to regionalism. He was interested in the history of regionalism as a political movement and in the writing of regional history, and he saw his study of North Queensland as part of an academic rediscovery of regional history from the late 1950s, as evidenced by the work of Margaret Kiddle on the Western District of Victoria, Duncan Waterson on the Darling Downs and R.B. Walker on New England. Even his work in London, as foundation head of what became the Menzies Centre, had an edginess he relished. As he put it, in London he was pursuing “one of my own persistent themes, that within Australia as a Western Australian, within Britain as an Australian, you are there to stand up for the provincials, for the people on the periphery.” Although he also feared provincialism and occasionally felt the isolation of Western Australia, he was determined to make an advantage of his geography.

Bolton’s early literary models included Lytton Strachey, Edward Gibbon and Thomas Babington Macaulay; he admired good, compelling prose. As a young man he met Miles Franklin, Henrietta Drake-Brockman and Mary Durack and was introduced to the Fellowship of Australian Writers, where he participated in a poetry group. He had been active as a student journalist and took pride in publishing the early poems of Randolph Stow. He recalled a “strong consciousness of trying to keep alive the traditions of Australian literature.” When he sparred with Geoffrey Blainey in the pages of Historical Studies over the reasons for the founding of the British colony of New South Wales, he saw their debate as an echo of Henry Lawson’s literary stoush with Banjo Paterson.

He called himself “the least ideological of creatures” and as a scholar he claimed to be “a tortoise, basically, rather than a hare”; he liked to earth himself in place, period and people and to allow patterns to emerge from that mastery. Thus he respected writing embedded in locale, and wisdom that grew from experience. This spirit underlies Spoils and Spoilers – and it shapes its analysis too, for Bolton told his publishers that the book argued that “Australians have done best when they discarded ideas and models brought from Britain and North America” and that “the worst mistakes have taken place through disregarding the native experience.” By the turn of the millennium, “native experience” included Aboriginal lore, and Australian regional and environmental histories had become essays also about settlers’ relationships with Aboriginal country – as seen, for example, in Tom Griffiths’s Hunters and Collectors (1996), Peter Read’s Belonging (2000), Tim Bonyhady’s The Colonial Earth (2002) and Mark McKenna’s Looking for Blackfellas’ Point (2002).

Another striking aspect of Spoils and Spoilers,read from an early twenty-first-century perspective, is its attentiveness to urban and domestic environments. The cities and the suburbs are the sites of a substantial part of Bolton’s “environmental” history – he takes us into the intimate, noisy, smoky worlds of domestic houses and fenced yards, the streets and lanes of traffic, abattoirs and incinerators. Two-thirds of its chapters are principally or wholly devoted to urban settings and issues.

Sometimes, in describing the development of the field of environmental history, we have fallen into the American habit of saying that urban history was long neglected in favour of forests, “wilderness,” and the preservation of the “natural” world. Yet, for Bolton, environmental history and urban history were seamlessly integrated in a national narrative from the start. Like Hugh Stretton, he suggested that the origins of Australian environmentalism were to be found in the very suburbia disdained by intellectuals. He described how conservation thinking emerged at the same time that Australians were turning the bush into suburbs. So his interest in the built environment, the little blocks and boxes, the nature strips and backyards, is part of his argument about the bush and what the loss of it came to mean. Spoils and Spoilers was written and taught in the same years that Graeme Davison presented his compelling critique of Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend, arguing for the urban origins of “the Australian Legend” – and Bolton’s book also offered a counter-narrative to the Ward thesis.

This urban emphasis seems at first surprising: Bolton had pursued environmental themes most prominently in his work on rural and regional environments – the Kimberley river frontages, the steamy canefields of North Queensland. Look a little closer, however, and a lineage emerges. Bolton’s early 1970s work with David Hutchison on southwestern Australia delves into how Perth’s urban infrastructure and geography shaped the experience of its inhabitants, from opportunities for recreation to class differentiation according to environmental amenity.

This incipient interest was nurtured by a period of frenetic activity in Australian urban history. Tom Stannage was working on The People of Perth, which shocked and dismayed Perth conservatives when it hit the bookstores in 1979. The Sydney History Group’s first publication, Nineteenth–Century Sydney: Essays in Urban History, was launched in 1978, an exceptional year for urban history that also saw the publication of Graeme Davison’s The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne, Weston Bate’s Lucky City and Peter Spearritt’s Sydney Since the Twenties. Bolton himself collaborated with young Murdoch graduate Su-Jane Hunt, who was working on a history of Perth’s Metropolitan Water Supply, Sewerage and Drainage Board, to produce an article of enduring significance on the early water supply and sanitation of Perth. Beyond the discipline of history, Max Neutze and Hugh Stretton were producing influential works engaging with postwar urbanisation.

Surveying the advent of town life in Australia, Bolton not only described the planning and administration of colonial settlements but also evoked what it felt like to live in these places of unmade roads, rudimentary or non-existent organised waste disposal, and ubiquitous flies. Partly a literary strategy, this approach also yielded new insights: Australians’ failure to develop a Mediterranean “al fresco” culture, for example, arose not from their lack of sophistication but from the sensory deterrents exercised by dust, mud, flies and stench; these elements of the urban environment also shaped, from very early on, a preference for vehicular transport that insulated occupants from the experience of inhospitable streets. Decades before the “material turn” in the humanities, Bolton provided numerous ways in which materiality and embodied experience shaped significant features of Australian cultural life.

Within this analysis is nested a keen sense of social justice, leading to an early articulation of the concerns that would later inform much work on environmental justice. Bolton emphasised the ways in which the material and social processes of urbanisation produced quite different outcomes for rich and poor. For example, writing at a time when the first civil suits against the siting of landfill facilities were taking place in the United States, and drawing on Tom Stannage’s groundbreaking history of Perth, Bolton highlighted the practice of locating rubbish tips in the poorest suburbs. His analysis of urban environmental issues led to an understated yet profound conclusion: “It was the same with environmental hazards always. If they could be kept out of sight of the prosperous and influential, remedial action was slow in coming.”

Drawing both a chapter title and one of the key themes guiding his exploration of the urban scene from J.K. Galbraith’s 1958 classic The Affluent Society, Bolton proposed that the relative neglect of public spaces and infrastructure, aggravated from the mid nineteenth century by the advent of a “weak and lopsided system of local government,” bore hardest on those migrant and working-class families with the fewest resources to invest in their private surroundings. Meanwhile, the seemingly intractable problems of public spaces encouraged many urban residents to devote their efforts to carving out more agreeable private environments in the home and garden – a finding that featured prominently in reviews of the book.

Bolton examines these “private” environments in some detail, pointing, for example, to the fact that in the 1920s most Australians did not have access to spaces that were entirely private. Even bedrooms were shared: with siblings when young, and later with spouses. “This meant that most people seldom had the opportunity of asking: ‘What sort of environment would I create for myself if I were planning for myself alone?’”

Here, “environment” is domestic and intimate: the living spaces and conditions that shaped most Australians’ everyday subjectivities. Household life is evoked in unexpected detail for an environmental history – the manifold daily uses of the kitchen table, the customary prints adorning the walls: “a solitary Arab with his camel gazing over the endless Sahara sands, or a handsome couple in evening dress conversing in a Mediterranean garden.” A lively and sympathetic historical imagination is exercised for analytical ends: Bolton concludes that the lack of opportunity for most suburban Australians to effectively shape their private environments meant that they also had no expectations of controlling the public environments in which they met and moved. Meanwhile, increasing access to beaches and hills meant that many suburban families began to visualise alternative home environments; dreams that were often pursued in the context of postwar prosperity.

The underlying concern here is with how people’s views are shaped in interaction with their immediate surrounds. Similar approaches became popular in the first decades of the twenty-first century, inspired by anthropologist Tim Ingold’s philosophy of dwelling and bodily engagement, among other influences.

Bolton’s commitment to and interest in urban environments increased over time: while he finished the first edition of the book with a hope that Australians might come to regard the earth as their mother, in the 1992 revised edition he accepted that perhaps this tradition “was insufficient in a nation whose environmental issues were increasingly those of the urban environment.” He also took issue with the longstanding tendency of conservation and environmental activists to focus on issues of “wilderness” remote from the daily lives of most Australians. Even in the first edition, he asked, “what if the ACF started to intervene in urban Australia” where most people lived and property rights were most entrenched?

By 1992 the criticism was more overt: conservation was often seen as the protection of “nature” or rural habitats, although the environment was often an artefact, most characteristically in the city and its suburbs. Even the more radical “green” movement of the 1980s and early 1990s concentrated on the preservation of forest or wilderness instead of looking at the problems of the urban environment which was home to most Australians. The “greens,” who at one time had seemed a potent force for change, were in danger of marginalisation.

For Bolton, cities were the big environmental issue, and a failure to address the environmental inequities and challenges in the places where most Australians lived threatened to make environmentalism a concern of a privileged minority. But while Bolton deeply respected the desires and choices of ordinary Australians and the visions of reformers who sought to provide them with a spacious and leafy environment, he also recognised the collective problems generated by “suburban sprawl.” It is a tension that is unresolved in the book, and remains one of the key challenges facing Australian cities.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, leading American environmental historians vigorously debated whether cities should be included within the scope of the field. Were they insufficiently “natural,” or were they important as sites where nature was encountered, transformed, represented and managed? In Australia, while many key environmental conflicts took place outside the cities and the historians tended to follow them there, some, like Bolton, recognised the importance of cities and suburbs as environments. Dan Coward (now Huon), who had worked as a research assistant to Keith Hancock for Discovering Monaro, marked Sydney’s environmental history as a story of pollution and public health in Out of Sight (1988). Inner-urban contagion and pollution also featured in other studies around this time, while George Seddon and David Ravine bucked the trend with their innovative application of art history and historical geography to the study of Perth in A City and Its Setting (1986).

Subsequently, amid debates over urban consolidation and the establishment of federal programs to combat “sprawl,” planning and economic historians pursued environmental themes in work on town planning and suburban expansion. Another factor bringing together the study of cultural and natural landscapes was environmental history’s emergence in the 1980s as an instrument of heritage practice, as a way in which public historians could talk to natural scientists and heritage practitioners across the nature–culture divide. Spoils and Spoilers encouraged that dialogue.

In the early twenty-first century, historians regarded urban en­vironments from a range of angles. A growing number of works on town planning, gardens, political mobilisation and local history ex­plored environmental themes and expanded our knowledge of how urban environments were transformed, regarded and used for liveli­hood or profit. Others aimed to achieve a more integrated storying of urban ecologies and societies: Heather Goodall and Alison Cadzow linked the ecologies of Sydney’s Georges River to its critical role as a centre of networks, enterprise and ultimately survival for Aboriginal people; Graeme Davison with Sheryl Yelland showed how the car was drawn into Australian cultures, where it worked to transform both the structure and the very air of our cities; Grace Karskens, at­tentive to the material culture of the residents of early Sydney, took us into their homes and helped us understand what it felt like to live in a two-roomed hut in the growing township, and to contemplate the vast bush beyond. Andrea Gaynor, with an eye to the future and a notice served by a local council ranger (“Nah, you can’t keep chooks here!”), explored suburban food production as a practice connect­ing minds and bodies to the broader urban environment.It turned out that the eviction of her chooks occurred in the dying days of a middle-class project of suburban modernisation, undertaken over the twentieth century at the expense of (largely) working-class capacity for self-provisioning.

While these works consciously engaged with contemporary environmental problems, they avoided the polemical approach taken by William Lines in Taming the Great South Land (1991). The first national environmental history to appear since Spoils and Spoilers, it lacked the empathy, humour and balance of its predecessor. The revised edition of Spoils and Spoilers (1992) contained relatively few changes, principal among them a new final chapter that combined discussion of the escalating environmental problems and conflicts of the 1980s and early 1990s with a strong critique of economic rationalism as a force increasingly shaping relations between society and environment. A more subtle change involved the subtitle, from “Australians make their environment 1788–1980” to the softening of human agency in “A history of Australians shaping their environment.”

Funding was sought from Film Australia to develop a pitch for a TV documentary based on the book, to coincide with the release of the revised edition; despite much enthusiasm for this proposal around Canberra, it never got off the ground.

In London in 1982, Geoffrey Bolton had a disagreement with Barry Humphries who, in the guise of Australia’s “cultural attaché” Sir Les Patterson, had imagined a rather different representative of Australia in Britain. Bolton’s mission was seriously in tension with that of the comedian. The historian Jim Davidson wrote to Bolton in 1982, saying, “If you manage to bury Sir Les Patterson, you’ll have done a good job.” Ten years later, in his 1992 Boyer Lectures, Bolton continued to ask, “So why do we [Australians] so often succumb to self-hatred and self-mockery, why do we accept Les Patterson and Sylvania Waters as icons of Australia?”

This stand-off between Australian icons at the heart of the old empire reminds us that one of Bolton’s causes as a historian was to foster “a collective Australian self-confidence.” He felt again that his experience in the west and north of the continent delivered an advantage, for they were “regions whose errors have often been errors of too much optimism rather than too little. But some of that quality of optimism is needed in Australia today.” Optimism and cultural confidence could be valuable, he argued, if they strengthened trust in homegrown wisdom and local solutions – and this was very much the message of Spoils and Spoilers.

Australian historians living at the margins of their continent, beyond the “golden triangle” (as Bolton called it), can become serious nationalists and keen students of federalism. Bolton’s view of the robustness of regional identity and the origins of Australia as “an archipelago of city states, each with their own hinterland” led him to argue that “the achievement of the politicians who put together the Australian Federation must be seen as impressive.” He was attracted to a biography of Edmund Barton because he was a leading figure who saw Federation “as a means of reconciling provincial diversity with the establishment of a national polity”; thus Barton enabled Bolton to resolve some of his own tensions between the metropolitan and the marginal. One of his favourite metaphors was “the belly and the limbs,” drawn from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, which argues the interdependence of belly and body. The central belly, or Commonwealth, however much resented for “cupboarding the viand,” does digest and distribute nourishment to the limbs of the states. Throughout his life, he was a strong and thoughtful champion of the federal invention that is Canberra. “Most other nations would be proud of such an achievement,” he declared in his Boyer Lectures. “It is a symptom of the Australian disease of self-hatred that we knock it.”

Spoils and Spoilers, then, was upbeat, ecological, literary, federal and urban. Bolton, like Barry Humphries, drew inspiration from Australian suburbia – but for him it was a source not of self-mockery but of a rather surprising radicalism. When the revised edition was published in 1992 – a time Bolton described as replete with gloom – his publishers assured readers that “Professor Bolton… reaffirms the message of hope from the first edition, that Australians can influence governments and markets to ensure the quality of urban and rural environments.” And he wanted his book to make a difference. He advised his publishers: “Every member of parliament should have [a copy] – at least those who read.” •

This is an extract from A Historian for All Seasons: Essays for Geoffrey Bolton, edited by Stuart Macintyre, Lenore Layman and Jenny Gregor, published by Monash University Publishing.

The post Tearing down and building up appeared first on Inside Story.

In my mid twenties and freshly home from my first trip overseas, I therefore wrote a brief letter to Eric Rolls, telling him that A Million Wild Acres was one of a handful of books about Australia that I would like to put in the hands of any visitor to help him or her understand my country. Now I would make greater claims for it. I think it is the best environmental history yet written of Australia, and I would hope it could be read not just by visitors but by all Australians. Eric was seduced by the vastness, mystery and wildness of the forest beside his farm, and by its “scented tunnels.” He ended up writing, as he put it, “the story of a forest which grew up and drove men out.”

I wrote a letter to Eric not because I wanted or expected a reply, but because I had to write it. But he did reply. He told me of the work he was doing on his history of the Chinese in Australia (which became Sojourners), offering me a brief, vivid snippet of his writing life. I now know that Eric got lots of letters like mine, and that he replied to more than I would have thought possible. I’ve been looking at his correspondence in the archives.

Eric’s papers, mountains of them, are in at least three libraries. He conducted a quiet, constant, private dialogue with his readers in parallel with his public writings and presentations. With such letters, Eric continued his quest to educate his fellow citizens, one by one. And among the correspondence you can find testimony from people moved by his books to write to him, even when writing does not always come easily to them. Some people normally unfamiliar with written words are clearly living Eric’s words. One wrote in stumbling script of A Million Wild Acres: “This is the first book I have ever read. Thank you for writing it. I enjoyed it so much I am now going to try reading other books.”

Another correspondent wrote at more length and with spelling difficulties:

Dear Eric,

Just a note or a few words, to say how much I liked your two books, A Million Wild Acres, “They All Ran Wild.” The best I have seen. I will get your other books and read them soon.

I would of liked to been with you, and read all the books and papers, and places you went to-get all the true information. A great bit of work. I do not no how many times I have read “A Million Wild Acres.” I no I have read “They All Ran Wild” twice last month.

… I lived all my early life at Pilliga. I will tell you more later. I like reading History of Australia. And you love the Bush, and no all about it.

… If you are ever over this way call in and have a yarn, and stay with your family. We have plenty of room. I will write again to you soon, hope you get some rain. “And keep writing,” all the best.

Yours truly…

And here are the words of another reader who admitted (like me) that she did not often write fan letters, but in this case could not stop herself: “I enjoyed your book more than I am capable of expressing. You made the Pilliga come alive on the page and I hope you make trillions… On nearly every page I found something to exclaim over (mostly I exclaimed how on earth did this man have time to fit in the farming!).”

Eric often wondered that himself. He wrote of the constant battle between words and acres, between the soil as a source of his originality and the farm as a demanding distraction. He knew that the battle to win time for writing was part of the necessary discipline. When I talked to Eric in his seventy-seventh year, he declared that “unless you feel so intensely about writing that you are prepared to murder anybody who stops you getting to your desk, it’s no use thinking of being a writer.”

In his book Doorways: A Year of the Cumberdeen Diaries (1989), Eric describes his workspace, his desk, as it was at his farm “Cumberdeen” on Pretty Plains. He always wrote with his back to a broad window, the words in front of him, the acres behind. “The imagination works better against a blank wall,” he says. But the sun on his back warmed him, reminding him of the outside world he was trying to capture on paper. Of his silky oak desk, he says: “Everything on it knows its place. Words come to it that I am not expecting.” On that desk were a pile of handwritten notebooks, eleven dictionaries and books of words, and a typed outline of his current book. He added five new pages of writing to the pile each day. Empty blocks of lined A4 paper sat beside him, as did the two fountain pens that had written all his books. In front of him was a large, disconcerting pile of letters that needed answering, and that we now know he would eventually get to. There was also a big splinter of fragrant sandalwood, a tail feather from a swamp pheasant, little soapstone turtles from China, a branding iron and two blocks of mulga.

Let’s imagine Eric there at his desk, wrestling with words and acres in the late 1970s as the book he has always wanted to write materialises into chapters – but never fast enough! He described the battle in letters to Sue Ebury, the editor at Thomas Nelson Publishers with whom he worked on A Million Wild Acres, and also to his agent, Tim Curnow.

In October 1974, Eric offered the idea of the book to his publishers and they accepted it immediately and enthusiastically. He told them he hoped that it might be finished in seven months. But two years later the final writing had hardly begun. On the first of June 1976, with years of experience, observation and research behind him, he took a deep breath: “The frame of the book is already mostly planned – it is only wording to be considered.” Three months later he reported: “I’ve got within a fortnight of beginning to write and am getting excited.” Another year later, in September 1977, Eric explained to his publisher that he had not yet signed their contract because he was “frightened harvest is going to fall on me like a guillotine when there are two chapters still to go. I don’t want to let anyone down and enough money has come in to keep me writing until harvest – so I’ll just do my damndest and see how far I get.” “Most days,” he added, “I read about six hours and write for six – if it is not ready on time it won’t be for lack of trying.”

But the acres continually interrupted the words. Another year later, in September 1978, he explained:

I lost three precious weeks writing when the lad who was working here burnt himself as he began crop spraying – he is still off work but I’m back to the writing. The tractor we use for odd jobs was burnt completely. I had to finish spraying then do the summer ploughing. It is cruel changing over from writing to farming unexpectedly. And I’d been concentrating so hard I was not even living in this century when it happened.

“One nearly gets torn in halves sometimes trying to lead two lives,” he exclaimed. But “Without the farm there would have been no book, even if it delayed publication.” Eric believed that contact with the soil preserves a writer’s essential sense of the ridiculous. As a farmer, he reflected that “Some years one can look back with considerable self-mockery and realise that if one had done nothing at all one would be much better off.” And Eric was never afraid of getting his hands dirty. Instead of writing a general statement like “ploughing killed native plants and encouraged weeds,” he reported: “I have had well-worked cultivation paddocks growing dense weeds up to forty centimetres high. I crawled about them looking for native plants and could not find one.”

In his house, he virtually re-enacted the settlement process he was describing. Just getting the right pioneers into the right places at the right time was a demanding and arduous job. He recalled: “I lined all the men up against one wall – thirty-seven men – each had a pile of papers, each named, all their years, and then I had the map at the other end of the room. I’d pick up a pile and march the man across the room to his place on the map… You had to see him getting there.”

A reviewer of the book, the environmental historian and philosopher George Seddon, later described these early chapters of the book as “like the Book of Genesis, with its endless ‘And Joktan begat Almodad, and Sheleph and Hazarmaveth, and Jerah.’ There is a walk-on-walk-off cast of thousands, and the detail is numbing – but this is the Pilliga Book of Genesis, and I think the author was right to put it all in.”

In July 1979, Eric reflected on a job nearly complete:

The end of the Pilliga book is in sight, thank God. I’m appalled that it has run so long over time. Each estimate I made seemed certain – I know how much I can do a day. Then what seemed certain plans for the farm would come unstuck and I’d have to do a couple of months’ hard work. It is hard not to go on writing and leave it. But one has to be practical. If we went broke in the middle of the book it would cost more time than ever. And there is not much leeway on the land now. Fixed costs are enormous and increasing. As much as I love the farm, it will have to be sold. It will not only cost me too much time but too many books. I’m also afraid it will cost me years of my life. It is excruciatingly difficult each time coming back to an unfinished chapter. So much reading has to be done again – days of it.

And on 4 October that year, 1979, he records: “I’ve just written the last word of the Pilliga book.”

Three years of intense writing, in the available spaces. But for years before there had been the source material of experience, of life with the soil, of walking and talking the forest, collecting scats to analyse animal hairs, learning the names of plants, often for the first time, mastering in words the craft of the timber-getters. And all that correspondence! Eric’s papers spill out with letters requesting and receiving information: To the curator of mammals at the Australian Museum, “How rare is the rat kangaroo?”… and could they possibly, as one old-timer attested, “be seen hopping about in dozens on a moonlight night”? To the Patent Trade Marks and Design Office in Canberra, “Can you tell me anything about early patents for barbed wire in Australia?” To the secretary of RAS Kennel Control, “Can you tell me if there is still a breed of dog known as a staghound?” To the president of the Quirindi and District Historical Society, “Do you know exactly how the old acetylene lights worked?” To Mrs King of the Tamworth Historical Society, “Have you any local information about the construction of George Clarke’s stock yards at Boggabri – near Barber’s Lagoon?”

It is the detail that matters, and it is getting it right that matters, too. “Much of the game of writing history,” he declares at the start of the book, “is keeping it true.” And keeping it true, for Eric, means not just finding out what happened, but also finding a sense of wonder about it, and understanding it in such detail and with such precision that he can make the story live. Use of the active tense – and his books bristle with it – requires quite specific knowledge. The passive tense, by contrast, allows slippage and can mask ignorance. Rolls’s prose is bracing and vivid. “At times,” he says, “I can even smell what I’m writing about.” His books won many awards, but he was particularly proud to win the Braille Book of the Year and the Talking Book of the Year, for he often said, “I write to make people see.” There is also a “swagger” to his style – and he consciously cultivates it – because it enables him to tell a story with conviction. This careful accretion of authentic organic detail generates the power of his non-fiction. But Eric would have refused that division of fiction and non-fiction. As he put it, “There’s imaginative writing and pedestrian writing, that’s all.”

Les Murray celebrated this literary quality in 1982 in a wonderful manifesto called “Eric Rolls and the Golden Disobedience.” Murray grew up near the great forests of the lower north coast of New South Wales, where his father had been a bullock driver and timber-getter, and he remembered his father’s stories of the thickening bush. He therefore seized Rolls’s “prose masterpiece” with a kind of elation because it gave credence and dignity to vernacular experience. Eric’s disobedience, explained Murray, was his freedom to sidestep received literary sensibilities, his ability to transcend the conventional boundaries between fiction and non-fiction and between humanity and nature, and his commitment to ecological democracy. In the early ’80s that unruliness seemed “to be available to non-fiction writers in greater measure than to other writers of literary texts.” “It is even possible,” he continues, “that the novel, a form we have adopted from elsewhere, may not be the best or only form which extended prose fiction here requires.” Murray was describing an Australian style of landscape writing as “made up of strings of vivid, minute fact which often curl up in intricate knottings of digression.” Nicholas Rothwell, working in this tradition and honouring it, sees the method as “a reflection of the bush itself in all its reduplications and its beginning everywhere and nowhere, its undelineated expansiveness.” Murray considered A Million Wild Acres to be like an extended, crafted campfire yarn in which everyone has the dignity of a name, and in which the animals and plants have equal status with humans in the making of history: “It is not purely human history, but ecological history he gives us… one which interrelates the human and non-human dimensions so intimately.” Murray compared its discursive and laconic tone to the Icelandic sagas. Through his democratic recognition of all life, Rolls enchanted the forest and presented us with a speaking land, a sentient country raucous with sound.

One of the book’s heroes is Eric’s beloved tree, the white cypress pine (callitris), especially the magnificent “Old Greys” that come to life in open grassland and die in heavy forest. The cypress pine was a kind of brother creature that also lived life passionately. Rolls wrote that “at pollination time when hundreds of cones go off together with a sharp crack and spurt brown pollen a metre into the air, the whole tree shivers.” “One does not expect a tree to move in passion.” When Eric died on the last day of October 2007, his family and friends had a coffin made for him by a local carpenter – it was a simple, oblong box with silver handles and was made of white cypress pine from the Pilliga.

When I spoke to Eric seven years before his death, he reflected on the writing of A Million Wild Acres:

I began to think that the whole forest seemed to be an animate thing, with voices, and that perhaps I ought to give the trees themselves an identity, and then I thought that’s absolute bloody nonsense, you’ve got a wonderful story to tell, just tell it in a straightforward manner in the best way it can be written. One of the reviews said that the whole book reads as though the trees themselves were telling the story, which delighted me. If I’d tried to do it that way, the book would have been hopeless.

One of Eric’s earliest public performances made nature animate. Every Friday afternoon at his kindergarten in Grenfell, his teacher Miss Postlethwaite used to tell the class stories. She would do this from her slightly elevated stage, with a mat at her feet. But she was rather dull. So one day, five-year-old Eric put up his hand and said, “Miss Postlethwaite, I’d like to tell a story this afternoon.” She said, “All right, come out here.” Eric was prepared. It was sowing time on the farm, so he went up the front and pretended he was a grain of wheat. He jiggled down into the ground and buried himself in the earth, pulling the mat over his body. Then the roots grew and the legs stuck out. Then leaves sprouted and the arms waved. The little boy wriggled and danced. As Eric recalled, “So I grew up, and a header came along and stripped me, and then the sheep went into the paddock and I got eaten.” He started telling stories every Friday afternoon, and adults began to join the gathering, too, making quite an audience. “I realised that telling stories was a good thing to do if you did it properly.”

Born in western New South Wales in 1923, Eric was five years old when his father drove north from Grenfell to Narrabri to take up his own farm. Well, it was not really his own farm; the rabbits owned it. The farm was too far from any school Eric could attend, so he had to wait until he was seven to begin lessons with Blackfriars Correspondence School. He recalled how he “spent two exciting years with a pack of dogs walking about hunting rabbits into burrows and hollow logs” so that his father could chop them or dig them out. He slept on the verandah of the wooden homestead, waking at night to watch the play of moon shadows and in the early morning to see the light come onto the Nandewar Ranges. Eric later won selection to Fort Street Boys’ High School in Sydney, where, as he recalled, he taught the other kids how animals reproduced and they taught him how humans did. He missed the chance to go to university because he got chicken pox just prior to his exams, and then the second world war intervened. After serving in Papua New Guinea he returned to Australia, where he farmed his own land for forty years on the edges of the Pilliga Scrub. Eric wrote more than twenty books, as well as hundreds of articles and essays, mostly in the second half of his life.

As the success of A Million Wild Acres both settled and unsettled his life, he did a stocktake:

On my sixtieth birthday I happened to be working out how many years it would take me to write the next five books: say another three years on this one, eighteen months, two years on that, seven years’ research and writing on the next big one. Then I realised with considerable shock how old I would be. I decided from then on to work words a day every day instead of acres.

The central story of A Million Wild Acres is a simple and compelling one, told richly and persuasively. It is, in Eric’s words, about the growing of a forest. His original achievement was to confront and provoke Australians with the idea that in many areas of the country, landscapes that had once been grassy and open are now densely vegetated, that there might be more trees in Australia now than at the time of European settlement, that forests – which we so readily and romantically see as primeval – could often be the creation of our own act of settlement. How many trees make a forest, he asked? “It is not a paradox that the fires that once kept our forests open should now cause them to grow denser.” Eric brought an observation that was commonplace in local lore forcefully into the scientific and historical literature. Many of today’s forests, Rolls reminded us, are not remnants of a primeval jungle: “They do not display the past as it was, they have concentrated it.”

Eric portrayed them as different and new; he revealed them to be exaggerated communities of plants and animals, as habitats both volatile and vulnerable. As Les Murray put it, Rolls’s work recognised that Europeans arrived in Australia to find a vast parkland, “a paysage humanisé and moralisé which the Aborigines had maintained for untold centuries.” The “wilderness we now value and try to protect,” agreed Murray, “came with us, the invaders. It came in our heads, and it gradually rose out of the ground to meet us.” However that thesis might be challenged in various details and regions, we will not now retreat from the fundamental and enduring truth at the heart of it. Eric offered us not only a scientific insight, but also a poetic one, and the two visions are necessarily intertwined.

Ross Gibson, who (with John Cruthers) made the award-winning film Wild based on Eric’s book, described his history of the Pilliga as an “unruly tract of local history” and “a deliberately feral book.” “Feral” is a fitting adjective for the work of the author of that other landmark book, They All Ran Wild: The Story of Pests on the Land in Australia (1969). “Wild” has often been used to describe nature that is untouched and pristine. But Eric the farmer found “wild” nature to be feral, mongrel and hybrid, nature stirred up, nature enlivened by human presence and intervention; it was dynamic, historical nature. So the forest that he grew in the pages of his book was “concentrated” and volatile.

When Eric’s editor, Sue Ebury, suggested the title A Million Wild Acres, Rolls had reservations: “I’m a bit dubious about another title with wild in it – I am partly civilised.” Eric’s own earlier suggestions had celebrated the novelty of the nature he described: “Pilliga,” “An Exaggerated Country,” “Unexpected Forests,” “Phoenix Forest,” or “Ungentle Men Unsettled Land.” “Wildness” fascinated him: the invaders – the cattle, rabbits, foxes, with their adaptability and sheer vigour even as they wrought damage – and the feral humans, too, the “wild men,” the “ungentle” white settlers of Australia. He was impatient with those who disowned such ancestors. “This book,” he writes in A Million Wild Acres, “is not written by a gentle man.”

A Million Wild Acres challenged the traditional contrasts of European settler thinking about nature. It revolutionised those assumptions that disturbed nature is somehow always lesser nature. Such views brought Eric into conflict with aspects of the green movement. At the same time as recognising the fragility and integrity of native ecosystems, he wanted to acknowledge the creative ecology of invasion. This relish for the fecundity of life and an irrepressible optimism also underpinned Eric’s joint advocacy of the causes of nature conservation, on the one hand, and human immigration to Australia on the other. He was always determined to see the creativity of encounter.

When Rolls was writing A Million Wild Acres, the conservation battlegrounds in Australia were the rainforests, most notably at Terania Creek in northern New South Wales in 1979. As Rolls acknowledges in his final chapter, woodchipping was also an issue and had become shorthand for indiscriminate forest clearing and exploitation. Rolls considered it a necessary industry committed to unnecessary destruction. So his book was written in the midst of those campaigns, when forests were depicted as timeless and primeval, and human disturbance meant the destruction of trees. He wrote a detailed regional study showing that forests could also be the creation of settlement. He wasn’t the first to notice this phenomenon: the anthropologist, naturalist and explorer Alfred Howitt, for example, presented his observations of the increasing density of forests in Gippsland to a scientific audience in 1890. The power of A Million Wild Acres was that it gave voice to a myriad of these earlier observers. And Rolls told a multi-causal story of how it had happened in one region, a place he knew intimately. He saw system and pattern and creativity in it. His book attracted little scientific or green criticism for over a decade-and-a-half, awaiting another political context. By the mid to late 1990s, the frontline of conservation battles had moved from the logging of old-growth forests on public land to the clearing of native vegetation for farming on private or leasehold land. In this new context, Rolls’s argument about the history of tree density was misinterpreted for political purposes by both farmers and scientists.

There was also continuing scientific and cultural resistance to recognising the significance and sophistication of Aboriginal burning. As Judith Wright wrote in her 1982 review of A Million Wild Acres:

It is as strange to me as to Rolls that some scientists and others still dispute the effect of Aboriginal fire-management, or even that there was such management. Again and again in my own reading of stock-inspectors’ reports in the Queensland of the sixties and seventies, there is reference to the change in pasture growth and shrub cover which followed the vanishing of the Aborigines and the fierce protectiveness of squatters for their timber fences, huts, yards and vulnerable slow-moving flocks of sheep. But no doubt such evidence is too much that of laymen to be trusted by academic ecologists.

The politics of this issue are so embedded and have such a long history that they are often unconscious. Scientific disdain for Aboriginal ecological knowledge was once racist; now it is sometimes simply anti-humanist. In other words, the same scientific suspicions can apply to settler knowledge – indeed to local knowledge of any kind – because it is human, anecdotal and apparently informal. So the debate about Rolls’s work sometimes presents itself as a clash of disciplinary styles, a methodological tension between the sciences and the humanities. The very qualities for which literary scholars and cultural historians celebrate Rolls’s book – its vernacular and organic dimensions, holism and narrative power – can be seen by others to diminish its scientific credentials. But Eric himself continually paid tribute to scientists, and his book Australia: A Biography (2000) was dedicated to them.

Eric was never afraid of a dangerous idea. He liked to tell it as he saw it. It got him into trouble, of course. When Pauline Hanson called Aborigines “cannibals,” he responded that she was more savage than any cannibal. When he wrote an article about the damage that cats do to the environment, the Sun-Herald reported that they had never had so many letters and phone calls about anything they had ever published, and Eric received violent threats, including from one woman who threatened to burn his home and his car and to destroy everything he owned. When researching an essay on the use and abuse of water resources for the Independent Monthly in 1992, he told the editor, Max Suich, of how his research had provoked a dark, watery threat: “I had no idea that things are as serious as they are, or that it will take so long to rectify them, or that there are such murderous forces at work opposing change. It is quite startling to be told ‘you better pull your punches or you’ll end up with concrete shoes.’ I haven’t pulled any punches.” He was just as ready to run the gauntlet of the conservationists as he was the developers or the bureaucrats. He was especially critical if any of them were “short on history.”

“People,” declared Eric Rolls, “must always be given hope.” He was an irrepressible optimist. He was prepared to deliver the hard, grim facts when necessary, but he also wanted to inspire action and guide change, and for that, he knew, we do indeed need hope. Historian though he was (as well as poet, farmer, cook and fisherman), Eric also believed that “tomorrow is more exciting than yesterday.” He had faith in the future, and in the capacity of people to meet it; he was a historian whose history had to serve the future for which he was so hungry.

There was a fearlessness about Eric’s work, as well as a swagger. And there is a complexity to A Million Wild Acres behind the compelling narrative power. It is a truly original work, yet it speaks directly to so many people; it is unique and pathbreaking, yet it also seems to represent an organic integrity and a common vernacular. That is Eric’s artistic achievement. That is why readers wrote to him, and why reviewers compared A Million Wild Acres to the Book of Genesis, or a campfire yarn, or an Icelandic saga. That is why it is possible for this to be the first book someone might ever read. •

References:
This an extract from Tom Griffiths’s The Art of Time Travel: Historians and Their Craft, published last month by Black Inc., and full references are provided there. The essay draws on the papers of Eric Rolls in the Mitchell and National Libraries and an interview he conducted with Eric on 19 February 2000. An earlier version of this essay appeared in J. Dargavel, D. Hart and B. Libbis (eds) The Perfumed Pineries, Australian Forest History Society, Canberra, 2001, which was reproduced as an introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Eric Rolls, A Million Wild Acres, Hale & Iremonger, 2011. Other sources quoted above include: Les Murray, “Eric Rolls and the Golden Disobedience,” in his A Working Forest: Selected Prose, Duffy and Snellgrove, 1997; George Seddon, “Dynamics of Change,” Overland, 87, May 1982, pp. 55–60; Nicholas Rothwell, “What Lies Beyond Us,” Eric Rolls Memorial Lecture, National Library of Australia, 22 October 2014, broadcast on ABC Radio National “Big Ideas,” 6 November 2014; Ross Gibson, “Enchanted Country,” World Literature Today, 67 (3), 1993, pp. 471–6; Alfred Howitt, “The Eucalypts of Gippsland,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Victoria, 2, 1890, pp. 811–20; and Judith Wright, “A Chronicle of White Settlement,” Island Magazine, 12, 1982, pp. 44–45. For more on historical debates about vegetation change, see Tom Griffiths, “How Many Trees Make a Forest? Cultural Debates about Vegetation Change in Australia,” Australian Journal of Botany, 50 (4), 2002, pp. 375–89.

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Davison explains that this book “tells the story behind Jane’s story, the one she must have known but did not tell, or perhaps did not even think worth the telling.” These delicate words begin the book’s task of plumbing the mystery of families and of intergenerational knowledge and influence. What did Jane know but not tell or not think worth telling? And how can we recover that lost context and those lost relations? Are they lost because they are forgotten, suppressed, hidden, overlooked or taken for granted, or perhaps because they were so beloved that there were no words for them? We feel we are best known by our families, yet families lose intimate knowledge with shocking speed. In this book, Davison – an eminent professor of history – confronts his most intractable source: his own family.

It is there in the title: my family. Not a family, not any family, but my family. Davison’s purpose is to examine his relationship to these people and what that means. His own DNA, his own biological and cultural lineage, is brought under scrutiny. And so the second beginning to the book takes place in an English country churchyard where Graeme and his sister Helen contemplate the grave of their great-great-great-grandfather, John Hewett, a yeoman farmer from Hampshire. As Graeme stands by the grave, he feels the historian’s curiosity about this villager, prematurely dead, whose widow and eight children would, a decade later, voyage to Port Phillip. But Graeme feels something more. This man John Hewett was his ancestor, linked to him in some mysterious way, physically and culturally, and therefore more significant than any other in the churchyard. What are those links and how do they persist even when knowledge of them is lost?

That grave must have been a great discovery, a completing of the circle as the great-great-great grandchild, an Australian, makes the pilgrimage back to source, arrives in the village of thatched cottages, steps through the lychgate, finds the tilting gravestone and reads the lichen-encrusted epitaph to his forebear. It seems romantic and ancestral; we can almost see the parting mists of time, and Davison even quotes Thomas Gray’s famous “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” But John Hewett died only a century before Graeme was born, and John’s eldest daughter, Jane – the great-aunt – died just a dozen years before the author’s birth. These are not great gaps of time, yet so much knowledge – so much beloved, treasured knowledge of face and voice, personality and philosophy, sense of humour and way of life, and even the reason why one would cross the world – is lost! How can this be? How can families, of all social institutions, allow this to happen?

Family history is so often forced to reconstruct from the outside in, from the bare recorded outlines of birth, marriage and death. “Little remains in writing of the Hewetts’ own words,” Davison tells us. “So I have had to reconstruct their story through the words of others, listen for clues to their thoughts in the voices of people like them, and try to put myself in the situations they faced.” He confesses it is a risky business, pushing the boundaries of what we can know or rightly guess, a risk the trained historian knows well. But with his own family the risk is greater, the intuitive leap so much more righteous and seductive. Davison deliberately puts himself in this danger, and enjoys making fun of his own moral sensibilities. And distinctive problems arise when he finds himself unearthing carefully created silences. Should those silences be violated, and what are the competing responsibilities of the historian and the family member – and why might they sometimes be at odds?

Lost Relations offers a rich tapestry of stories: the heartbreak and gamble of emigration, a sea voyage that was “a nineteenth-century love-boat,” the pitching of a tent on the Victorian goldfields, a 750-kilometre journey with horse and dray, a corrupt colonial election, an inmate of the Maitland Gaol, rural scenes of “Dad and Dave simplicity,” charged fervour from the “high-voltage religion” of Methodism, a swagman, a billabong and a lone bush death, and a new home tragically engulfed by fire on Christmas Day. The action moves from Hook Farm in Hampshire to Castlemaine, the richest alluvial goldfield in the world, to Williamstown, seaside town and no mere suburb of sister Melbourne, and finally to Essendon in the mid twentieth century, where the author delicately crosses “the threshold between history and memory.” Along the way there are conversations, tea ceremonies, revival meetings and family dinners, and the reader experiences surging hope and dismaying tragedy.

Davison explains that he avoided family history most of his life, partly because he is “not much attracted to mystical or biological notions of blood and inheritance,” and partly too out of professional wariness. He instinctively drew a boundary between family history and academic history, which he calls his “day job” (a good joke this, from a dedicated lifelong historian who thinks of history as a vocation and a calling!). Davison says he finally “succumbed” to the appeal of family history not only because he “wanted to better understand who I am” but also in order to “think more concretely about the relationship between the familial and communal pasts.” In other words, this book is a search for identity as all family history fundamentally is, but it is also a reflective exploration of family history as a method – and what better case study could there be than one’s own family? But it is more than that. If a historian wants to examine the mystery of the relationship between generations, and if he wants to do it in a personal and contextual way, then he has no choice about where he must go.

The native Algonquin people of North America have a story about a woman and her baby who were left alone in a winter camp and had just one small fishhook with which to catch food. The mother could easily rig a fishing line, but she had no bait, nothing with which to catch the fish. What was she to do? She took a knife and cut a strip from her own thigh. Davison has done the same thing: he has gone fishing with the worm of his own flesh.

Those of us who have long admired Graeme Davison as a scholar and a teacher, as an engaged citizen, as a public historian as well as an academic historian, are not surprised to find him writing so eloquently of his own family. His landmark work, The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne, first published in 1978, was a study of colonial generations. He has long been interested in heritage and the popular past, in the uses of Australian history, and in history as a moral discipline; he has always loved fieldwork, leading walks, reading buildings and landscapes, seeking the past in the present; and his upbringing in the self-improving world of Methodism perhaps also inclined him towards an interrogation of the balance in our souls between nature and nurture. Graeme was always going to find himself here.

In his quest to understand how things “pass mysteriously from generation to generation,” Davison does finally concede some power to blood and physical inheritance, but he also traces influences that have more to do with culture, pattern and tradition, and with talents, values and foibles. Like Tolstoy, Davison is interested in the “common characteristics that bind good families across generations.” Ultimately he offers us a haunting and complex portrait of fate. The title of the book provides a clue. When Davison uses the word “fortunes,” he is drawing on a term from “Australia’s Golden Age” to invoke life’s game of chance and circumstance. These people, his people, made decisions, and they were fateful ones. And only the passing of time – across generations – enables us to see how. We begin to understand that the ancestral past lurks within us, as an unfolding potential or constraint. Fate and fortune are not the same as luck. They allow us some agency, even if it is not always conscious.

The book alerts us to another uncanny working of fate. As the older Davison seeks his family, he sometimes encounters his younger scholarly self, a step ahead of him but looking in a different direction. So he researched Henry Mayhew’s sensational articles on the London needlewomen of 1849 before he knew that he had an ancestor among them; he became the historian of Marvellous Melbourne before he knew that four of his great-grandparents arrived there on the eve of the 1880s land boom; and he led urban history walks around Richmond before he knew he was passing the site of his great-great-great-grandmother’s home. What kind of intuitive inheritance is at work here?

These gentle, whimsical stories make this book also the most modest of intellectual autobiographies. Davison does not say this, but he is able to illuminate the lives of his ancestors so well because of his own scholarly work and that of his students and colleagues whom he has taught and inspired for half a century. It is Graeme Davison’s school of history that pioneered Australian understandings of the Victorian city, researched urban life in Britain and Australia, investigated the lives of outcasts and drifters, the predicament of the city-bred child and the work of the great social investigators, wrote about nationalist literature and the city and the bush, examined respectability, social and geographical mobility, energy and material life, and the historical contours of space and time, and reflected constantly on the nature and practice of history itself. A stunning tapestry of these themes is woven from the personal journey described in Lost Relations.

The beauty of this book and its mode of telling is that many Australians will enjoy it on at least two levels – for the compelling story of this particular family, in all its diversity, and also for the resonances they will find with their own family histories. In the case of my own family, I discovered many parallels and coincidences. Like the Hewetts, it also looks back to bold and mysterious acts of emigration from Britain, to voyages by sea during which lives were literally reinvented, and to the pitching of a tent on a central Victorian goldfield. I too have Cornish and English ancestors (along with my Welsh ones), and grew up making occasional weekend trips back to Castlemaine – where my grandfather was also born. On those trips we would nostalgically walk the “pummelled” earth of alluvial mining, look at an old family home now owned by others, and visit the graves of ancestors in Campbell’s Creek Cemetery, as Graeme’s family did.

My forebears also shared in the drift to the city, the gradual migration to the middle class, the violent disruptions and long shadow of overseas war, and the reconstitution in suburban Melbourne of rural and domestic networks that brought the bush to town and may also have carried echoes of village life from the other side of the world. Like so many other families over this period, mine too experienced the lengthening of lifespans, the shrinking of family size, the increasing opportunities for education, the weakening of religious observance and the revolution in material life. I felt so deeply and personally drawn into this moving saga that I found myself waking at 3 am after reading it, perhaps so that I could consider the lives and fates of these people in a dream-like state, for that is another level of comprehension and empathy.

Lost Relations is an impressive historical and literary achievement and, incidentally, a fascinating tour through the mind and inheritance of one of our finest historians. It is also a profound and practical intervention in intergenerational memory, working intelligently against the gradient of loss. •

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Now that Mr Abbott has decisively entered this terminal phase of his prime ministership, it’s time to consider his likely epitaphs. What political lessons will be drawn from his time as prime minister? What parables of Australian governance will be distilled from his swift fall?

Here are three possible epitaphs, and I begin with a three-word slogan.

He couldn’t govern

Tony Abbott was frequently credited with being a great opposition leader because of his relentless, aggressive and effective negativity. A great opposition leader, they say, but a disappointing prime minister. But his failure as prime minister must make us reassess his time as opposition leader. It is now apparent that relentless negativity does not prepare one for government. Since day one in the prime minister’s office, Abbott has floundered. He is still campaigning, still opposing. His major achievements, by his own account, have been to stop things.

Governing is a very different art and it can only be practised and refined by being creative, visionary and responsible in opposition. For those who have despaired at the increasingly simplistic and destructive partisanship of parliamentary debate in recent years, the failure of the Abbott prime ministership may be good news. It should become the example of what happens if oppositions focus only on blaming and undoing. When they win the prize of government, they don’t know what to do with it.

In January this year, before the knighting of Prince Philip but amid growing unease about leadership, one Liberal MP who is a strong supporter of Mr Abbott (but who retained anonymity) told Fairfax Media that the government needed to “come up with a few reasons why we deserve to be re-elected.” “Our biggest problem,” continued this supporter of the PM, is “Why are we here and what are we going to do now we are here?” It was an innocent and astonishing admission sixteen months into a three-year term and reveals the vacuum created by a narrow interpretation of “opposition.”

Abbott was unable to make the transition to responsible, positive leadership, to policy development, to consultation, to governing for all Australians. He has sometimes responded to people who criticise him with the words, “Ah yes, but I doubt you voted for me anyway.” This is a prime-ministerial voice we have not heard before, one that cannot transcend partisanship.

A sad and telling example of Abbott’s inability to govern has been his failure even to advance a cause close to his heart – and one that has the support of both major parties and a clear majority of Australians. It is recognition of Indigenous Australians in the constitution. Australia craves Abbott’s leadership on this issue. He spoke strongly about it in opposition and has said that he wanted to be “the Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs.” He has a historic opportunity not just because he is prime minister now but also because he is a conservative prime minister now. It is an example of a reform that awaits the national leadership of the conservatives and where the PM has unusual independent power and high symbolic purpose delivered into his hands. Indigenous leadership mostly gave him their trust and support. As Noel Pearson declared in the revised version of his 2005 Mabo Oration, “It will take a prime minister in the mould of Tony Abbott to lead the Australian nation to settle the ‘unfinished business.’”

Yet Abbott has been in a curious paralysis. Even when seeking to “reboot” his leadership with new vision in 2015, he forgot the Indigenous cause again, just as he easily forgets that Sydney was more than just “bush” when the British arrived. His Indigenous adviser, Warren Mundine, was “disappointed” that the PM failed to mention Indigenous recognition in his National Press Club address on 2 February. The “governor” has so far let Indigenous people down – indeed all Australians. Does leadership elude him precisely because the issue is bipartisan, creative and requires the grace of good governance?

He punished the poor

Abbott’s fate tells us that Australians, even in an increasingly inequitable society, still believe in the “fair go.” The 2014 budget sounded the death knell for the prime minister and his treasurer because it was manifestly unfair. Australians can accept economic stringencies if they are shared with some equity and justice, but to especially punish the poor, the sick, the disadvantaged and the marginal for a budgetary imbalance is seen to be wrong.

A popular nomination for an Abbott epitaph is He broke promises. And those three words will indeed be inscribed with others on his political gravestone. But this charge is too universal and does not get to the essence of his betrayal. John Howard showed that you can be seen to break promises and still get away with it. Abbott did it brazenly, and then compounded the problem by denying it. But more than that, his rationale was unfair.

Because of perceived unfairness, many budget measures have been unable to pass even a conservative Senate. So it is the government’s thwarted intentions and enduring rhetoric that eroded Abbott’s standing. The age of entitlement is over, education is an indulgence, welfare recipients are “leaners,” refugees are “illegal,” poor people don’t drive cars, Indigenous Australians haven’t sufficiently helped to Close the Gap: this cascade of whingeing from those in power sickened even many advocates of small government.

Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey don’t get fairness. Most Australians are dismayed by that. Knighting the prince was a trivial but revealing example of a peculiar mindset. When John Howard became prime minister, he moved Robert Menzies’s desk into his office, and Menzies’s political career provided Howard with many of his successful strategies. Menzies was a sensible local conservative model. But when Tony Abbott became prime minister, he moved a portrait of the Queen into his office. As executive director of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy in the 1990s, Abbott stopped the republic, and he is still fighting royal battles against his sovereign’s powerless subjects.

It’s the environment, stupid!

The famous sign that hung in Bill Clinton’s electoral office in 1992 declared: “The economy, stupid!” For Tony Abbott, it has been the electoral power of the environment that he has misunderstood, and he needs reminding of it even in his epitaph. No other federal government has attacked science and the environment with such undisguised and complacent vigour.

He has made light of Australia’s planetary obligations, as if our island girt by sea can somehow leave Earth. He seems to believe that we can be “open for business” while also retreating from the world community – by spurning cooperative regional solutions to refugees, reducing foreign aid, threatening world heritage, insulting the Human Rights Commission, drastically reducing investment in Antarctic science and opting out of international climate change governance. When 2GB shock-jock Alan Jones emerges as a powerful environmental campaigner against conservative state governments, you have to question Abbott’s political judgement as well as his principles.

“Stupid” is an unkind and discourteous word to use in public debate, and Clinton’s abusive sign was directed at himself. But, sadly, “stupid” does seem a relevant word in this debate. It describes a stubborn, even knowing, closing of the mind to evident truth. It does not assert a lack of intelligence but a misuse of it. Abbott, as opposition leader, was happy to legitimate climate change scepticism, announcing in 2011 that he remained “hugely unconvinced by the so-called settled science on climate change.” As Philip Chubb describes in his book Power Failure, Abbott in 2010 adopted the thoroughly discredited position that the world was cooling, a position again recently advanced by his top business adviser, Maurice Newman. These are stupid views in 2015.

Prime minister Abbott has attacked every arm of government associated with climate science. He initiated enquiries into wind farms and the Bureau of Meteorology. He criticised the Australian National University for divesting itself of fossil fuel funds. He thinks coal remains “good for humanity.”

It is worth remembering how Abbott came to the Liberal leadership. The first day of the 2009 summer – 1 December – dawned unseasonably cold in Australia’s national capital. The minimum temperature that morning was more than 6˚C below normal. That’s an ice-age kind of difference. As members of the Liberal Party made their way to a crucial leadership meeting on that day, they would have had to put on winter jackets and clear condensation from their car windows. On that crisp “summer” morning, to some members of parliament global warming may indeed have seemed like “absolute crap,” as leadership hopeful Tony Abbott described it. The leadership crisis had been prompted by a policy disagreement about climate, and it may have been weather that delivered Abbott’s one-vote victory.

Bubbling beneath the politics of the Liberal leadership spill last week were old and new concerns about environment and climate. Don’t underestimate them. Arguably, Howard, Rudd and Gillard were all swept out of office by climate politics, and Abbott’s fate will be similar. He came in as leader of the Liberal Party at the end of the last El Niño drought cycle and probably won’t quite last to the beginning of the next. If he were to linger, weather would blow him out, just as it allowed him in.

As Tony Abbott’s prime ministership draws to its agonising end, these three nominations for his epitaph will join many other assessments of his reign. What damage might Abbott do in his death throes? Warmongering and inciting panic over terrorism are the refuges of the desperate politician, and Abbott is already playing these cards. Talk is powerful. The way we make sense of the premature passing of another elected prime minister will help determine the fate of the next, and the next. And it will also shape the character of our parliamentary and public debate.

David Marr’s portrait of Abbott before he became PM, Political Animal – which Abbott gracefully accepted as fair – made it clear that he was a professional wrecker, good at penetrating an institution and destroying it from the inside. That lifelong practice explains why he was unable to negotiate leadership of the hung parliament of 2010, and why his prime ministership is doomed. •

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These political pressures have at times restrained a full and honest portrait of the man. All the more reason, then, for scholars to foster a robust, critical and balanced appraisal of his character and achievements. A thoughtful assessment of Mawson’s strengths and weaknesses is essential to Antarctic history as well as to Australian Antarctic policy and practice – and, of course, it is also fundamental to good Antarctic conversation.

This new book by the prolific biographer and history professor, David Day, demands our attention because it promises (according to the blurb) to “change perceptions of Mawson forever.” It “answers the difficult questions about Mawson that have hitherto lain buried,” and draws on “new evidence” and a “long-suppressed diary” to “challenge Mawson’s official story.” Book blurbs are not always drafted by the author, but in this case the book itself reiterates these claims throughout.

Readers of Inside Story may already have seen the two controversial advance extracts from Flaws in the Ice released to newspapers in October. One extract suggested that Mawson may have deliberately starved Xavier Mertz to death on their return sledging journey in the summer of 1912–13 to ensure his own survival, and the other argued that Mawson had a “mad summer of love” with Captain Scott’s widow, Kathleen, in England in 1916. These two episodes of Mawson’s life have attracted scholarly attention before, but no previous historian has ventured such confidently judgemental conclusions. Are these claims convincing and founded on new evidence, or are they sensational gambits aimed at selling the book?

Before I address David Day’s interpretation of these two episodes, let me summarise the general argument and style of the book. Flaws in the Ice has grown out of Day’s long interest in “conquest” in modern world history. His history of Australia, Claiming a Continent, was structured around this theme, and his book Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others (2008) examined (in Day’s words) “how so-called ‘supplanting societies’ claim territories and make them their own over an extended period of time.” This was, he surprisingly argued, “a new way of looking at the history of the world.” With such a vision, it was natural that Antarctica would increasingly attract Day’s attention, and in 2012 his Antarctica: A Biography was released. Its central question was a political one about the claiming of remote territory, and its structure was a detailed chronology of exploration from Captain Cook to the signing of the Antarctic Treaty, with a brief final chapter on the last fifty years. In that general history of the continent, Day gave an account of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, or AAE, of 1911–14 and ventured interesting criticisms of Mawson’s manipulation of his own legend. Flaws in the Ice elaborates those criticisms at book length and focuses on that expedition and its immediate aftermath, finishing at the end of the Great War.

At the beginning of Flaws in the Ice, Day carefully clears the ground of a hundred years of previous scholarship so that he can tell his story to the reader directly, without having to deal explicitly or specifically with other writers and historians. Day contrives an archival silence into which his book can be seen to enter afresh and alone. Much of the evidence of the expedition, claims Day, “has been hidden away for the last century” and “includes the diaries of Archibald McLean, Robert Bage, Frank Stillwell, John Hunter, Charles Harrisson, and several others.” But the diaries of these men have been available for decades in public libraries and archives and have been studied intensely by many people, including those “other historians.” How strange that a historical scholar should regard the carefully preserved and curated collections of public institutions, long available for research, as “hidden away.” What Day means is that many of those diaries have only recently, in these centenary years of the expedition, been edited for publication. There is a revealing sleight of hand here by the author – the phrase “hidden away” suggests something sinister, perhaps a conspiracy, and it is David Day who is going to bring it to light.

But there is one diary that has indeed been kept mostly private for a hundred years and which has just been made available to the public in full. It is the diary of the geologist Cecil Madigan, published in early 2013 as Madigan’s Account (edited by Julia Madigan). But even this source has been partly available since 2000 in a book by Madigan’s son (Vixere Fortes: A Family Archive), and has been drawn upon in other historical studies. Day is right to call the full diary “explosive,” however, and I believe it does warrant the attention he gives it. It is the major source for his portrait of Mawson, and it is a vital and important one. But it is confusing to say that the diary has been “long-suppressed” – another phrase that suggests a conspiracy. Madigan and his family chose to keep it private. Madigan wrote in the diary in 1913 that he “will probably feel ashamed of some of the things I have written,” and his descendants protected him as much as Mawson from its frank expressions of resentment, anger and despair. Madigan and Mawson both built their academic careers in Adelaide and worked together throughout their lives.

There is another silence at the heart of Flaws in the Ice. Although Day draws on the work of many historians who have studied Mawson and the AAE – in particular Philip Ayres, Peter FitzSimons, Brigid Hains, Elizabeth Leane, Beau Riffenburgh and Heather Rossiter – he does not name them in the text or engage explicitly with their scholarship. They are referred to as “other historians” or “other writers,” generally dismissively. Flaws in the Ice claims to be a new history, but it does not provide a historiography by which we might judge that claim.

The benefit of this approach for Day is that he can position himself as an unmediated storyteller, unburdened by collegial obligations and free to fashion a simple and compelling narrative. Flaws in the Ice is well-written, full of telling detail, and evocative of the elemental drama and intimate agony of a famous Antarctic tale. The several summer sledging expeditions of the AAE are deservedly and attentively retold. Day carefully analyses Mawson’s cultivation and manipulation of his own reputation, during the expedition and afterwards. Readers will relish this fast-moving account with its driving ambition to see the worst in Mawson. All of Mawson’s well-known weaknesses are probed at length – his ambition, selfishness, coldness, competitiveness, meanness, lack of compassion and humour, propensity to dither, and other “flaws” in his icy character. It is surprising that Day does not draw on the fact that even his wife-to-be, Paquita, had fears about the emotional depth of her fiancé.

Mawson never commanded the kind of love or affection that Ernest Shackleton or Frank Wild inspired. He was very demanding of his men – he drove others as he drove himself – and he was both respected and resented, even sometimes disdained. But Day is so determined to find Mawson’s flaws that his portrait is two-dimensional, almost a caricature. He is so keen to find fault that we lose any sense of Mawson as a complex, conflicted human, or as a man attached to any greater purpose than self-justification and self-aggrandisement. Day seems like a warrior fighting against a century of legend-making, but because he does not introduce us to other scholarship we are left with an unbalanced account. This is compounded by his decision to concentrate only on the first half of Mawson’s life. For these reasons Day’s book does not supersede Philip Ayres’s biography, Mawson: A Life (1999), or Beau Riffenburgh’s history of the AAE, Aurora (2011).

As revealed in his general history of Antarctica, David Day continues to lack any interest in, or curiosity about, science. This political historian of empire, who casts a perceptive and tenacious eye on the politics of polar annexation, can only ever see science with cynicism. It is for “show”; it “acts as a cover”; it “buttresses scientific credentials”; it is always strategic, self-serving and “disguising” something else. Science is never given the dignity of its own dynamic. With such a view, Day is destined to be blind to Mawson’s core motivation, and he is unable to share the wonder and intellectual excitement that drew – and still draws – many expeditioners to Antarctica.

THESE strictures sometimes prevent David Day from telling a more interesting story. I can best illustrate this by referring to the two extracts with which he chose to advertise his book – one about Mawson and Xavier Mertz, and the other about Mawson and Kathleen Scott. In his desire to find the evil in Mawson, Day overlooks the awkward tenderness and vulnerability that may lie at the heart of this flawed and driven man. On that desperate sledge journey, Mawson stayed with Mertz just as Mertz stayed with Mawson, each making a risky sacrifice in the hope that both could make it home. Mawson rationed the food so that they both might have a future. He tried to carry Mertz on the sledge, who found that too painful, and he nursed him in his final days. Yes, we only have Mawson’s testimony for all this, and of course he wanted to survive. He probably carried the guilt of his survival all his life.

Kathleen Scott relished the company of men, especially polar heroes, the manly icons of the age. In 1916, Douglas and Kathleen found a curious solace. Her husband had been entrapped by the ice and he (Mawson) had barely escaped it. They were united by grief and a shared fascination with the whiteout of Antarctica. Such a unique meeting of emotional needs propelled them to spiritual intimacy. They clearly enjoyed one another’s company and liked to be alone together, and probably even savoured the frisson of gossip. With Mawson, Kathleen could be close again to the world that had animated her husband, perhaps even imagine what it would have been like if he had returned. With Kathleen, Mawson could possibly glimpse his own death and sense the erotics of sacrifice.

In the newspaper “extract” about this relationship (The Australian, 26 October 2013), the sensationalism of the story is sharpened (the book is a little more careful). To say, as Day does, that Mawson was “smitten,” wanted to show off his “smart uniform,” and relished the “chance to chase after thirty-eight-year-old Kathleen” with whom he shared “a mad summer of love” misses the emotional depth of their probably platonic and very real romance. Furthermore, it is disappointing that Day cannot resist claiming that he has brought to light “a hitherto hidden chapter in his life.” This is quite false, and continues his conspiratorial theme of “hidden,” “buried” and “suppressed” revelations. It has long been an intriguing part of Mawson’s biography, and Day brings little new evidence into play.

In 1979, the biographer Roland Huntford wrote an iconoclastic book called Scott and Amundsen that rocked the British establishment by exposing Robert Falcon Scott – that model of British moral and physical courage, that tragic, frozen hero – as a vain and incompetent fool. Every hero invites a debunking (especially one whose diaries had even been censored for publication), but few have suffered as Scott did at Huntford’s hands. Scott, argued Huntford, was a poor leader with little foresight who endangered men in his charge, a reckless and careless planner who trusted to luck, and an ambitious naval officer who was sentimental and competitive. Huntford was so keen to destabilise the legend of Scott that he was careless with facts and also careful about which facts he revealed. He went beyond the boundaries of good scholarly practice. But he also perceived some neglected and unpalatable truths about Scott’s character and leadership, insights that have shaped views of Scott ever since.

David Day is trying to do a Huntford on Mawson and I hope his work will promote thoughtful debate. Huntford was one of the few historians to rate a mention in Day’s book about Antarctica. Following Huntford’s interpretation, and with breathtaking assurance, Day tells us that Scott’s famous account of Captain Oates’s suicidal exit from the tent in 1912 was “probably invented for posterity.” Like Huntford, Day is leaning so relentlessly into attack mode that he sometimes falls on his face. But, also like Huntford, there is much truth in his portrait, and I hope the fact that Day has overreached does not just elicit a defensive backlash. We need to be able to debate Mawson’s failings as well as his virtues and not be cowed by his geopolitical prestige.

I can summarise the flaws in Day’s book with words from its author. In reporting heroic age rivalry, Day says, “Anything that belittled Scott was attractive to Shackleton.” We might say the same of Day with regard to Mawson. And of the AAE raconteur, Herbert Dyce Murphy, Day writes that Murphy had “a great fund of incredible stories, most of which were true (albeit embellished), and some untrue. The problem was knowing which was which.” •

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I’m a long-suffering Melbourne supporter. That’s the AFL team that got thrashed again last weekend. I can’t help my affiliation, of course – or should I say affliction? Barracking is hard-wired; it is like a totem assigned by some mystery of culture; it is imbibed with milk and language. It is a fate to which one is condemned. Choice never had anything to do with it.

Next year it will be fifty years since my team won a premiership. That’s unusual but not unique. But that half-century is a whole lifetime of conscious barracking, and such sustained lack of success, decade after decade, begins to bruise your sensibility. Low expectations, irony, a feigned lack of interest, wry bitterness – these attitudes begin to shape your winter weekend.

There are many compensatory benefits in being an underdog, a good loser, a sad clown, a hilarious cynic, a brave martyr, a loyal fan, a resilient supporter, a denizen of that great temple, the MCG, and – more desperately – a devotee of the oldest club in the league. But Melbourne has always been a little embarrassing to follow, for it was also the club of the well-heeled, those silvertails in jackets who lounge in the Members’ Stand and refuse to join in the Mexican wave at the Boxing Day cricket. At least Melbourne Football Club’s appalling record is proof that money – or establishment money, anyway – can’t buy success in the AFL, whatever the recent Australian Crime Commission report might suggest.

What would success taste like – and could I cope with it now? I don’t think I’ll be tested soon. The last few years have seen a new nadir in the team’s fortunes and I’ve noticed a distinct change in Melbourne’s place in football culture. It is normal and healthy for a losing team (and especially one that loses a lot) to become the butt of jokes. Disdain and contempt are rightly poured from a very great height. I can cope with that. I’m used to it. I have honed my survival strategies over decades. But now there is something new I cannot cope with. It is pity.

It began in Round 19 in 2011 when Melbourne was defeated by Geelong by 186 points in what was described as “the meekest surrender in the game’s history.” People feel sorry for me now, for being a Melbourne supporter. Their concern is genuine and it is combined with a kind of incredulous disbelief. Really? You barrack for Melbourne? You still barrack for Melbourne? Get a life, man!

Surely they understand that one is condemned, that there is no choice? I crave the disdain and contempt. I yearn for the disrespectful badinage served up to an almost-equal. Pity is unbearable.

After last weekend’s debacle, when my team was again booed off the field by its own supporters, the relatively new coach, Mark Neeld, fronted up for yet another depressed and depressing press conference in which he looked and confessed to being “shell-shocked.” “It’s a damn long road and it’s a hard one,” he explained. If that’s how he feels after just one year with the club, what does he think fifty such seasons feel like? All last year, “Neeldy” regretted that his players hadn’t yet got the hang of the “game plan.” Getting goals seemed too complex an idea for them. But now he tells us with a sense of achievement that their theory is exemplary: “if it was an exam, it was 100 per cent correct,” he declared to the press. They now play perfectly correctly at training, he assured us. He was genuinely puzzled that it just doesn’t seem to work on the day of the game – on any day, in fact, when another team is on the field. But at least my team is now stunning at training. Mark says he is trying “to keep an elite mindset going” at the club. He announces that “we believe we train like an AFL team.”

Melbourne trains (even if it doesn’t play) like an AFL team. One could almost think it were one! This is where pity takes you – to a mentality where even the coach cannot help betraying the conviction that he is working in the second division.

THERE was one bright spot in my barracking career. It was 1987. The 1964 premiership was already far back in the mists of time, and Melbourne had laboured through many long, dark years. In the 1980s, the team was graced with the balletic skills of an extraordinary player, Robert Flower. Even his name seemed to capture his delicacy, and it is a wonder that a light, fine-boned man could distinguish himself on such a gladiatorial turf. Robbie Flower swept along the wing of the MCG with a speed and sureness of touch that defied opponents and gravity, but he was a shining star in a losing team. He seemed destined never to play in a final. Then something utterly surprising happened.

In the middle of 1987, Melbourne started winning. Not just squeaking home, but running wild and free to victory for the sheer fun of it. They were “the Cinderella side,” a young team with a new Irish recruit, Jim Stynes. I watched, disbelieving and hardly daring to breathe, as a fairy tale unfolded. Robbie Flower was captain; it was his last season; they were doing it for him. It was one of those moments when joy and chemistry took over and corporatism and “game plans” seemed irrelevant.

Melbourne had come second last the year before and was improving in 1987, but they hardly looked like making the Final Five. The surge began in late July. They won six in a row and just snuck into the finals, achieving an unlikely fulfilment of Flower’s dream. But now it seemed they couldn’t stop. They had a runaway win by 118 points over North Melbourne in the qualifying final. Then they blitzed Sydney by seventy-six points in the semi-final. The preliminary final was against Hawthorn and again the underdogs ran hard and fast and led all day with sheer momentum and exuberance. In the final quarter Hawthorn pegged them back, but still it seemed that Melbourne was home and into their first grand final since 1964.

The final minutes and seconds ticked away and the lead was intact. The gifted Hawthorn forward, Gary Buckenara, was awarded a free kick just beyond the fifty-metre line. Then the siren sounded. The game was over and Melbourne had won. Supporters started celebrating. But the umpire did not hear the siren over the joyous, relieved roar of the Melbourne crowd. The siren blared without stopping but went unheeded by many on the ground. The game continued. Buckenara went back for his kick. Jim Stynes, who had not heard the siren, cut across the ground to pick up a loose man and ran across Buckenara’s mark. The umpire, who still awaited the siren, awarded a fifteen-metre penalty, bringing Buckenara within range. He kicked truly. Hawthorn supporters ran onto the ground. Everyone woke up. The fairy tale was over.

Something inside me died that day. The cruelty was exquisite. I was cradling my daughter, three months old, as the siren sounded and Melbourne’s win turned to ash. I was struck dumb. I handed our precious baby carefully to my wife and went for a long, lonely, bitter walk. Football was never the same again.

Jim Synes died prematurely of cancer at the beginning of 2012. He always said that it was the last seconds of the 1987 preliminary final that gave him the flinty determination to become great, to win the Brownlow Medal, to play a record 244 consecutive games. When he announced his illness to the media he showed them his number 37 jumper, the one he had worn that fateful day on the MCG; it had become a symbol of challenge. As club president, he had rescued Melbourne from debt, and his battle with cancer lifted hearts. But his death depressed the players rather than inspiring them. The 2012 season was, for Melbourne, the most miserable I had experienced. No one could ever quite remember the game plan. The sole highlight had been Melbourne’s failure to lose to an Essendon team disabled by the mid-season regime of their club pharmacist.

By the start of 2013, my customary enthusiasm for the game had withered further. My team had just been found guilty of behaviour “prejudicial to the interests of the AFL” after charges of tanking in 2009, other teams were suspected of injecting their players with illegal drugs in 2012, bookie Tom Waterhouse dominated sports coverage and, in the first game of the season, Essendon’s coach continued to rule the turf on national television as if unaffected by the scandal engulfing his club. As the opening round continued to sprawl over two weeks, I wisely chose not to watch Melbourne get humiliated by Port Adelaide. Instead, I walked to Etihad Stadium with my twenty-five-year-old daughter (who had survived the end of the 1987 preliminary final and does not barrack for Melbourne) and we watched North Melbourne play Collingwood.

It was overcast and raining lightly. The game had begun by the time we arrived and the stadium was booming. The roof at Etihad was closed and the interior glowed and beckoned like a theatre set. As I stepped inside, I felt a familiar awe at the sheer scale and grandeur of this performance, at the bravery of the young men on the sacrificial field and at the passionate decency of their supporters. I joined a mixed group of Magpies and Kangaroos, strangers to one another who were drinking beer as they watched the game. They could not see my demonic heart, so they did not pity me. They honoured me with their churlish respect. Since I was at Etihad, they assumed I barracked for a first-division team. They were unbridled in their support of their own teams but had the capacity to grudgingly admire the other. The game was fast, clean, skilled and close. It was a relief to watch a game between two equally matched teams. The coarse wit of my companions and their robust and friendly rivalry cheered me. I remembered why I like football.

I also knew what was wrong with Melbourne: the players were thinking too much and they didn’t have time for that. They were too worried about getting the coach’s exam 100 per cent right. I wished that exuberance and joy might be allowed to run away with them. And I hoped that, one day, my team would enable me to wear my heart on my sleeve again and join the grown-ups’ conversation once more. •

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THE most shocking fact about Black Saturday 2009 is that people died where they thought they were safest, where they were told they would be safest. Of the 173 people killed, two-thirds died in their own homes. Of those, a quarter died sheltering in the bath. There were relatively few injuries: the destruction was total, and the following day brought an awful stillness and silence.

The royal commission into the Black Saturday fires applied much critical scrutiny to the “Prepare, Stay and Defend or Leave Early” policy, generally known as “Stay or Go.” It was a policy often distilled in the official mantra, “People save houses. Houses save people.” The Age journalist who reported the royal commission, Karen Kissane, declared this policy “the final victim of Black Saturday.”

In the week after Black Saturday I argued in Inside Story and the Age that the Stay or Go policy was a death sentence in Victoria’s mountain communities on a forty-something-degree day of high winds after a prolonged heatwave and a long drought. Although the policy has guided people well in most areas of Australia and has demonstrably saved lives and homes, it led people who live in that distinctively deadly fire region to believe that they could defend an ordinary home in the face of an unimaginable force.

By enshrining the idea that a home is defendable in any circumstances, Stay or Go also implicitly sanctioned the gradual abandonment of community fire refuges over recent decades. The fire refuge dugout, which developed in the era of bush sawmilling in the early twentieth century, was a distinctive cultural response to the history of fire in the tall Victorian forests. Few dugouts were built in other forest regions of Australia, but those that did exist in these Victorian ranges saved dozens of lives in the fires of Black Friday 1939. It seems that they might now be making a comeback. Some of the people who lost homes on Black Saturday have decided to rebuild with fire refuges on their properties. The royal commission recommended that community refuges be designated in high-risk areas and, in October 2011, the decision to build the state’s first official fire refuge in the region was announced.

It also now seems clear that the Stay or Go policy underpinned the lack of warnings issued by authorities to local residents about the movement of the fire front. The royal commission rightly gave sustained attention to the failure of warning systems on Black Saturday. It is one of the most haunting aspects of the tragedy – the weird official paralysis which meant that warnings weren’t given to communities known to be in the path of the firestorm. In one case an accurate warning was not issued by the Kilmore Incident Control Centre, or ICC, because the fax machine was not operating. It was not uploaded to the CFA website either. Specific warnings were drafted and ready to be sent out several hours before deaths occurred. Kevin Tolhurst’s fire-mapping team in the Integrated Emergency Control Centre produced predictive maps of the fire before 1 pm, but they were not issued. At about 2.40 pm on Black Saturday, the deputy incident controller at Kangaroo Ground, Rocky Barca, predicted that the fire would reach Kinglake, Kinglake West, Strathewen, St Andrews, Steels Creek, Flowerdale, Humevale and surrounding towns and areas. But the message was not sent because Kangaroo Ground was not the designated ICC for the fire.

We have to analyse this paralysis; not just its surface manifestations, but also its culture. The most senior authorities knew the power and path of the fire, although those in the new Integrated Emergency Coordination Centre in Melbourne were surprisingly insulated from the detail. Staff in the Kilmore and Kangaroo Ground ICCs also knew where the fire was heading. But people in the region, people directly in the path of the firestorm who were relying on their radios, TVs and internet to keep them informed, did not know. Power company SP AusNet was warned that its assets were under threat at Kinglake but residents of the town were told nothing.

In an article in the Monthly in July 2009, Robert Manne, who survived the fire in Cottles Bridge because of “a mere fluke of wind,” analysed the evidence so far presented to the royal commission in an attempt to understand why so few warnings were issued by authorities on the day. He was perplexed and angry that people in the path of the fire were not given the benefit of the latest information about the fire front. He and his wife were ready to leave should they learn that the fire was coming their way. They followed the news of the Kilmore East fire and heard that Wandong had come under attack. They knew that this meant that the fire had jumped the Hume Highway and, worryingly, had reached the dense, tall forests of Mount Disappointment. Then they heard nothing more – other than, about 5 pm, “an unearthly roar” which they later thought may have been the firestorm descending on St Andrews, six kilometres to their north. Soon afterwards, the wind changed. They were astonished that, in an age when “people across the globe learn within minutes if a plane crashes or a volcano erupts,” they were left for ten hours knowing “nothing whatever about a monster fire a few kilometres away.”

While residents remained uninformed during the afternoon, roadblocks were put in place in some of the threatened areas. In several reported cases, locals were allowed through only if they were returning to their homes. As Manne reported, police ordered several residents to return to their homes in Pine Ridge Road in Kinglake West where they perished shortly afterwards. Evacuation was being discouraged and returning home was being facilitated, even in some cases demanded. Threat warnings were being suppressed by the bureaucracy.

I THINK there is a system here – a logic – that we need to recognise. It is connected to the Stay or Go policy. As sinister as all these actions seem, they were consistent with a fear of late evacuations and a faith in the safety of the home. How did such a policy evolve and become so strong by 2009?

There had been intimations of the policy as early as the late 1960s. Foresters Alan McArthur and Phil Cheney moved towards it in their report on the Hobart 1967 fire (although it was not remarked that half the “civilian” deaths occurred in or near homes). Then, in 1969, Australians were shocked when seventeen people died at Lara, between Melbourne and Geelong, in or escaping from their cars as a grassfire swept across a major highway surrounded by open paddocks. Travelling through a fire was clearly perilous, even in modern cars and on a broad, multi-lane highway.

But it was the Ash Wednesday firestorm of 1983 that prompted a clear change of policy. Ash Wednesday, which was like Black Friday in intensity if not in range, confronted the modern firefighting community with the limits of its capacity and technology. It also brought tragedy. Seventeen firefighters died that day, most of them next to their well-equipped tankers on a forest road in Upper Beaconsfield when the wind changed and the firestorm swept over them. The experience forced changes in firefighting strategies and philosophies. How to save firefighters from sacrificing themselves? How to get the community more engaged and better informed? The Stay or Go policy, which had been developing quietly since 1967 and evolved from these good questions, began to be articulated more clearly from 1983.

Ash Wednesday initiated a sensible search for “shared responsibility” and “community self-reliance” in firefighting. People had been reminded that some firestorms cannot be stopped or even hindered, even by the most sophisticated of firefighting forces. That day, the Country Fire Authority observed, “normal fire prevention had little effect… on the forward spread of the fire.” It was also apparent that during such an event, the CFA would not be able to offer protection to every home – that homeowners should not expect firefighting assistance and would need to make their own decisions and preparations. Fire expert David Packham, an early advocate of Stay or Go, survived the Ash Wednesday fire by successfully defending his own home at Upper Beaconsfield. It was a close call, but seemed to confirm the proposition that people were in less danger staying put than evacuating late, especially with the tragic example of superbly equipped and trained firefighters caught on the road nearby. This was the crux of the policy: that it was far safer for citizens to be in their own homes, prepared and ready to fight, than it was to be on the roads.

That same year, 1983, Packham spoke often of his experience, arguing strongly that, because radiation was such a killer, “The safest place in a bushfire is inside a building!” He added that “the very best way to make sure a house does not burn down in a bushfire is to have somebody in it!” The philosophy that “People save houses. Houses save people” was beginning to crystallise. Since radiant heat was a major killer and houses were most at risk from ember attack, the partnership made sense. The policy was founded on an assumption that a fire front takes only minutes to pass, a belief that would be challenged by many accounts of Black Saturday. Packham argued against the “irrational evacuation mentality that is sweeping some of the bureaucracies of this state [Victoria].” Compulsory evacuation in such situations was often part of policy overseas, especially in the United States, and so there was some patriotic pride in the development of a libertarian “Australian approach” of community self-reliance. These feelings encouraged the aspiration to articulate a national policy rather than a series of local responses.

Ash Wednesday 1983, like Black Tuesday 1967, confirmed that the new frontier of fire in Australia was the expanding “interface” between the city and the bush. A generation after sawmilling communities were withdrawn from the bush following the recommendations of Judge Stretton in 1939, communities were again being established deep in the forests. This was always going to be a dangerous amalgam, as it had been before, but it was made even more so by the fashion for native gardens that developed strongly from the 1970s. This proliferating zone – spreading along winding bush roads – called for new protective measures and different firefighting philosophies. If a “shared responsibility” was called for, then research was needed into why people die in bushfires.

In 2005, fire scientists John Handmer and Amalie Tibbits reviewed the development of the Stay or Go policy in an article entitled, “Is Staying at Home the Safest Option During Bushfires?” published in Environmental Hazards. Their account shows a strengthening articulation, especially since Ash Wednesday, of faith in the safety of the home – always in contrast to late evacuation. “The clearest lesson from these fires,” Handmer and Tibbits said of Ash Wednesday, “was that late evacuation is dangerous.” It was this kind of thinking that turned the policy focus to the people who stayed and to ways of empowering them. New fires and the enquiries they generated interacted with the policy, generally confirming it. The Sydney fires of 1994, the 2002–03 fires in Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory, and the Eyre Peninsula fires in South Australia in 2005 seemed to show that people who stayed and defended their homes had a better chance of survival than late evacuees. On the Eyre Peninsula, eight of the nine deaths occurred in cars. The Dandenong Ranges fires of 1997, in which all three victims died in their homes, seemed to challenge the policy, especially as none of their neighbours perished despite some very late evacuations. But Handmer and Tibbits argued that the policy remained sound because the people who died in 1997 were “adopting a more passive sheltering strategy” rather than actively defending.

This last argument – where contrary evidence was explained away and an “ideal” form of behaviour was assumed – revealed a worrying tendency in the scholarship supporting the Stay or Go policy. We can see it at work in one of the foundation pieces of research on which the policy depended, a 1984 article entitled “Fight or Flee?” by forestry academics Andrew Wilson and Ian Ferguson published in Australian Forestry. Wilson and Ferguson analysed the experience of Mt Macedon residents in the Ash Wednesday fires and concluded that “able-bodied residents who are threatened by a bushfire should remain in their houses. Their chances of survival are excellent, and 90 per cent can expect to save their houses.” The authors were careful to stress that these findings emerged from a fire that was “at, or near, the maximum intensity possible.” This article is constantly cited as proving that, on Ash Wednesday, “twice as many deaths occurred in vehicles or out in the open than inside houses.”

But the death statistics are much more ambiguous than this suggests. The authors argued that, of the forty-six “civilian” deaths in Victoria as a whole on Ash Wednesday, only seven occurred inside houses. But it would be equally valid to say that of the forty-six deaths, around a third died defending their homes (fifteen), a third died evacuating (eighteen), and a third died firefighting in the open (thirteen). Or we could say even more bluntly that five out of the six people who died at Mount Macedon that day were killed in or near their homes. In other words, for such an influential piece of research – research said to establish the relative safety of the home – the evidence is surprisingly inconclusive.

Of those five deaths in or near homes at Mt Macedon, Wilson and Ferguson argued that all the people were over fifty-five, one was disabled and one lived in a steep, forested location exposed to a fully developed crown fire. “In our opinion,” argue the authors in relation to all but the last death, “able-bodied occupants would not have lost their lives.” Therefore: “The results of this survey suggest that evacuation should not be undertaken lightly, if at all.” This is the same argument made of the home deaths in the 1997 Dandenong fires. Even the language of Wilson and Ferguson’s article – “Fight or Flee?” – is heavily weighted towards the more noble, able-bodied defence of the home castle.

Ash Wednesday confirmed the enduring bush wisdom that late evacuation in a bushfire is perilous. It also reminded us that many houses burn down after the fire front has passed. Therefore people can indeed save homes, and many did on Black Saturday. But Ash Wednesday, contrary to accepted opinion, did not prove that homes can save people. And Black Saturday would demolish the mantra completely.

AS THE Stay or Go policy settled in, its architects began to marginalise the evidence against it. It was a utopian ideal, and for the various reasons scientists and managers were keen to explain, real life did not always live up to it. You needed the right kind of people, properly prepared and living in the right kind of houses, to make it come true. And the policy reduced the options available to people to a simple choice, and one which – with its language of “fighting” and “defending,” and the prospect of saving one’s home – was also implicitly presented as a moral decision. Moreover, as the Black Saturday royal commission was to find, “The policy did not tell people they risked death and serious injury if they stayed to defend.” By 2008 the CFA was preparing to address these flaws and contradictions. There was a growing acceptance that, while the policy was “soundly based in evidence,” there were problems of community understanding and “implementation.”

A key retrospective rationale for the Stay or Go policy was the research finding by Katharine Haynes, John Handmer, John McAneney, Amalie Tibbits and Lucinda Coates that “the majority of civilian fatalities in bushfires between the commencement of written records and early 2008 occurred while victims attempted to flee the flames during late evacuation.” This finding, arising from a study published in Environmental Science and Policy in 2010, remained unquestioned by the royal commission, which called its lead author, Dr Haynes, to give evidence. Since it was relied on heavily by the royal commission and by fire and emergency services officers, it is worth scrutinising its use of evidence.

Drawing on coronial records, Haynes and her co-authors investigated the history of Australian “civilian” bushfire fatalities since 1900 and concluded that “late evacuation is the most common activity at the time of death.” But this finding only emerges from the historical data if you place in different categories those people who died inside their homes and those who died outside them while trying to defend them. If you make that distinction, then a large number of deaths are classified as “outside” instead of “defending the home.” This allows “late evacuations” to emerge, by a small margin, as the “most common activity at the time of death” (32 per cent). If you combine the people who died inside houses with those defending the property outside – all of whom it could be said were “staying and defending their home” – then this becomes the major cause of death (35 per cent). And over just the last fifty years, the proportion of deaths of people defending their properties increased to 39 per cent, compared to 29 per cent for those evacuating late.

Everyone accepts that late evacuations are perilous. But even before Black Saturday, it appears that staying and defending could be described as the most dangerous choice a homeowner could make. After Black Saturday, of course, no matter how you read the statistics, that is definitely the case.

Like Handmer and Tibbits, and Wilson and Ferguson, Haynes and her co-authors seek to attribute deaths in houses to the capacity or behaviour of the people inside. The victims “were passively sheltering” or making “meagre and unsuccessful attempts to defend.” They go so far as to argue that not one “prepared” person out of the 552 “civilians” killed in bushfires since 1900 died while defending a “defendable structure” – they either left too late, unwisely fought the fire outside their home, failed to fight when inside, or had a heart attack in the home when defending and therefore died “not directly from the bushfire.” Thus, the utopian policy remains intact, unsullied by messy human behaviour or imperfect human bodies.

Their analysis is also unable to apply any discrimination to the process of evacuation. People sometimes leave late because the threat is much greater than they imagined or their house is about to burn, even if their initial decision was to stay and defend. Haynes and her co-authors categorise them as “late evacuations.” What about the people found burned to death between their home and their car (which was nearby, already packed and had keys in it, thus following David Packham’s sensible advice to those staying and defending to have a means of escape)? When she gave evidence before the royal commission, Haynes appeared to categorise them as “late evacuations” although her published work may register them as “outside the home”; either way, they are again excluded from the definition of “inside defendable property.” Yet the art of defending a home is choosing when to protect yourself inside from the radiant heat and when to go outside to put out flames and embers. Those who evacuated early or “just in time” – or, indeed, too late but miraculously survived – do not register in the data because only deaths are analysed. Successful evacuations are not measured.

It is very surprising that the royal commission was led to believe that this was the only piece of historical research on this issue and that it accepted it without historical scrutiny. Rachel Doyle, the same senior counsel who ruthlessly pursued Christine Nixon about her whereabouts on the night of the fire, seemingly subjected this influential and crucial research to a perfunctory examination. Researching and writing good history is a demanding craft, and understanding the complexity of real life requires careful contextual analysis. It is not easily reduced to statistics. And statistics can be very misleading, especially when your sample size is 552 and you are drawing on events spanning a century.

THIS was the thinking – evident in both the research and management – that underpinned the relentless logic of the Stay or Go policy. Robert Manne was right to ask in July 2009, “Had a decision not to issue warnings in the circumstances of 7 February been taken?” His answer, and I agree with him, was “Yes” – “both a cumbersome bureaucratic structure and a peculiar ideological mindset had worked in combination to prevent the fire and emergency chiefs… from issuing warnings.”

The failure to issue warnings to communities in the path of the firestorm was partly due to error and bureaucratic paralysis, but it was also caused by a conviction that late warnings would precipitate late evacuations, and that people are most vulnerable when in panicked flight. The logic of the policy was that, once the fire is on the move, it is best to keep people at home. Warnings might therefore seem a low priority; they might even seem dangerous.

And it’s not just that people weren’t warned. They were falsely reassured – by the policy; by the advisory literature, which made defending a home in this region on such a day seem a reasonable option; and by the slow, vague and misleading official information that was released about the fire front. In her book, Worst of Days, Karen Kissane observed that at the same time as Stay or Go insisted people take on an adult responsibility for their fates, it “also infantilised them by withholding key information.” Her analysis of “the official mind” is devastating. “While the CFA was arguing over who should run the Kilmore fire,” she writes, “the fire came and went.” In the public messages issued there was “deadly oversight of the bleeding obvious.”

Disturbingly, defensive managerial language has also, at times, undermined local experience and observation. People who live in the Yarra Ranges have developed special words and phrases for the extreme fire behaviour they have repeatedly witnessed. But many fire scholars and professionals forgot the force of fire in tall, wet forests and began to doubt what people said they saw during major fires in Victoria in 1851, 1926, 1939 or 1962, or on Ash Wednesday in 1983. According to this view, the unrehearsed narratives of survivors were actually exaggerated fictions or “myths” that needed to be dispelled by calm professional education, fire science and “the laws of physics.” We are told by the fire professionals that, in the 1944 fires in Victoria, houses did not simply “explode” as people reported, that in the 1967 fire in Tasmania “most accounts of houses exploding can be disregarded,” and that an “extensive survey of houses in the Otway region of Victoria after Ash Wednesday debunked stories of ‘exploding houses.’”

As for Judge Stretton’s famous account of exploding houses in his 1939 royal commission report, John Handmer takes the trouble to interpolate that the judge’s statement is “not supported by quotes.” Stretton didn’t need to quote because the descriptions are there in the 2500 pages of testimony to his royal commission. John Nicholson, a former director of risk management at the CFA, argued in 1994 that “to be effective, this community education process must actively seek to dispel myths about Australian wildfires, for example fire fronts do not move at such phenomenal speeds as sometimes reported in the popular press” – and, of course, he added that houses don’t explode.

If people believe that houses can actually explode – or that fire fronts can move surprisingly quickly – they might not stay in their homes during a firestorm. Handmer argues that, in rural areas, “‘staying’ has always been a likely choice of survival strategy” in bushfire. But the historical experience of the Yarra Valley in the first half of the twentieth century contradicts this. Evacuation was normal. Most people knew their homes weren’t safe, and either escaped or dug desperately into the creek bank. If you were trapped at home, there was an art to abandoning it at the right moment. The acknowledged vulnerability of homes made it essential for those caught in them to get out. And people in those earlier times were more inclined to look out the window, go outside and watch the horizon, sniff the air. In 2009, the internet was a killer. The private, domestic computer screen with its illusion of omniscience and instant communication compounded the vulnerability and isolation of the home.

As recently as 2008, thoughtful fire officers – drawing narrowly on the science of grassfires – argued that there were no such phenomena as “exploding houses” or “firestorms” or “fireballs,” and that these were just the delirious words of people unfamiliar with fire. And they suggested that such untutored and emotive words also falsely implied that “bushfire is something beyond human control.” Nothing shows the psychological blinkers of the Stay or Go policy more powerfully than this professional disparagement of eyewitness accounts of fire in a distinctive forest. Dugouts and “fireballs” were material and verbal evidence of local cultural adaptation, and yet they were abandoned and disparaged by authorities seeking universal solutions and national policies.

Because the research underlying Stay or Go remained unchallenged by the Black Saturday royal commission, the commissioners concluded that “the central tenets” of the policy “remain sound.” But their report did recommend major changes: a need for the policy to recognise variations in the severity of fires resulting from “different topography, fuel loads and weather conditions,” and a need to resist the simplistic “binary approach” of the policy. “Realistic advice is unavoidably more complex and requires subtlety,” they argued, and this would involve providing a greater range of practical options such as community refuges, bushfire shelters and evacuation. Community education would need to include the message that “among the risks of staying to defend are death and serious injury.”

TO LIVE with periodic, recurrent firestorms, I think we need to develop a sensible fatalism. If people are going to live in the heart of the bush in the most dangerous fire region of the planet, then on the worst days a “stay and defend” option is only realistic if your property has a secure fire refuge or bunker. Working out how to build safe, secure and affordable refuges on each vulnerable property is an appropriate challenge to the design and construction industries of the fire continent.

We need more research that is deeply local, ecologically sensitive and historically informed – and is undertaken in collaboration with the communities that live with the threat of bushfire and firestorms. All the political pressures surrounding tragedies like Black Saturday push politicians, fire managers and royal commissioners towards “national” responses. Yet Black Saturday – like Ash Wednesday and Black Friday – was a fire that was characteristic not of Victoria but of a particular region of Victoria. To understand it fully, and to prepare for its certain recurrence, we need to come to terms with the local distinctiveness of fire. A forest is not just any forest, but a unique community of trees with a distinct human history, and a fire is not just any fire, but one of a particular frequency, a particular intensity, a particular range.

What are the distinctive fire regions of Australia, and of Victoria? How will that local distinctiveness shape the behaviour of fire and people? These are simple, key questions, insufficiently studied. The value of such fire scholarship is its attention to local ecology, local history and local community. In every other way fire research should be wide-ranging: it has to be interdisciplinary, drawing on physical, biological and cultural paradigms in one holistic inquiry. But locality – expressed in the physical, geographical, biological, cultural and historical specificity of particular places or regions – should be its cohering focus. This insight has been a tragic legacy of Black Saturday, when people living in a distinctively dangerous fire region died trying to implement a blunt “national” survival plan.

National vision has its place, of course. Accounts of firefighters struggling on the forest floor to link hoses of four incompatible threads provide a simple, vivid example of where a national policy is urgent. But making fire survival plans compatible or universal or national is inappropriate and possibly dangerous. Fire is ruled by weather, ecology, topography and culture, not by jurisdictional boundaries. Yet issues of risk management, bureaucratic response, political responsibility and even charitable benevolence are jurisdictional in application and come to dominate discussion and policy formulation. Fire research needs to work against the grain of this institutional fabric and political momentum. It has to liberate and empower local knowledge and experience where it exists – and create it where it doesn’t.

Fires, like floods, tend to go where they have gone before. Historical research that is also local and ecological is essential for community bushfire awareness and planning. Detailed environmental history – alert to the regional specifics of weather, geography, ecology and human settlement and management – has the capacity to integrate the physical, biological and cultural paradigms of fire scholarship.

Local fire history is also vital to active community memory, commemoration, education and participation. Whereas national institutional solutions can foster passivity in the face of a generalised fire threat, a keener awareness of local ecological and historical distinctiveness can encourage the inhabitants of fire-prone areas to be more actively engaged with managing and surviving their particular environment.

Graeme Bates, captain of the Healesville CFA, reflected after Black Saturday on the value of local memory: “The old guys… it’s handy to talk to them because they know fire behaviour, what it’s going to do coming out of the mountains, how the winds react in the valleys and all that. They can tell you some good old stories of where it burnt and how it burnt and how quick it burnt, so you never forget that because it usually repeats itself… They’ll say it’s always come down there… and across there… and over that mountain… and that’s actually what it did this time.”

In 2009, a National Day of Mourning was announced to mark the anniversary of Black Saturday. I hope that this significant commemorative and reflective ritual will, in the next few years, evolve into a different kind of annual event to be held on a different date. There are now many fire deaths to mourn and many different fire days to remember in Australia, particularly in Victoria – and there will be more. We need a National Fire Day that commemorates them all but also enables Australians to think and plan constructively about fire. A public holiday in the late spring could be both commemorative and practical. It would be a day to remember the peculiar power of fire, both positive and threatening, in your particular region – and a day to anticipate the coming summer and prepare for it. •

The post The disturbing logic of “Stay or Go” appeared first on Inside Story.

In Antarctica, you can’t just select a date, waltz in, and perform a ceremony. Ice and weather cannot be commanded. You have to submit yourself to the control of the continent, just as Douglas Mawson’s expedition did a hundred years ago. Antarctic logistics are ruled by what is called “the A-factor,” the destabilising ingredient in all Antarctic planning. But commemorations are about nothing if not dates; they are about precision in time and place. They book into our crowded calendars an exact moment for reflection. What happens, then, when you plan a historic commemoration in the continent of uncertainty?

Uncertainty and waiting are the warp and weft of Antarctic history. The men of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition spent a lot of time waiting… waiting for the wind to stop so they could work outside or hear themselves think, waiting agonisingly for the Far Eastern sledging party of Mawson, Belgrave Ninnis and Xavier Mertz to return, waiting for the black speck of their ship, the Aurora, to appear on the horizon to take them home. They were not the first Australians in Antarctica – several including Mawson himself had participated in earlier expeditions – but this was the first Australian expedition and the first of any kind to set foot on the Antarctic continent directly south of Australia.

In Antarctica, it can feel like time has not only skipped a beat, but has lost the beat altogether. Time there assumes different rhythms. There is the deeper pulse of the ice ages, the seamless months of eternal light or night, the transcendent otherworld of a blizzard, the breaking up of the sea ice, the exciting return of the Adélie penguins in spring, the schedule of the summer ships, and the intensity of the annual “changeover” at Antarctic stations. A century might signify a hundred generations in Antarctica or just one tick of the glacial clock.

It therefore seemed entirely appropriate that Antarctica itself should dictate the timing of the centennial visit to Mawson’s Huts. Blizzards at Casey station in late December had delayed the return of our ship, the Aurora Australis, and its subsequent departure from Hobart. And there was an added complication. For possibly the first summer in a century, Commonwealth Bay was filled with ice.

Just to the east of the Bay there once existed the huge tongue of the Mertz Glacier (named after Xavier, who died on Mawson’s sledging journey and still lies, perfectly preserved, somewhere on its inland slopes). That tongue of ice had seemed a constant attribute of this coastline, a dominating geographical feature that was discernible even on small-scale maps of the continent. In the lee of the glacier tongue, furious katabatic winds funnelled down onto Commonwealth Bay and maintained a polynya, the beautiful Russian word for the belts of open water found within the ring of ice that surrounds Antarctica. In February 2010 a huge iceberg from the Ross Ice Shelf – the size of the Australian Capital Territory and named B9B – was drifting steadily westwards. It collided with the Mertz Glacier tongue and sheered it off, sending it slowly spinning westwards. B9B itself became grounded about twenty-five kilometres offshore from Commonwealth Bay and corralled the sea ice near the coast. Cured hard by the wind and fastened to the land, the sea ice made it impossible for ships to reach Mawson’s Huts this summer. However, the Australian Antarctic Division, keenly conscious of the summer’s historical significance, willing to await its moment and equipped with three helicopters on board Aurora Australis, was determined to take on the A-factor.

Members of the Australian Arctic Expedition in Mawson’s Huts, Commonwealth Bay, 1911–14. Frank Hurley/Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

As well as making the pilgrimage to Commonwealth Bay, our voyage was also the most significant Australian marine science expedition of the season. Douglas Mawson would have thoroughly approved. He was first and foremost a scientist and was always trying to fit a bit more science around urgent logistical or strategic goals. Even though he was very anxious to establish his base on the continent as early as possible in 1912, he still found time to gather sea temperature and salinity data on the way south. Just along the edge of where the Mertz Glacier tongue used to lie, our voyage revisited a collecting station of the original Aurora. The sea temperatures gathered at various depths by the expedition using reversing thermometers continue to provide illuminating insights today.

Our voyage leader Robb Clifton reported that It feels like history is all around us as we do this work. And we made history ourselves by sailing where no one had ever sailed before – over the vast tract of sea floor liberated by the calving of the Mertz Glacier. By colliding with the glacier tongue, iceberg B9B has initiated what the physical oceanographer Steve Rintoul calls a “natural experiment” in sea-ice production. The Mertz polynya, as one of the prime Antarctic sites of sea-ice production, releases salty, dense “bottom-water” that plunges to the ocean depths and drives the engine of ocean circulation. Was it the presence of the vast glacier tongue that made this polynya so active? What might now be the impact of the glacier’s calving on salinity, circulation and biodiversity? And how might it relate to a general trend – observed since the 1970s, possibly as a result of increased glacial meltwater – for Antarctic bottom-water to become less salty and less dense? In other words, how might global warming affect ocean circulation? I have no doubt that, if he were alive today, Douglas Mawson would be out there defending the future of his beloved ice. He would be at the forefront of the scientific effort to explain to the general public the dire implications of the climate crisis.

But his ice was not so beloved as Mawson tried to find a way through it to make a landing on the Antarctic coastline in early January 1912. He and the captain of the Aurora, J.K. Davis, were disappointed to find the pack ice so far north. As it grew heavier, they were forced to follow its edge westward, ever westward, looking for an opening to the south and a way finally to the continent itself. By the night of 2 January, Mawson was in despair: his whole expedition seemed in jeopardy, and he was facing personal failure and humiliation. Things looked so bad last night, he wrote to his fiancée, Paquita, that I could do nothing but just roll over and over on the settee on which I have been sleeping and wish that I could fall into oblivion.

Suddenly on 8 January 1912, following further days of hope, anxiety and disappointment, they gained a clear prospect of accessible land! It was a day of brilliant sunshine and a party was sent ashore in the whaleboat. Mawson later described it in The Home of the Blizzard: We were soon inside a beautiful, miniature harbour completely land-locked. The sun shone gloriously in a blue sky as we stepped ashore on a charming ice-quay – the first to set foot on the Antarctic continent between Cape Adare and Gaussberg, a distance of about 2000 miles. What did our revered expeditioners do the moment they set foot on the ice? As Archie McLean recorded, Mawson and [Frank] Wild explored and the others had a snowball fight.

A century later we had hoped also to land at Commonwealth Bay on this day, but due to the blizzards that delayed the start of our voyage, we were still in the middle of the Southern Ocean surrounded by wheeling albatrosses. There was some concern expressed in the media about missing this day of the landing. But we felt the commemorative aptness of dealing with ice and weather and also remembered that the original landing was not on one day but twelve. From the 8th to the 19th of January, Mawson and his men struggled to land the stores for their first and main base at Cape Denison. Late on that gloriously sunny and calm day of 8 January, the true character of the place – its defining elemental essence – had revealed itself. Winds such as no one had ever known before swept down onto the natural harbour they had found and forced them to retreat frozen to the ship, where they hoped that the Aurora’s anchor would hold.

Over the next few days it dawned on them that they had decided to build their home in an unusually windy corner of the windiest continent on earth and that some of the generating factors were quite local – and further, that the open water that had attracted them there was also to some extent a creation of the relentless offshore winds. A ship is naturally lured into the home of the blizzard. It was no accident that Mawson should land in such a place and thereby condemn his expedition to heroic daily scientific recording in one of the most forbidding places on earth. But harbours and bare rock were so precious, and finding that place had been so hard, that the men were determined to secure their fragile foothold with their canvas and planks and nails.

Throughout mid-January, the men of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition laboured between the blizzards, shuttling between ship and shore to land the stores and the Baltic pine timbers of the hut. On the night of 12 January, the expeditioners spent their first night sleeping on the continent. I find that moment as moving and meaningful as the first landing a few days earlier. “Night” doesn’t have much meaning in Antarctica in high summer; the sun, if you can see it, gently bounces on the horizon. But sleeping on the continent itself signals a commitment. One makes oneself vulnerable, becomes a resident, begins to inhabit the place and starts to become (if one ever can) a local. Lying down on the scarce available rock and submitting to sleep in such an alien and threatening place is to begin that transformation. So, as a storm brewed again on the evening of 12 January, Mawson and Wild went ashore to join the five men working there, pitched the tents, unpacked the reindeer sleeping bags and fired up the Nansen cooker. The seven men spent the first night ashore at Cape Denison, warmed by soup and cocoa. Thus began the Australian occupation of Antarctica.

By 16 January 1912, they were still waiting out storms and unloading stores. And this was the day, a century later, that we finally landed our own party. For five days we had waited on the edge of the sea ice twenty kilometres off Cape Denison for weather that would allow our helicopters to fly. That morning of the 16th, the cloud lifted and the white cliffs of East Antarctica sparkled in the sunlight. The wind was slight, the air crystal clear. We could see the exposed granites of the cape and, a few hundred metres inland, the dark outcrops of the moraine. Brooding above everything was the white brow of the polar plateau that climbs and recedes into a pure infinity against the light blue of the sky. And somewhere in the middle of this small coastal patchwork of white ice, black rock and aerial blue could be seen something else… At first I registered it as a different, surprising, organic colour, a pinpoint of warmth. It was the wind-bleached wood of a hut.

From a distance it seemed like a piece of driftwood scoured pale, lean and delicate by the wind and snagged between ice and rock. It glowed with a fragile lustre. I was immediately struck by its homeliness, even from the outside. Mawson’s book about this place is called, of course, The Home of the Blizzard, which honours (or laments) the ferocious katabatics that are the essence of this bay. But this was the home also of eighteen men. This was their cosy, beloved refuge, and one hundred years later it is still an inviting and reassuring presence. The swale in which it sits is also quite intimate, and the men made this their own, too, inscribing it with the daily religious duty of their scientific observations. I was surprised to find that the place felt to me like a part of Australia, not just in a patriotic sense because of its history, but also because it could almost be a winter hut in the Australian Alps among familiar granite pinnacles.

An aerial view of Mawson’s Hut on 14 January 2012. Dean Lewins/AAP Image

The low door had been dug clear of snow by our advance party. Appropriately, we needed to bow to enter the darkness of this shrine. Inside on this calm day was the Antarctic silence. But more than that, there was stillness. The air smelt musty and organic and the walls gleamed faintly, illuminated by the skylight. There were half-familiar shapes and structures to discern in the gloom: Frank Hurley’s photographs reconstituted themselves before my eyes in ageing wood, metal and paper, half-encrusted with ice. The stove stood in one corner, the acetylene generator that produced lighting sat on a high beam, and all around the walls were the beds. The hut was insulated with a two-storey layer of people. I had walked into a boys’ bunkroom! Eighteen men slept here top to toe for a year, and it still feels private, intimate, domestic.

Outside the huts we gathered for a ceremony. In number we were similar to that which landed a hundred years ago. Surrounded by a voluntary audience of Adélies, the Director of the Australian Antarctic Division, Tony Fleming, read a statement by the prime minister, Julia Gillard. The names of all the men of the AAE were then read out and honoured: the nineteen who served in Adélie Land (this included Sidney Jeffryes who joined them in the second year), the eight who established the Western Base, the five who maintained the station at Macquarie Island, and the men of the Aurora. Tony reminded us of the pre-eminence of science in the planning and practice of the expedition, and of the foundation it thus laid for a modern Antarctic Treaty System where good science is the currency of influence. “I am frequently asked,” explained Tony, “what is the enduring legacy of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition? My answer is unequivocal – an entire continent devoted to peace and science, where nations work together in a spirit of collaboration. What a wonderful legacy they have left us!” Deborah Bourke from the Antarctic Division and David Ellyard, president of the ANARE Club (formed in 1951 by veterans of the first Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions), raised the Australian flag to applause from the people and squawks from the Adélies. I said some words about the original landing and the way it was recorded in the diaries of the expeditioners.

After the ceremony, we walked across ice and granite scree to the small eminence of Proclamation Hill for another ritual – this time the laying of a time capsule in which Australian schoolchildren had written their visions of Antarctica in one hundred years time. Thus our commemoration turned to the future – and we wondered, as the children do, about how the southern ice cap will fare in a warming world. This hill was so named when Mawson returned to Commonwealth Bay in 1931, raised the flag again and asserted British sovereignty on 5 January. Almost twenty years after his expedition, Mawson had already become a tourist to his own history. He was proud to find the huts still standing even though the ice had penetrated them. Inside they were like a “fairy cavern.”

In my history of Antarctica, Slicing the Silence, I made a bit of fun of proclamation ceremonies in front of audiences of Adélies on windy, remote Antarctic coastlines. After all, claiming something as slippery as ice is laced with comedy, and narrow nationalism appears inapt on a continent of ice where just being human is so marginal and vulnerable. There’s a slightly irreverent chapter in my book called “Planting Flags.” And now, in January 2012, I was suddenly involved in the ritual myself…

Why would Australians today raise the flag in this international place? There is no doubt that by doing so we are quietly affirming Australian sovereignty over 42 per cent of Antarctica and that the penguins are not the only creatures with a colony here. But this was also a deliberately modest ceremony. No anthem was sung, no cheers called for, no proclamation made, no mention of “territory” by the prime minister, and the emphasis of the speeches was on the science of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition and its continuities with the scientific priorities of the Treaty era. Attention was given to all the young men who were excited by this last frontier, not only Mawson. The two men who died were especially remembered. With typical Australian bashfulness at ceremonies, the formalities were completed quickly and simply. The real commemorative act, we all felt, is in continuing to do science and history in Commonwealth Bay – and across East Antarctica – and helping researchers from other nations to do it too.

When speaking internationally and cross-culturally in Antarctica there is no word more powerful for Australians than “Mawson.” Uttering that word creates a significant space for us in the conversation. Our international Antarctic colleagues expect us to be the leading researchers and custodians of that history. Curiously, perhaps, the scholarly commemoration of Mawson and his legacy has become a critical part of our international obligation in Antarctica. Nationalism is not contrary to the spirit of the Antarctic Treaty, for national endeavour is the means of contributing to the treaty system and there is national pride in becoming an influential party. Quiet, reflective nationalism is the fabric of Antarctica’s successful international governance.

While our ship was still on the Southern Ocean, the historian David Day wrote an opinion piece for the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald in which he questioned such expressions of nationalism in Antarctica. Entitled “Antarctica is no place for politicking: Mawson’s expedition was about territorial gain, not science,” Day’s essay was critical of the commemorative ceremony of 2012 that I’ve just described and argued that it fell into a familiar pattern of Antarctic behaviour: “From Mawson in 1912 to Monday’s ceremony, it has all been done in the name of territorial acquisition and retention, with science acting as a cover.” Science, argued Day, was only “the supposed purpose” of Mawson’s expedition; its real aim was territorial acquisition and economic gain.

As symbolic proof of this priority, David Day offered the following evidence: “As soon as Mawson had erected his huts at what he named Commonwealth Bay, he gathered his companions together on a nearby hill for a formal ceremony on January 30, 1912. Curiously, the ritual received no mention during the commemoration this week.” Thus Day’s commentary perceived a consistent sleight-of-hand across the past hundred years. Just as Mawson’s real strategic priorities allegedly hid behind the “cover” of science, so did this year’s commemoration underplay the true imperial dimensions of Australia’s endeavours down south.

Although I think David Day’s interpretation is wrong in both detail and analysis, as I will explain below, he is right to identify the constant tension between science and politics as characteristic of Antarctic history. The process of commemoration itself took us to the heart of that question about the importance of science in Antarctic affairs, both a century ago and today. A commemoration should be more than a symbolic gesture. It can draw the past and present into a meaningful and active dialogue, and it can thereby become a way of doing history. The very process of commemoration can demand such a detailed engagement with the day-by-day fabric of past experience that it can furnish new insights and understanding. It challenges our ethnographic eye to consider the larger meaning of everyday action. So our commemorative voyage taught us quite a bit about the priorities of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition through a close and sympathetic engagement with their words, actions and setting.

After the ceremonies, I climbed Azimuth Hill just west of the huts where the memorial cross to Ninnis and Mertz stands clearly on the skyline, surrounded by penguin colonies. Beyond it, the ice cliffs of Commonwealth Bay take your breath away. Belgrave Ninnis was swallowed by a crevasse on 14 December 1912 and Xavier Mertz died very early on 8 January 1913 in the sleeping bag next to Mawson during their desperate return from the Far Eastern sledging journey. In November 1913, after their unexpected second winter at Cape Denison, Mawson and the six other remaining men solemnly erected this wooden cross to the memory of their dead friends and their “supreme sacrifice… to the cause of science.” As I sat there among the nesting Adélies, gazing out across the sea ice to the tiny black dot on the horizon which was our ship, I was moved by this choice of words etched in wood which seems so emblematic of how the men of the expedition saw their endeavour. Their friends died not for “the glory of empire” or for “pride of nation,” but in “the cause of science.”

Are these mere words or do their actions support them? Pondering that question beneath the cross, I felt that they rang true. Ninnis and Mertz died on a crazy, unheroic but earnest quest to understand more about Antarctic geography. And the last year of their lives, like those of their companions, was devoted to the daily discipline of survival and scientific recording. The priorities of the expedition were clear, and our commemorative mapping of their daily activities had revealed them to us. No sooner had the huts been built and a “house warming feast” held on 30 January 1912 than daily meteorological recording began – on 1 February. Ninnis and Mertz built two Stevenson screens to house the recording instruments, work began on the construction of the Absolute Magnetic Hut and Magnetograph House, a tide gauge was installed, biological and geological work begun, and seals and penguins were butchered for winter stores of meat and blubber. On 6 February, geologist Frank Stillwell recorded that Bickerton spent the afternoon erecting a 5′ flag pole on top of the main hut and it gives a nice swanky appearance to the homestead. But it was not until the summer was almost over, not until the scientific infrastructure was in place, not until 25 February that Mawson set aside the time to raise a flag on that pole above the hut. The ceremony would have taken place even later had not weather delayed the departure of the exploratory sledging parties Mawson was so keen to despatch.

Therefore Mawson did not conduct his flag ceremony “as soon as [he] had erected his huts,” as David Day suggested. Nor did he “[gather] his companions together on a nearby hill for a formal ceremony on January 30, 1912.” Neither the date nor place is correct in this account. Day was misled, as many others have been (including Peter FitzSimons in his recent book, Mawson) by a quirk in the historical record. We are lucky to have so many surviving diaries of the men of the Main Base at Commonwealth Bay and the only flag ceremony they mention that first summer took place on 25 February – and it was held next to the huts, not on the nearby hill. (The proclamation ceremony on the hill took place nineteen years later, in 1931, as mentioned above.) None of the expeditioners mentions a ceremony on 30 January. The 30th of January was a memorable day for a different reason – it was the day the men had their first sit-down meal in the hut (their “house warming feast”), and also the first day they could play the gramophone.

The reason the mistake has often been made is that biologist Charles Laseron conflated the dates in his memoir, South with Mawson, which was written thirty-five years later, in 1947. The words he used in his book describing a ceremony on 30 January correspond exactly with those in his unpublished diary for 25 February. Scholars who have not been able to consult the primary sources have compounded the error by understandably relying on the easily accessible published account.

The difference in dates is not trivial or pedantic; rather, it goes to the heart of the argument about symbolism and about whether or not science was only “the supposed purpose” of the expedition and a mere “cover” for territorial behaviour. David Day remarked in his article that “Curiously, the ritual [on 30 January] received no mention during the commemoration this week.” But this was not due to some dark historical suppression of Mawson’s political behaviour; it was because the ritual did not take place until later in the establishment of the expedition. In the day-to-day challenge of gaining a physical and emotional foothold on the ice, flag planting was a less urgent priority than survival and science. At the Australasian Antarctic Expedition’s Western Base, a proclamation was not made until almost a year later, on 25 December 1912.

Of course I am not arguing that claiming sovereignty wasn’t important to Mawson. His whole career is testimony to his lifelong conviction that Australia must secure its political and economic interests in Antarctica. The expedition was unusual in putting geographical exploration ahead of the attainment of the South Pole. One had to be resolute and original to resist “the Race to the Pole” in 1910–11. But this is what Mawson did, for he had another vision. He wanted to explore new territory, and especially that vast stretch of Antarctic coastline directly south of Australia. He promoted the expedition not only as a scientific mission but also as an investment in Australia’s long-term security and prosperity. Mawson also saw an opportunity to demonstrate Australia’s frontier vigour on the world stage, “to prove that the young men of a young country could rise to those traditions which have made the history of British Polar exploration one of triumphant endeavour as well as of tragic sacrifice.”

So the Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911–14 was a contribution to the British Empire’s embrace of Antarctica, but it was also a distinctively Australian endeavour, a proud initiative of the recently federated nation, driven by this newfound nationalism and by a southern hemisphere sensibility about the need to know one’s backyard, to understand the shared world of stormy sea and swirling, icy air that emanated from the neighbouring Antarctic region. Exploring Antarctica was Australia’s duty, Australia’s “preserve,” Australia’s destiny.

It has often been claimed that the Australian nation was born in 1915 on a war-torn beach far away in Turkey on the other side of the world. But the heroic landing a few years earlier at Cape Denison, Antarctica – a landing also “hampered by adverse conditions” and a landing in Australia’s own region of the globe – deserves our attention and was imbued with similar symbolism and sentiment.

During that ceremony at Commonwealth Bay on 25 February 1912, Mawson used the ritual to express this complex mixture of imperial, national and scientific loyalties. The Union Jack and the Commonwealth (Australian) flag were both raised above the hut. But what the men most savoured in their diaries was not so much the flag or the proclamation but the first church service that Mawson nervously held in the hut, the celebratory dinner that followed, and the speech that Mawson gave that evening. What did he say on what Archie McLean called this day of days in so far as the history of our stay in this place is concerned? Cecil Madigan recorded: He said we were snug & comfortable etc. – we were in a much worse place than any Antarctic expedition had ever landed in – the weather was far worse – it looked as if these winds were constant and sledging would be most difficult. No other expedition had been game to land here. Perhaps it was a terrible region – we were going to prove it. The meteorological results would be very valuable – the magnetic work – the biological work – but of more practical value at present was the geographical work – we must explore.

When the Aurora sailed away from Cape Denison on 19 January 1912, Captain Davis wrote: They are a fine party of men but the country is a terrible one to spend a year in. The proclamation of territory and the assertions of nationalism were vital to strategy and morale. They had named their new home Commonwealth Bay and at dinner on 25 February Mawson wrapped himself in the Australian flag. But the science was vital, too, for its own sake – and also because, even more than planting the flag, it justified their presence for at least a year on this remote, alien continent and helped secure them to this windy place. These young men, mostly Australian, mostly in their twenties, mostly university-educated, were as eager as Mawson to explore and to apply their fresh scientific curiosity and training to new terrain. Science was their emotional anchorage, their intellectual sustenance, their daily discipline – and perhaps it might keep them sane. •

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The most enduring wisdom forged by the Black Friday fire of 1939 came in the form of Judge Leonard Stretton’s royal commission report. It was also the greatest literary legacy of that fire: no other published words about Black Friday compared with its biblical power. It was celebrated not only as a political statement, but also as literature. For many years it was a prescribed text in Victorian Matriculation English, and it was consulted by politicians and fire managers. In 2002–03, as the alps burned, Premier Steve Bracks borrowed Stretton’s 1939 report from the Parliamentary Library for his weekend reading. Bruce Esplin, head of the Victorian bushfire inquiry of 2003, said he could feel Judge Stretton looking over his shoulder. Stretton’s words still resonate with poetic and political power: he was fearless.

Justice Bernard Teague’s royal commission report on the Black Saturday fires is earnest and thorough but too careful and comprehensive to make memorable literature. It is becoming clear that Black Saturday is shaping a different and more diverse literary legacy. Black Friday 1939, followed so quickly by years of world war, did not generate any notable books, although it did induce life-long trauma, become embedded in folklore and language, and seed political and bureaucratic reform. But Black Saturday 2009 is quickly germinating a forest of impressive writing: perceptive essays by John van Tiggelen, Robert Manne and Robert Hillman, Danielle Clode’s A Future in Flames, Roger Franklin’s Inferno, a forthcoming study by Peter Stanley (Black Saturday at Steels Creek), and two very important books discussed here – Adrian Hyland’s Kinglake-350 and Karen Kissane’s Worst of Days.

Kinglake-350 takes us into the world of the Kinglake Ranges as they were about to be consumed by the Kilmore East fire, storming unheralded towards them. The story’s main character is Acting Sergeant Roger Wood of the Kinglake police, and his call-sign is Kinglake-350. We follow him from dawn on 7 February, learn what he is doing, thinking and fearing, and we feel the drama of Black Saturday explode around him. Through him, we meet the people of Kinglake and gain a visceral sense of the caprice and violence of a firestorm in the Ash Range. Adrian Hyland knows these people because he lives with them. This is superb non-fiction writing: dramatic, full of tension, deeply researched, and true.

Karen Kissane’s Worst of Days, published last year before the royal commission’s final report, also focuses on the Kilmore East fire and has its foundation in her work as the Age’s chief reporter at the royal commission’s hearings. Like Hyland, Kissane structures her compelling narrative around selected individuals, but her book is also a piece of sustained investigative journalism. Daily immersion in the hearings and evidence of the commission is here transmuted into history and literature with perspective and punch. She seems determined to find a voice that is stronger and tougher than the “disapproving puzzlement” and “neutral, non-condemnatory tones” of the royal commission’s interim report. As Kissane puts it, “the commission’s [interim] report reflected the evidence before it, in which so many emergency workers and bureaucrats using phrases right out of Sir Humphrey Appleby’s mouth had smoothly declined to take responsibility for any failures: it was not their job, or they were working at a higher level, or their underlings should have told them if there was a problem.”

Historian, speech-writer and brilliant analyst of language, Don Watson, has described Black Saturday as “the day words fell short.” Seven months after the fires, he reflected on the evidence that fire managers were giving to the royal commission about what they called “communication”:

One CFA manager described the business of telling the public as “messaging”; “communicating the likely impact”; “to communicate the degree of the circumstance”; providing “precise complex fire behaviour information”; “to communicate more effectively in a timely manner not just that it is a bad day, but other factors as well.” He spoke of his task as “value-adding” and “populating the document.” He and other managers talked a good deal about “learnings,” “big learnings” and even “huge learnings.”

Watson’s conclusion was:

It was not that they [the managers] did not do their very, very best. More likely, when it came to telling people what they had to know, their management training made their best inadequate. Telling people requires language whose meaning is plain and unmistakable. Managerial language is never this.

Karen Kissane and Adrian Hyland have thrown off this blanket of bureaucratic blandness and have set out to distil a very different kind of language of disaster. They have tapped into what Robert Hillman, writing in the Griffith Review in 2009, called “the vernacular of Australian catastrophe”: spare, vivid storytelling, full of people doing things, full of verbs, full of agency and responsibility. Hillman, who lives near Warburton and found himself caught within a horseshoe of fire, was spellbound through the night of 7 February by radio accounts from survivors, by “the terrible beauty of tales in which there is no exaggeration, no sentimentality,” and which were as gripping in their brevity “as the verses of an ancient ballad.” He confessed that he became “absorbed by the way in which disaster restores the vigour of language,” just as the fire cauterised the forest itself, ridding it of excess and reducing it to a weirdly beautiful austerity. Hillman felt that the best memorials to the victims of Black Saturday would not be the services imbued with hyperbole and cliché, but the “unrehearsed narratives” of those who escaped. Well, here they are.

Hyland, especially, feeds off the lean poetry of these unrehearsed narratives by weaving a tapestry of stories in the present tense. This enables us to see that, even as people are overwhelmed by an unbelievable force of nature, there are still tiny interstices of time and space in which they can exercise their will, understanding and wisdom. Inevitability and luck are two dominant metaphors for explaining and coping with disaster, and they play large roles in Hyland’s narrative, too, but his focus on people doing things – especially the policemen at the centre of the drama – reveals how individuals can still make a difference in such a crisis. Hyland creates room for heroes without diminishing our understanding of the ecological and climatic forces within which they were trapped.

There are heroes in Worst of Days too, but also more death and inevitability. Having sat through the royal commission hearings, Kissane understandably grapples more directly with the “managerial language” of the bureaucrats, and its consequences. There is a more sustained analysis of the systemic failures, and an impressive demolition of the “Prepare, Stay and Defend, or Leave Early” policy (abbreviated to “Stay or Go”) and the official mantra that “People save houses. Houses save people.”

In the week after Black Saturday, I argued in Inside Story that the “Stay or Go” policy was a death sentence in these Victorian mountain communities on a forty-something degree day of high winds after a prolonged heatwave and a long drought. Although the policy has guided people well in most areas of Australia and has demonstrably saved lives and homes, it misled people in this distinctively deadly fire region to believe that they could defend an ordinary home in the face of an unimaginable force. I believe that the policy – by enshrining the defendable home – also implicitly sanctioned the gradual abandonment of community fire refuges over recent decades. And it underpinned the lack of warnings issued by authorities to local residents about the movement of the firefront. Partly this was due to incompetence and bureaucratic paralysis, but it was also because of a conviction that late warnings would precipitate late departures and that people are most vulnerable when in panicked flight. The logic of the “Stay or Go” policy implies that, once the fire is on the move, it is best to keep people at home. And it’s not just that people weren’t warned. They were falsely reassured – by the policy, by the advisory literature which made defending a home in this region on such a day seem a reasonable option, and by the fact that what little official information was released about the firefront was misleading. Hyland comments that one of the poignant images that recurs from the day “is of people who perished because they were staring at a screen and not at the sky.”

Kissane’s book analyses the evolution of the “Stay or Go” policy and its contradictions. She declares it “the final victim of Black Saturday,” observing that the very policy that insisted people take on an adult responsibility for their fates “also infantilised them by withholding key information.” Kissane’s analysis of “the official mind” is devastating. “While the CFA was arguing over who should run the Kilmore fire,” she writes, “the fire came and went.” In the public messages issued, there was “deadly oversight of the bleeding obvious.” The defensive managerial language observed by Don Watson was doing its work.

IN HIS closing reflection in Kinglake-350, Adrian Hyland asks: “So how does contemporary Australia respond to the dilemma of fire?” And his answer is: “With lawyers.” It is hard for a “profession whose primary function is to find somebody guilty or innocent” not to be drawn into the blame game. But if there is blame to be assigned here, we all share in it. Hyland regrets “the trophy-hunting convolutions that surrounded the Black Saturday royal commission” and the way barristers and journalists “circled for the kill.” These distractions meant, he believed, “that there was little attention left… for an examination of the nation’s soul.” The former Victorian emergency services commissioner, Bruce Esplin, observed on radio in August 2010 that a royal commission “can be a very legal process and it can be a process that thereby stifles proper debate because people are concerned about the implications of what they may or may not say.” Perhaps the commissioners themselves were frustrated by these constraints, for their final recommendation (no. 67) is that “the state consider the development of legislation for the conduct of inquiries in Victoria – in particular, the conduct of royal commissions.”

The Black Saturday royal commission, in my view, had some conspicuous strengths – it was thorough, consultative and exhaustive. In particular, it took very seriously its emotional and political commitment to the victims and their families: “We have been conscious of your pain and loss throughout our work.” The commission made a priority of travelling to suffering communities for its initial consultation sessions, and shared its city proceedings with the general public through webcasting. It also convened special hearings into the circumstances of every death, sessions that were as much therapeutic as investigative. Family and friends of the deceased were welcomed and invited to participate. Justice Teague explained to those present that it was “a different kind of hearing,” one that dispensed with some of the legal formalities and aimed “to get the information we need but in a way that will save you having to be exposed to a great deal of detail.” This was part of the commission’s very impressive commitment to “securing the memories of the fires.”

The commission was less successful in guiding the adversarial legal style of the courtroom away from the pursuit of personal blame. At times – most notably in the cross-examination of the former Victorian police chief, Christine Nixon, by senior counsel Rachel Doyle – the commission allowed its proceedings to be hijacked by another agenda. Stronger moral guidance from the commission to both counsel and the media might have enabled greater public attention to the significant systemic and cultural flaws unearthed. The really shocking point about Christine Nixon’s whereabouts on the evening of 7 February is that, even if she had spent every second of that night in the newly established Integrated Emergency Coordination Centre (“the war room”), she wouldn’t have known much more about the unfolding disaster than she did sitting in a North Melbourne pub.

Could Justice Teague have controlled the distracting media frenzy of blame? Possibly not. But it is worth recalling again that earlier royal commission in 1939 – admittedly a very different era in terms of media morals and power, but still an instructive example. Judge Leonard Stretton began proceedings with these words:

I wish to make it clear at the outset that this is not an inquisitorial commission. I do not represent any punitive or detection arm of the law; I am here merely to arrive at the broad causes of the recent fire disasters and to make recommendations later, if any suggest themselves to me, for future assistance. If any person feels embarrassed by being asked to give evidence, or if he feels that he may incriminate himself, he has only to say so, and he will be given the protection which the law affords him.

Stretton constantly monitored and guided his proceedings to ensure the investigation of broad causes rather than individual blame. “I want to get to the truth, but I do not want to embarrass anyone,” he explained at his first country hearing in Healesville. But he did not hesitate to excoriate the daily newspapers when they threatened his search for truth. He blasted them for their “blackguardly lies” in reporting his commission and its witnesses, especially – he added with typical wit and mischief – “that section of the press which is printed for the more unintelligent, who can absorb their news only in picture form apparently.”

In Worst of Days, Karen Kissane identifies “a great historical truth” that was somehow lost in the state’s bushfire response on Black Saturday: that “some fires are so extraordinarily fast and intense that, in the face of their fury, even the best prepared and well defended home is doomed to ashes.” She adds: “Education campaigns skirted this brutal fact.” I agree with her – and they were not just “some” fires, but very specific types of fires in a quite distinctive region on identifiable kinds of days. The royal commission has gone some way towards being more discriminatory about the variety of bushfire, weather, topography and ecology – but not far enough. There is still insufficient recognition of the distinctiveness of the fire region through which the Black Saturday bushfire stormed. It is astonishing that no vegetation map appears in the royal commission’s interim or final reports. The forests enter the report mostly as “fuel.” “The natural environment,” explain the commissioners in their introduction, “was heavily impacted.” I can see Don Watson wincing!

A key finding of Kissane’s was that “the evidence suggests the CFA was resistant to making warnings as high a priority as firefighting: its operational focus has been on trucks and crews rather than towns and residents.” The royal commission agreed with her, and in its final report recommended that “fire agencies should attach the same value to community education and warnings as they do to fire-suppression operations.” Let us hope that this recommendation is indeed implemented by the fire agencies. It will involve deep structural and philosophical change, and the signs so far are that things are moving very slowly.

Changing attitudes is the biggest challenge and this is where these two books do wonderful work. They draw their moral power from a profound sense of responsibility to those who lived and those who died, and a desperate conviction that meaning, hope and reform must be dug from the ashes. Hyland and Kissane have provided specific, contextual, true stories to think with – that’s what the finest contemporary history should offer policy-makers and survivors. They bring those unrehearsed narratives compellingly before us. As Hyland argues, we do need fire ceremonies like those created by Aboriginal people over millennia – rituals and stories that distil “lessons about how to live in the land, truths that have evolved over tens of thousands of years.”

We need education, research, museums, books, films, websites, and ceremonies and rituals. After the 2009 fires, a National Day of Mourning was announced to mark the anniversary of Black Saturday. I hope that this ritual will, over the years, evolve into a different kind of annual event. There are now many fire deaths to mourn and many different fire days to remember in Australia, particularly in Victoria – and there will be more. We need a National Fire Day – a public holiday – that commemorates them all and remembers the power of fire for good and ill, but also a day that enables Australians to prepare emotionally and practically for the coming summer. And we need that day not in February but in October. •

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FIFTY YEARS AGO this week a remarkable agreement, the Antarctic Treaty, was signed in Washington. It was created not only by strategic national politics but also by genuine idealism and –­ of special relevance to Australian politicians coming to terms with climate change –­ by a bipartisan respect for the integrity of good, international science. As we count down to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, it is worth reflecting on the negotiations that led to this enduring political document.

Forged in the Cold War era, the treaty has proven to be a resilient and evolving instrument for international cooperation. Its main object is to promote the peaceful use of Antarctica and to facilitate scientific research south of 60º latitude. The key provision of the treaty (Article IV) neither recognises nor denies any existing territorial claims to Antarctica. In polar parlance, such claims are “frozen.” This political compromise emerged from a period of escalating national rivalry over Antarctic sovereignty.

In the early twentieth century Antarctica – “the last continent” – became the proving ground of nations, an additional site of European colonial rivalry, and the place for one last burst of continental imperialist exploration, which had been such a trademark of the nineteenth century. The heroic era of Antarctic exploration – associated with the names of Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton and Mawson – was “heroic” because its goal was as abstract as 90º south, its central figures were romantic, manly and flawed, its drama was moral (for it mattered not only what was done but how it was done), and its ideal was national honour.

In the 1920s, a more pragmatic geopolitics quickened in Antarctica, and the heroics down south became harder-edged and more territorial. There was, as the Adelaide Advertiser declared in 1929, “A Scramble for Antarctica” that echoed the famous “Scramble for Africa” amongst European powers in the late nineteenth century. From the 1920s, commercial whaling intensified along the edges of the ice and seven nations consistently asserted territorial claims to sectors of the continent: Argentina, Britain, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway – and Australia, which in 1933, under the Australian Antarctic Territory Acceptance Act, formalised the transfer from Britain to Australia of sovereignty over 42 per cent of Antarctic ice.

Assertions of Antarctic possession continued to escalate and the status of claims remained unresolved – an uncertainty that became known as “the Antarctic problem.” In early 1939 an expedition from Adolf Hitler’s Germany bombed Antarctic ice with hundreds of cast-iron swastikas, each carefully counterbalanced so that it stood upright on the surface. In the early 1940s, Britain, Chile and Argentina contested possession of the Antarctic Peninsula and nearby islands. Stamps, post offices, maps and films were weapons of war in a region which, depending on your nationality, was known as Tiera O’Higgins, Tiera San Martin, Palmer Land or Graham Land. In February 1952, Argentine soldiers fired machine-guns over the heads of a British geological party trying to land at Hope Bay on the Antarctic Peninsula. The following summer, in retaliation, British authorities deported two Argentines from the South Shetlands and ordered troops to dismantle Argentine and Chilean buildings on the islands. But British and Argentine crews still had good enough relations at Deception Island to hold soccer matches, although they disagreed as to who was the home team.

Immediately after the second world war, in 1946–47, America’s great polar explorer, Richard Byrd, led the largest ever expedition south (his third), called “Operation Highjump.” The “operation” involved 4000 personnel, a dozen icebreakers and an aircraft carrier. An official Navy directive of 1946 identified the expedition as a means for “consolidating and extending United States potential sovereignty over the largest practicable area of the Antarctic continent.” In 1950, the Soviet Union announced its renewed interest in Antarctic exploration, occupation and sovereignty. It began to seem that the Cold War might find its way to the coldest part of the planet.

In 1948, the US government proposed an international trusteeship for Antarctica consisting of the seven claimant states and the United States. The apparent idealism of this terra communis was tempered by the proposal’s goal of excluding the Soviet Union from the power bloc. The claimant nations rejected the proposal because it required the renunciation of sovereignty. The Chileans, however, suggested a compromise (known as the Escudero Plan) which allowed claims to be suspended rather than renounced. By 1950 Chile and the US, united by a desire to exclude the USSR, had agreed on this revised plan for internationalisation. But a significant world event was about to change Antarctic politics.

The International Geophysical Year of 1957–58 (known as IGY) was the biggest scientific enterprise ever undertaken, and the launching of the Soviet spaceship, Sputnik, on 4 October 1957 was its most visible achievement. Building on the tradition of International Polar Years (held previously in 1882–83 and 1932–33), IGY made a focus of Antarctica as well as those other regions – outer space and the ocean floor – made newly accessible by technology. Tens of thousands of scientists from sixty-six nations took part at locations across the globe. In Antarctica, twelve countries were involved: the seven claimant nations plus Belgium, Japan, South Africa, the United States and the Soviet Union. For fifty years the main motives for Antarctic work had been national honour and territorial conquest; now, scientific work and international cooperation became the priorities.

IGY was such a resounding success that it cried out to be institutionalised. It was also clear that any management regime for Antarctica had to include the Soviet Union. Intensive diplomatic activity following IGY culminated in a draft for an Antarctic Treaty which incorporated the compromise of the Escudero Plan. Military activity and testing of any kind of weapons were prohibited south of 60º, information was to be shared, and inspections of other nations’ bases allowed at any time. On 1 December 1959, the Antarctic Treaty was signed in Washington by the twelve nations that had participated in IGY. Science as an international social system had never before revealed itself to be so powerful.

Australia argued especially for non-militarisation, freedom of scientific research and the freezing of territorial claims, with the Australian external affairs minister, Richard Casey, helping to persuade the Soviets to accept this last, crucial provision. The Russians were initially opposed to any mention of claims at all, but a meeting between Casey and Nicolai Firubin, the Soviet deputy foreign minister – held near a Queensland beach in March 1959 – brought agreement.

BY THE TIME delegates of the twelve IGY nations gathered in Washington fifty years ago, myriad working party meetings had prepared the ground for a successful conference. Yet there was still uncertainty in the air. It was not simple. The Antarctic Treaty is a relatively brief, eloquent document, but it took the momentum and euphoria of IGY, the eighteen months of working parties and then another six weeks of demanding, cooperative work in Washington to create it. And it required courage and goodwill – and some planetary consciousness – from all parties.

Participants were walking a kind of tightrope, as the leader of the French delegation explained: “Each day that went by could bring about the failure of the Conference, but each day that passed brought to us a strengthened hope of success.” And there was indeed hope and optimism in the air – and a sense of history too. Antarctic history itself was an inspiration. Delegates to the Washington conference felt a humble continuity with the courage of explorers past. As one representative put it, “we can justly feel that it is an exceptional success to have been able to conquer so many obstacles which, to us, seemed as insurmountable as those with which the daring explorers of Antarctica had to cope.”

We look back on this achievement of 1959 and see it as remarkable that such a document of peace should emerge from the period of the Cold War. They took pride in this surprising result at the time, too. In fact that anxious political context gave the meeting some of its edge and momentum. They wanted to set a new path. And people enjoyed the wordplay about temperature just as we do now: there were references to the Cold War and the need to exclude it from the coldest continent; they marvelled that a Cold Peace might break out in Antarctica; there was a lot of talk about warmth, and about thawing. The Soviet president, Nikita Khrushchev, upon assuming power in 1958, had repudiated aspects of Stalin’s regime and had been willing to travel to the United States. His visit occurred just the month before the Antarctic conference, and there were plans for President Eisenhower to visit Moscow. There was keen anticipation about a Paris summit conference in May 1960 of “the Big Four”: Khrushchev, Eisenhower, Britain’s Harold Macmillan and France’s Général de Gaulle. Détente was in the air.

And Antarctica itself delivered a lesson. In the course of the Antarctic conference, there was a fatal accident down south. A tractor carrying three New Zealanders fell down a hidden crevasse – one man was killed and two were badly injured. A US party in the area lent valuable assistance in rescuing the injured. The event was a reminder to delegates that “even in today’s conditions,” Antarctica is perilous and human cooperation is vital. The event confirmed what the delegates felt – that even as they launched Antarctica into a new political era, the physical place remained humbling and the continuities with the heroic age were strong.

It was fortunate that these crucial meetings and negotiations about the Antarctic Treaty took place in a brief period of reduced east–west tension. A major determinant for success in the treaty negotiations was that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union, having established presences on the continent, was prepared to withdraw and leave the field to the other. A few months after the treaty was signed, Soviet and American relations disintegrated dramatically when an American U-2 spy plane was captured over Russia. Eisenhower refused to apologise for the spying and Khrushchev stormed out of the Paris summit. The construction of the Berlin Wall commenced just after the first Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting was held in Canberra in July 1961. A year later, the world held its breath during the Cuban missile crisis. The Cold Peace, one might say, was established during a brief interglacial in the Cold War.

Today we recognise, with hindsight, that the Antarctic Treaty was not only a significant achievement in its own right, but that it was also a precursor, a model for the rest of the world and for the future. It was the first disarmament treaty of the Cold War. It became an inspiration for the governance of other places – for management of the sea and outer space. The people who created the Antarctic Treaty foresaw some of this in 1959. They believed that it could be the start of something new. This was part of the motivation, the incentive, the inspiration for what the Argentine delegate called “the transcendental provisions of the treaty.” As the leader of the Chilean delegation reported, “Someone said, during a debate, that we were drafting a document that could mean the beginning of a new era for the world.” There is this wonderful sense amongst the delegates of rising above themselves and of their nationalities, of surprising themselves with what could be achieved through sympathetic strategy and patient talk. Even the shape of the 1959 conference expressed this transformation, beginning as it did with recitations of past national achievements and ending with hopes for a common future. There were, at the end of the meeting, as the signing took place, expressions of surprise as well as extreme satisfaction. The non-nuclear provision, in the words of the Argentine delegate, went “beyond the greatest expectations.”

Remarkably, Antarctica is a part of our globe where strategic idealism has sometimes triumphed over short-term politics. Perhaps its political culture has been formed at the threshold of two ages – one of competitive nationalism and the other of cooperative internationalism. Antarctic history offers us both the latest phase of imperial partition and the first expression of planetary awareness. Politically as well as geophysically, then, Antarctica seems, as Alan Henrikson put it, “the last place on earth, the first place in heaven.” The deep black Antarctic sky with its crystal clear air really does appear to bring other worlds closer. The Antarctic Treaty – born not just in, but out of, the Cold War – is a beautiful, workable, enduring document, both delicate and robust. It truly does seem an expression of both heaven and earth. Its creation fifty years ago reminds us that politics driven by respect for science can sometimes achieve miracles. •

Photo: Tom Griffiths

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We should have seen this coming. We did see this coming. Yet we failed to save lives. We have still not lived long enough.

They had not lived long enough were the words that Judge Leonard Stretton used to describe the people who lived and worked in the forests of southeastern Australia when they were engulfed by a holocaust wildfire on “Black Friday,” 1939. The judge, who conducted an immediate royal commission into the causes of the fires, was not commenting on the youthfulness of the dead: he was lamenting the environmental knowledge of both victims and survivors. He was pitying the innocence of European immigrants in a land whose natural rhythms they did not yet understand. He was depicting the fragility and brevity of a human lifetime in forests where life cycles and fire regimes had the periodicity and ferocity of centuries. He was indicting a whole society.

In 1939 Australians were deeply shocked by what had happened in their own backyard. Rampant flame had scourged a country that considered itself civilised. As well as shock, people sensed something sinister about the tragedy and its causes. Judge Stretton tried to find the words for it in his fearless report. Of the loss of life at one sawmill settlement, he wrote: “The full story of the killing of this small community is one of unpreparedness, because of apathy and ignorance and perhaps of something worse.” The “something worse” that he tried to define was an active, half-conscious denial of the danger of fire, and a kind of community complicity in the deferral of responsibility.

There is something sinister also about this dreadful tragedy of 2009, although the character of it is different. Those of us who know and love these forests and the people who live in or near them are especially haunted. In 1939, some of the ignorance and innocence was forgivable, perhaps. “Black Friday” was a late, rude awakening from the colonial era of forest exploitation and careless fire use, and it demanded that people confront and reform their whole relationship with the bush. When the 1939 fires raged through the forests of valuable mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans), settlers did not even know how such a dominant and important tree regenerated. In the seventy years since 1939, we have lived through a revolution in scientific research and environmental understanding and we have come to a clearer understanding of the peculiar history and fire ecology of these forests. We have fewer excuses for innocence. We knew this terrible day would come. Why, then, was there such an appalling loss of life?

Victorians live entirely within what the international fire historian Stephen Pyne calls “the fire flume.” It is the most distinctive fire region of Australia and the most dangerous in the world. When a high pressure system stalls in the Tasman Sea, hot northerly winds flow relentlessly down from central Australia across the densely vegetated south-east of the continent. This fiery “flume” brews a deadly chemistry of air and fuel. The mountain topography of steep slopes, ridges and valleys channel the hot air, temperatures climb to searing extremes, and humidity evaporates such that the air crackles. Lightning attacks the land ahead of the delayed cold front and a dramatic southerly change turns the raging fires suddenly upon its victims.

There is a further ingredient to the chemistry of the fire flume. Across Australia, eucalypts are highly adapted to fire. Over millions of years these trees have turned this fragment of Gondwana into the fire continent. But in the south-eastern corner – especially in the forests of the Victorian ranges – a distinctive type of eucalypt has evolved. Ash-type eucalypts (the mountain and alpine ash) have developed a different means of regeneration. They do not develop lignotubers under the ground like other eucalypts and they rarely coppice. They are unusually dependent on their seed supply – and, to crack open those seeds high in the crowns of the trees and to cultivate the saplings successfully, they need a massive wildfire. Ash-type eucalypts generally grow in even-aged stands. They renew themselves en masse. These particularly grand and magnificent trees have evolved to commit mass suicide once every few hundred years – and in European times, more frequently. Not all the communities that were incinerated in 1939 and 2009 were in or near the forests of ash, but many were, and the peculiar fire ecology of the trees is another deadly dimension of this distinctive fire environment. These are wet mountain forests that only burn on rare days at the end of long droughts, after prolonged heatwaves, and when the flume is in full gear. And when they do burn, they do so with atomic power.

The 2009 fires were “unprecedented,” as many commentators have said. They erupted at the end of a record heatwave and there seems little doubt that this was a fire exacerbated by climate change. But it is the recurrent realities that are more striking. For those of us who know the history, the most haunting aspect of this tragedy is its familiarity. The 2009 bushfires were 1939 all over again, laced with 1983. The same images, the same stories, the same words and phrases, and the same frightening and awesome natural force that we find so hard to remember and perhaps unconsciously strive to forget. It is a recurrent nightmare. We know this phenomenon, we know the specific contours of the event, and we even know how people live and how people die. The climate change scenario is frightening. But even worse is the knowledge that we still have not come to terms with what we have already experienced.

The Bureau of Meteorology predicted the conditions superbly. The premier issued a warning. Fire experts knew that people would die that day. History repeated itself with uncanny precision. Yet the shock was, and still is, immense. It is the death toll, and not the weather, which makes the event truly unprecedented.

The recommended survival strategy of “leave early or stay and defend your home” was a death sentence in these Victorian mountain communities on a forty-something degree day of high winds after a prolonged heatwave and a long drought. There is no identifiable “early” in this fire region on the fatal days. We understand why this policy has evolved and it has much to recommend it. It is libertarian; it recognises the reality that people prefer to stay in their own homes and defend them if they can; it seeks to minimise late evacuation which is so often fatal; it encourages sensible planning and preparation; and it has demonstrably saved lives and homes. It will continue to guide people well in most areas of Australia. But I fear that it has misled people in this distinctively deadly fire region to believe that they could defend an ordinary home in the face of an unimaginable force.

We need to be wary of “national” fire plans and to develop ecologically sensitive, bioregional fire survival strategies. We need to move beyond an undifferentiated, colonial sense of “the bush” as an amorphous sameness with which we do battle, and instead empower local residents and their knowledge of local ecologies. The quest for national guidelines was fatal for the residents of these Victorian mountain communities on such a day; it worked insidiously to blunt their sense of local history and ecological distinctiveness. Clearing the backyard, cleaning the gutters and installing a better water pump cannot save an ordinary home in the path of a surging torrent of explosive gas in the fire flume.

A “stay and defend” option is only realistic in such places and conditions if every property has a secure fire refuge or bunker. A bunker at the shire hall or at the end of the street is not good enough – people will die getting to it. I welcome the prime minister’s promise to rebuild these communities “brick by brick” – and I would like him to add: “and bunker by bunker.” Many people built bunkers in their backyards in the second world war and most, thankfully, were not used. But we know for certain that any secure bunkers built in these Victorian forest towns will be used in the next generation, and they will save lives. This is an appropriate challenge to the design and construction industries of the fire continent.

Fires inflame blame. Arsonists will be rightly condemned, but they will also distract us from addressing the reality of fires mostly caused by lightning. There were arsonists in 1939 and 2009 and there will be again in 2069; they are a sickening factor mostly beyond our predictive control. Water-bombing helicopters will again be promoted and in some areas they will be effective. The environmental and protective impacts of systematic control burning of our forests will be debated even more vociferously. Climate change will be correctly identified as a new factor in fire behaviour. But none of these policies or issues will ultimately save lives in these Victorian mountain communities on a holocaust day. Deep in the forests on Black Friday, 1939, with flames leaping kilometres ahead of the fire front, there was only one way to go – down. Well-built dugouts saved lives.

There was another meaning to Judge Stretton’s declaration that they had not lived long enough. He was saying that lived experience alone, however vivid and traumatic, was never going to be enough to guide people in such circumstances. They also needed history. They needed – and we need it too – the distilled wisdom of past, inherited, learned experience. And not just of the recent human past, but of the ancient human past, and also of the deep biological past of the communities of trees. For in those histories lie the intractable patterns of our future. There is a dangerous mismatch between the cyclic nature of fire and the short-term memory of communities. These bushfire towns – where the material legacy of the past can never survive for long – need to work harder than most to renew their local historical consciousness. The greatest challenge in fire research is cultural.

There is a perennial question in human affairs that is given real edge and urgency by fire: do we learn from history? Testimony from the 1939 and 2009 fires suggests that there is one thing that we never seem to learn from history. That is, that nature can overwhelm culture. That some of the fires that roar out of the Australian bush are unstoppable. As one fire manager puts it, “there are times when you have to step out of the way and acknowledge that nature has got the steering wheel at the moment.” It seems to go against the grain of our humanity to admit that fact, no matter how severe are the lessons of history. •

This essay won the Alfred Deakin Prize in the 2009 Victorian Premiers Literary Awards.

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