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.

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.

Composed only of recordings by those in the midst of the trauma, the documentary was both immediate and unmediated. Dramatisation, on the other hand, necessarily involves many kinds of mediation. Storylines are created by blending actual situations to create something that is typical and yet filled with invented detail. Actors find diverse ways of expressing emotional and psychological responses. Editors and cinematographers arrange time and space to suit the script’s sequence of events.

Numerous recent television series have produced fine dramatic renditions of real events. But where those events are both acutely traumatic and recent — as they are in Fires, the ABC’s six-part dramatisation of the 2019–20 blazes — a very keen sensitivity is called for.

The first episode of Fires was prefaced with content warnings, and many people commented on social media that they could not watch because it was “too soon.” But there is another important sense in which it can be too soon to explore a disaster in dramatised form. Some critical distance is required to make the best judgements about tone and focus — about where creative reconstruction is appropriate, and where not.

The clips the ABC has used in its trailers for Fires are indicators of where such judgements have gone awry. Richard Roxburgh and Miranda Otto, playing a couple whose dairy farm has been devastated, are seen looking intensely into each other’s faces in lingering close-up. At the information centre, a switchboard operator played by Noni Hazlehurst offers personal reassurance to a distressed caller as the camera slowly moves in and her expression softens.

We are being invited to focus — intimately — on the human impact of the fires. What is being promoted is emotional power of a kind the ABC believes to be a drawcard for audiences. Underlying the entire approach is an assumption that viewers need an emotional hook in order to engage with the experiences of those caught up in an unfolding catastrophe.

Producer Tony Ayres says the goal was to honour the experiences portrayed — to be authentic and truthful — and in many parts of the series he and his cast have certainly done this. But good intentions are not always accompanied by the best instincts. Although showrunner Belinda Chayko’s approach, in which personal storylines are to the fore, is effective in giving dramatic shape and unity, the dramatic pull starts to favour interpersonal tensions.

Each episode focuses on a different set of characters in circumstances representative of the worst scenarios of the black summer, with Eliza Scanlen and Hunter Page-Lochard as two young firefighters whose recurring appearances serve to create an overall story arc. The actors may be playing rookies, but their own professional experience shows in the subtlety with which they convey signs of budding romance.

This only becomes intrusive when it serves to create a sentimental overlay that clashes with the sheer brutal urgency of the situation. In the opening episode, the pair are in a fire truck caught in an ember storm in remote bushland where back-up can’t reach them, as actually happened to a group of firefighters in the Four Corners report. Two young people reaching out to each other under the fire blanket creates a moment of poignancy, but belongs to an emotional register that is entirely at odds with the hard-headed self-control of the experienced team who in real life made their way to safety against all the odds.

What’s troubling is the sense that the creators of the series felt they needed to focus on human relationships because they didn’t have sufficient trust in viewers to let the relationship between the humans and the fires be the dominant element.

The second episode, featuring Otto and Roxburgh, includes scenes in which the couple, having found their house burnt to the ground, must shoot injured animals then muster the surviving cattle to be fed and tended. This is all conveyed with stern conviction.

But as the episode progresses, an already unimaginable burden of distress is added to when conflict breaks out between the couple and their daughter-in-law. This explodes into renewed anguish when their son is found dead in a burnt-out vehicle. Roxburgh handles the scene in which he finds the vehicle with stoic restraint, but in a follow-up sequence he returns to the spot and undergoes a storm of explicit grief.

If the old adage for fiction writers, “show, don’t tell,” has an equivalent for dramatic media, it is “don’t show, indicate.” The breakdown is too much in every sense, and for those already triggered by the recall of such tragedies, it is surely insensitive to linger on such intimate and explicit portrayals of suffering.

Writing this, I’m well aware that the views of critics matter less than those of people who were directly affected. Social media posts suggest the majority of viewers have been moved and impressed, but there are dissenting voices. “I’m still living with the charred remains of many of my possessions and surrounded by dead, burnt trees,” one tweeted. “Trauma isn’t entertainment.”

Some have compared the series to Neighbours. It would be disrespectful and unfair to badge it as soap opera, but it risks being tinged with that genre, the hallmark of which is to set up an emotional rollercoaster through a storyline littered with interpersonal crises. Overpitched emotional registers make for cheap drama, and it is the curse of the ABC repertoire that it keeps leaning in that direction. •

The post Too much, too soon appeared first on Inside Story.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be featuring selections of summer reading from our twelve years of archives — and, of course, highlights from 2020, the year of bushfires, Covid-19, a government that’s taking a long time to wake up to the looming post-carbon reality, and much else.

We’ll be back in full swing at the end of January. In the meantime, have a happy and safe holiday season. •

The post Inside Story’s summer season appeared first on Inside Story.

By the end of the season, according to an ANU survey, the majority of Australians had been directly or indirectly affected by the fires. Around 2.9 million adult Australians had property threatened or damaged, or were evacuated at least once. Around ten million people were affected by smoke, with many experiencing months of prolonged exposure. Another three-quarters of the adult population — around 15.4 million people — had indirect experience of the fires via family and friends.

If there was any good news, it was the fact that deaths and acute injuries were lower than in previous catastrophic fire seasons. Some thirty-four people died during the fires, compared with seventy-five deaths during the Ash Wednesday fires in early 1983 and 173 deaths on Black Saturday in early 2009.

Emergency physician Simon Judkins, immediate past president of the Australasian College of Emergency Medicine, has worked in many disaster settings. He sees the relatively low levels of injuries and deaths in the 2019–20 season as evidence that we have learnt from previous events. “We have got good at evacuating, triaging and getting people out of affected areas when necessary,” he says.

Many of the measures taken during the season were recommended by the Victorian royal commission set up after Black Saturday: clear and consistent public messaging and comprehensive evacuation plans, for example, coordinated emergency services responses and protocols for treating injured people on site or moving them to city hospitals.

Demand on hospitals and local health services was kept manageable by including GPs in field clinics and in the teams sent by the National Critical Care and Trauma Response Centre. Mistakes were made in communications and emergency services responses, of course, but improved evacuation and treatment meant that existing health services were not overwhelmed.

Still, health experts warn against complacency. As Judkins observes, the system functions well because of the dedication of overworked health professionals who do their best in an under-resourced system. He emphasises that an already stretched public hospital system can quickly become overwhelmed.

Iain Walker, director of the ANU Research School of Psychology, agrees. “If we have systems operating at capacity then there is no ability to deal with any additional problems,” he says.“For example, if the Covid-19 pandemic had reached Australia a month earlier when we had mass bushfire-related evacuations we would have had two conflicting events co-occurring and would not have coped.”

With challenges of this kind likely to become more frequent and more intense, Walker adds, “we need to build capacity into our health and social care systems and other essential services to deal with these situations.”

Simon Judkins also stresses the need to do more to support health professionals, first responders and volunteers who worked at the bushfire frontline. “How do we manage not only acute response, such as getting medical and nursing staff to the affected areas, but also ensuring that we support the health professionals on the ground who worked for fourteen-hour days for four or five weeks non-stop?” he asks. “Who looks after GPs working in those areas who absorbed a lot of stress and suffering in their communities? Who relieves solo practice GPs in places like Mallacoota when they need a break?”

The acute effects might be the most obvious legacy of the fires, but by far their greatest health impact came from the smoke they emitted. Because bushfire smoke can travel long distances and linger in the atmosphere, many more people were exposed than experienced the fires’ direct impact — and that makes our limited knowledge of its effects all the more worrying.

Clare Walter, a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland, has analysed the findings of nine Australian studies on the health impacts of air pollution. They show that, in the short-term at least, air pollution causes increased presentations to hospitals for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, cardiac arrests and ischaemic heart disease.

These findings are supported by early research into the increased demand for healthcare during the 2019–20 bushfire season. Studies of air quality data for bushfire-affected regions of New South Wales, Queensland, the Australian Capital Territory and Victoria have found that the concentration of small airborne particles exceeded the ninety-fifth percentile of the historical daily mean on 125 of 133 days studied. In other words, concentrations were within the top 5 per cent on most smoke-affected days.

Researchers correlated this data with hospital admissions, emergency department attendances, GP consultations and ambulance call-outs to calculate that smoke was responsible for 417 excess deaths during the 2019–20 bushfire season and around 4500 presentations to hospital for cardiovascular and respiratory problems.

These findings suggest a strong relationship between bushfire smoke and specific health problems. But the exact causal relationship isn’t yet clear.

Almost all research on the health impacts of air pollution is based on measurements of airborne particulate matter, or PM, a mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets. PM is markedly elevated during fires and is widely monitored around Australia; that’s why researchers focus on its link with health problems.

The size and chemical composition of PM differs according to its source (apart from bushfires, the big ones are motor vehicles and coalfired power stations) and also from place to place. Evidence suggests that size matters, with small particles — those measuring less than 2.5 micrometers, or PM2.5 — being particularly damaging because they can penetrate deep into the respiratory system. But we know less about how their chemical composition affects humans.

Walters’s analysis has identified differences between the health effects of bushfire smoke and other forms of air pollution: specifically, respiratory impacts were comparatively stronger for bushfire pollution and cardiovascular impacts were weaker. But she stresses that only further investigation will show whether this is this is a causal relationship.

She has also found that bushfire smoke appears to affect adults more than children — the reverse of traffic pollution — although she can’t yet say whether this reflects biological or behavioural factors.

There’s another big unknown, too: the relative impact of heat and smoke exposure on health. With bushfires tending to occur on days of extreme heat, the two events can have a compound impact on humans. One recent Perth‐based study found a 6.6 per cent joint additive effect of PM2.5 and heat waves on admissions to hospital emergency departments. Again, the interaction is poorly understood.

Respiratory medicine specialist John Wilson, president of the Australasian College of Physicians, suggests that part of the reason that demand for healthcare rises during periods of smoke pollution might be that people with existing conditions are not sticking to their treatment plan. This may be because people delay regular medical appointments in response to public health advice to stay home on days of high pollution or because they are reluctant to seek help early for problems which then escalate into more serious issues.

On the question of the effectiveness of wearing a mask to reduce exposure to airborne particles, he is agnostic. “There is no clear answer from the research,” he tells me. “We have better information about their role in reducing infection due to the Covid-19 pandemic but there have been no clinical trials that definitively establish how effective they are.”

Wilson believes that Australia is the ideal setting for evaluating the effectiveness of masks, and stresses the need for their effectiveness to be confirmed before we face another major bushfire smoke episode. “When it comes to masks we have to either prove it or lose it,” he says.

More challenging from a research perspective is a better undersanding of the longer-term effects of bushfires. Existing Australian research in this area mostly comes from studies of the Ash Wednesday and Black Saturday fires, but the smaller scale of those fires means that it may not accurately predict the impact of the prolonged exposure last summer.

What is clear from the limited research is that the longer-term effects of smoke exposure go beyond the respiratory and cardiovascular systems. Some experts have suggested, for instance, that smoke exposure could increase the risk of Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological conditions. Some evidence also suggests that babies exposed to prolonged smoke in utero are at higher risk of low birthweight, which brings a heightened lifelong risk of conditions including cerebral palsy and visual or hearing impairment, and an elevated risk of heart disease in later life.

As some of these longer-term effects can be subtle and delayed, large-scale longitudinal studies will be needed to track groups over years and decades. The Menzies Centre for Health Policy’s Lesley Russell, an Inside Story contributor, is among the public health experts who have been arguing that more resources should be put into this kind of research.

She nominates four priority areas: longitudinal studies of all recognised firefighting personnel; longitudinal studies of communities most exposed to bushfires and bushfire smoke; greater awareness among and guidance for clinicians to help them recognise and deal with the health consequences of bushfires; and more focused research projects on high priority issues.

Some of the research gaps are being tackled with funding from the federal government’s Medical Research Future Fund, which has allocated $3 million for research into the physiological impacts of prolonged bushfire smoke exposure and $2 million for research into the mental health impacts of bushfires.

Although Russell welcomes this funding she is concerned by the lack of large-scale longitudinal studies. While she acknowledges this type of research can be very costly, she argues that “there are even greater costs involved in failing to undertake it — along with lost opportunities to improve the ability of the public health and healthcare systems to respond to future crisis situations.” She stresses the need for the findings of studies of the 2019–20 bushfires to be widely distributed and incorporated into the design of government services and programs.

ANU’s Iain Walker nominates social cohesion and resilience as other priorities for future research and action. He describes how the stress of a disaster can expose the “fracture lines” in individuals, families, communities and systems. Although social and community relationships are crucial to resilience, he says, they are often overlooked in research.

Given Australia’s vulnerability to natural disasters, Walker suggests that we should focus more on how to promote resilience to protect us in future disaster situations. He points out that understanding how resilience manifests in individuals, families, communities and systems will help in preparing not only for future bushfires but also for drought, pandemics, economic downturns and other crises.

Although the impact of bushfires on mental health often receives less attention, the evidence suggests that it can be more serious and long lasting. Research on the Black Saturday fires, for instance, found that mental health effects ($1 billion) exceeded the lifetime cost of deaths and injuries ($930 million).

But there are many gaps in our understanding of how natural disasters affect mental health. So far, the attention has been on short-term mental health needs of people directly affected by the fires.

After this summer’s fires, the federal government announced $76 million in funding for counselling and psychological services for people on the fire fronts, for bushfire trauma response coordinators, for emergency services workers and their families, and for youth mental health.

This funding expires in December 2021, though, and ANU’s Iain Walker warns that chronic and delayed mental health effects might not be visible for some time and could persist for years. He has been funded by the Medical Research Future Fund to examine these effects around Canberra and on the southern NSW coast.

“This is a neglected area of research,” he says. “There is some background research on how people respond to disasters more generally but still many gaps in our understanding of the specific impact of bushfires in an Australian context.” His research is looking at the range of psychological responses, including anxiety, depression and post‐traumatic stress disorder, and at the indirect mental health effects of the loss of possessions and property, damage to the environment and the sense of belonging to physical environment and associated changes in jobs.

The Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences agrees that mental health effects can emerge at any time and last for years. In its submission to the current royal commission it cites studies of the effects of the Black Saturday fires in 2009, which showed that one in five individuals in affected regions still had some form of psychological disorder five years later. The academy also found an increase in domestic violence in highly bushfire-affected communities. It warns that the twin stresses of Covid‐19 and the bushfires could exacerbate mental health problems.

Iain Walker highlights the vulnerability of healthcare workers, including first responders, who are not only affected by the bushfires themselves but also responsible for caring for others. “If a doctor or mental health worker is unable to work because of the impact of the crisis on themselves and their family then the whole system will fall over,” he says.

Specific population groups and communities were experienced more severe smoke-induced symptoms during last summer’s bushfires. They included people with pre-existing health conditions, elderly people, pregnant women, children, and people preparing to undergo surgery or anaesthesia.

We need to know more about the relative effectiveness of a range of strategies by making sure masks are used if and when appropriate, for example, by reducing the heat load in houses and public spaces, and checking indoor air purifiers and filters more frequently.

Respiratory specialist John Wilson’s message to government and health authorities is to pay more attention to pollution warnings and invest in targeted information campaigns informing people at risk about to reduce exposure and the importance of continuing to take medication, access routine treatment and seek early help.

Wilson also highlights the role that telehealth can play. “We have developed telehealth capacity as a result of Covid-19,” he says, “and we should continue to use this to protect vulnerable patients from infection and air pollution and reduce impact on emergency departments.”

People on low incomes are disproportionately affected by air pollution, says Clare Walter, not least because of their housing. “Australian houses are often not well insulated,” she says, “and even those with air conditioning often pull in air from outside if they don’t have a filter. People living in rented properties often can do little to improve the insulation of their houses and this can compound the existing risks associated with their higher rates of chronic disease.”

Walter recommends creating community-based “clean air shelters” to provide a safe environment for people during periods of high pollution. She also stresses the importance of ensuring clean air in childcare centres, residential aged care and other spaces occupied by vulnerable people.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people — with their higher rates of chronic disease and, in many cases, closer proximity to bushfire-prone areas — are also disproportionately affected by particulates and the loss of cultural resources during bushfires and other natural disasters.

But Indigenous communities can also be a source of knowledge and strength in combatting the adverse effects of bushfires. Their cultural and historical knowledge of land management and bushfire prevention practices can play a central role in bushfire prevention strategies, and non-Indigenous Australians can learn how cultural knowledge, values and practices assist Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in dealing with environmental adversity.

And, of course, people living outside cities are often at the frontline of bushfire-related harms. These communities have received short-term assistance to deal with the immediate impact of the fires, but there are concerns that attention has now moved to Covid-19. “Workforce planning needs to take place to ensure that not only are health professionals brought into affected communities, but that they stay there for enough time to properly respond to the health issues caused by the bushfires,” says the National Rural Health Alliance in its submission to the bushfires royal commission.

Perhaps the group most exposed to risk are prisoners in jails near fire-prone areas. The NSW government was criticised for not moving prisoners in the Lithgow Correctional Centre, 140 kilometres northwest of Sydney, when a nearby bushfire caused surrounding houses and building to be evacuated. Around a quarter of the inmates in the prison identify as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, many of whom would have been more vulnerable to the effects of smoke because of their poorer health status.

The arrival of Covid-19 at the tail end of the bushfire season is a stark reminder of the many ways in which climate change can threaten health and well-being. It highlights the need for a comprehensive and nationally coordinated approach to dealing with the health impacts of global warming.

As Australia prepares for another bushfire season, which could start as soon as late August, we have a chance to use the lessons of summer 2019–to reduce the risk of harm from bushfires and other extreme weather events. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Summer’s legacy appeared first on Inside Story.

The wave of interest comes on top of a growing awareness of the broad and deep history of Aboriginal peoples’ uses of fire in the landscape. Native title and land rights reforms, Indigenous fire workshops, government-funded ranger programs, reconciliation policies, local conservation initiatives, and landmark books like Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth (2011) and Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2014) have contributed to the buzz around cultural burning.

My experience researching in this area suggests that this situation is both exciting and fraught for many Aboriginal people involved in caring for Country in this way: exciting because they are accustomed to having their perspectives and interests marginalised, if not ignored, in public debates and policy decisions; fraught because much can go wrong when white individuals and institutions traipse into Aboriginal peoples’ lives, particularly if they are looking for “tradition” or “ancient knowledge.”

As Citizen Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte argues, this knowledge is often framed in terms of its “supplemental value” to dominant groups. Effectively, we ask Indigenous peoples: how can your ideas add to our established approach? Instead, says Whyte, we should understand that recognising and supporting Indigenous knowledge has “governance value” because it contributes to Indigenous peoples’ resurgence and nation-building.

Participants at the 2019 National Indigenous Fire Workshop, Yorta Yorta Country, Victoria, in June 2019. Timothy Neale

Whyte and other scholars are wary of the “supplemental value” approach for many reasons, two of which are particularly worth highlighting. First, it is plainly colonial to make whitefellas’ knowledge and approaches central by default. If we don’t want to perpetuate existing inequalities then conversations need to happen on equitable terms. Second, searching for “supplemental” or useful knowledge will create new hierarchies of value. Given the violence that colonisation has inflicted on Aboriginal peoples, not all will have a complete knowledge of how their ancestors managed fire regimes.

Indigenous peoples’ experiences of sharing their knowledge have frequently been negative and exploitative. If we only seek to engage with Aboriginal peoples who are both eager and able to share what they know, and if we expect that knowledge to fit easily into our ideas of what “tradition” is, then we are once again in a colonial mindset, maintaining old inequalities and fashioning new ones.

How Aboriginal peoples want to approach the current interest in their fire knowledge is a matter entirely for them. For non-Indigenous people with an established or new interest in this issue, the vital question to ask is: what are we trying to achieve in seeking to support cultural burning? Are we, the beneficiaries of colonial dispossession, simply trying to make our lifestyles, houses and property safer from the increasingly combustible landscapes we have helped create? After everything, are we still looking for help without reciprocity?

For those who have studied the postcolonial history of fire management in southern Australia, it has been baffling to read media accounts that assume Aboriginal peoples’ fire knowledge needs rediscovering. Government agencies and researchers have periodically “discovered” the existence of this knowledge, only to then forget these moments — though not before elements have been appropriated or certain avenues investigated and enthusiasms spent. Let me recount a few choice examples of these churning cycles of remembering and forgetting, and draw attention to how they are fuelled by our fixation on “supplemental value.”

Following the second world war, the CSIRO created Australia’s first two research units devoted to fire. One of the groups, founded in 1953, was given the task of conducting research on fire behaviour; under the direction of Allan G. McArthur it produced formative guidance on prescribed burning and fire behaviour, and various fire danger indexes still used throughout Australia.

Although Aboriginal peoples are acknowledged only fleetingly in McArthur’s early work, this changed later in his career. In 1969, pointing to “overwhelming evidence” of Aboriginal fire use, he wrote that fuel-reduction burning was a method to “return a small percentage of forested lands to their natural condition prior to white settlement.” A few years before his death in 1978, the “father” of Australian fire science wrote that “the only way” to prevent major bushfires is to burn the land “in much the same way as the Aborigines did prior to the advent of the white man.”

Others who have written about this aspect of McArthur’s work have tended to foreground wider forest-policy battles. “Natives” had established a “natural” order of combustion, the CSIRO group argued, which now needed to be mimicked by a program of prescribed burning in the name of protecting settler populations and resources. That living Aboriginal peoples were not included in these debates, and did not clearly benefit from them, is both regrettable and unsurprising.

Meanwhile, precolonial fire practices were also playing a part in the social sciences in debates about the role of anthropogenic interventions — such as burning the landscape — in the creation of grasslands, rainforest clearings and other ecological niches. In the late 1960s, archaeologist Rhys Jones made a famous intervention into these discussions, arguing that Aboriginal peoples had for tens of millennia used “firestick farming” to change their surroundings “systematically and consciously.”

Between Jones, Sylvia Hallam, Norman Tindale and others, two distinct fields of inquiry opened up for researchers. One examined the role of intent. What did Aboriginal people mean to do when they lit a fire on Country? The second examined the spatial and temporal pattern of precolonial fires. What were the frequencies, seasonal patterns, intensities and sizes of those fires? In both cases, answering the key questions has involved examining archaeological remains, colonial journals and plant characteristics. Where contemporary Aboriginal peoples have been included in these endeavours — and this has been relatively rare — they have been almost exclusively from central and northern Australia. Often, too, they have been treated as indexes for their precolonial ancestors, rather than the holders of rights or interests in the production of facts about those ancestors.

Knowledge of fire practices has arisen in other contexts, too, but perhaps the most relevant today, given the round of reviews called in the wake of the 2019–20 season, is its treatment by government inquiries. Historian Daniel May has conducted extensive research on this topic across Australia, so let me just focus on the past two decades in the southeast.

Over the 2002–03 summer, large wildfires swept across parts of Victoria, including fires ranging over 1.12 million hectares in the northeast and Gippsland regions. The resulting commission of inquiry report devoted a chapter to the potential utility of Aboriginal peoples’ “traditional burning practices,” concluding “that repositories of this knowledge are mostly lost and any reconstructed regime would largely be speculative.” Although a 2017 Victorian parliamentary inquiry into fire-season preparedness didn’t cite that report it nonetheless took a similar tack. Only “very limited data” was available on the effectiveness of cultural burning, it concluded, recommending that a “pilot scheme” be established and overseen by a non-Indigenous research organisation.

Reading back over examples like these is frustrating. Non-Indigenous individuals and institutions, often with good intentions, have repeatedly sought to understand Aboriginal fire knowledge and practices without empowering, or even engaging with, Aboriginal peoples. They have not sought to understand or facilitate Aboriginal peoples’ right to be engaged in these conversations. Far too often, in southeast Australia, our eyes have been set on deep time and distant places, ignoring the people living today in the world around us. Far too often, we have given little or no thought to how our interest in Aboriginal peoples’ knowledge of fire must be seen as an opportunity for justice. Cultural burning is, among other things, an opportunity to forge relationships of equity and integrity with sovereign peoples.

When I tell non-Indigenous people that I conduct research in this field, they tend to ask me two questions. The first question, often in a tone of sceptical rationalism, is “Do Aboriginal peoples here in southern Australia know anything about traditional fire?” I have been asked this one by a variety of people — scientists, public servants, retirees, tradespeople and others. The second question, more earnestly searching, is “What can I do to support cultural burning?” The people who ask that one, many of whom come from a similar range of backgrounds, are looking for guidance. They feel our management of fire needs to change, as does the way we relate to Aboriginal peoples and nations. Some don’t know exactly how to engage respectfully; some are worried about making mistakes and ruining a conversation before it really gets started.

The first question is the wrong one to ask. It’s not our business. My answer to the second question can be difficult for people to hear. We should all progressively take practical steps to give up control over Country, I say, and wherever possible give Aboriginal peoples the resources to manage fire in the way they want. Different groups are going to have different aspirations for using fire, and that is their matter to determine. For our part, if we don’t want to be locked in old cycles of remembering and forgetting, looking only for the supplemental value, then our efforts need to be focused on changing policies and structures of control.

In his recent book Fire Country, the Indigenous fire practitioner Victor Steffensen uses the analogy of a car to describe the change required. We can all travel together, he suggests, but it is time for settler governments and non-Indigenous peoples to get out of the driver’s seat and into the passenger seat, letting Aboriginal peoples take the wheel. To extend the analogy, it shouldn’t simply be a matter of handing over the keys and walking away, lumping Aboriginal peoples with a vehicle with a lot of problems.

I think there is real potential for non-Indigenous people and institutions to seize on the current interest in cultural burning and support substantial change. Signs of a new approach can be seen in initiatives like last year’s Victorian Traditional Owner Cultural Fire Strategy, a collaboration between the Victorian government, the Federation of Victorian Traditional Owner Corporations and a range of traditional owner groups. In our research, my colleagues and I have encountered numerous cultural burning initiatives in southeast Australia, many with some level of government support. But in the absence of robust budgets or a clear longer-term commitment by governments, they will rely on persuasion, improvisation and intercultural diplomacy. In the best, Aboriginal peoples are treated as partners with self-determination, not one stakeholder among others.

It is pretty galling, if you think about it, to see centuries of dispossession simply followed by requests for more. We should treat last season’s fires as a chance to support Aboriginal peoples’ rights to Country and, thereby, their capacity to care for it. My hope is that, quite soon, when we whitefellas talk about cultural burning, we won’t be talking about an idealised traditional technique that might have helped us with our problems if only we’d been able to get our hands on it. We will be talking about a vital and vibrant network of groups making decisions about their Country. •

My thanks to Amy Brown, Minda Murray and Matt Shanks for their comments on earlier drafts of this piece. Any errors and omissions are, of course, my own.

The post What are whitefellas talking about when we talk about “cultural burning”? appeared first on Inside Story.

The land is still sick when we stop tweeting about it, though, and comorbidities come with this pathology. Displaced animal species from dying ecosystems produce new pathogens that can pass to humans. Economies, social systems and supply chains are catastrophically affected as the interrelated elements of our existence, grounded in a largely ignored dependence on the land, begin to break down. Our mental and physical health becomes dysfunctional.

The solution to this destructive pandemic of disconnection can be found in the traditional knowledge systems of Indigenous cultures, which sadly remain inaccessible to most people. If only there were somebody who could map this knowledge and translate it into a plain-language text that could connect with the hearts and minds of people from all walks of life, I’ve often thought. Such a text just might save this continent, if not the world.

Enter Victor Steffensen, Tagalaka man, ranger, educator, musician and filmmaker, and his game-changing book Fire Country: How Indigenous Fire Management Could Help Save Australia. Steffensen has been working on Country with traditional Elders and knowledge-keepers for decades, initially on Cape York and then all over Australia. On the surface his book is about Indigenous firestick practices of land management — the burning off of areas seasonally to care for Country — but when you start reading you will find it is so much more than that.

Fire Country is an autobiography, a self-help book, a manifesto, a biology textbook, a change-management guide and environmental commentary all rolled into one. Mostly it is a book about the hot topic of Indigenous land-based knowledge. A lot of people are looking to this traditional knowledge for solutions right now, and while Bruce Pascoe’s work has dealt with the why, and my own work has dealt with the how, Steffensen has dealt expertly with the area people are clamouring to know about — the what.

The what is important. While many Indigenous thinkers are still writing to convince the world of the importance of Indigenous knowledge, a critical mass of motivated people are actively seeking this knowledge and ways to apply it. Their efforts are frustrated because this knowledge is obscured by a maelstrom of history wars and identity politics. Steffensen’s book is a breath of fresh air, a lifeline for all the influencers and grassroots change-makers who are actively seeking to transform our ways of living on this planet to ensure the survival of the biosphere and the humans who depend upon it.

The word Steffensen uses for this activity is “praction,” a term coined by a Cape York Elder to describe the application of knowledge in fulfilling custodial roles on Country. He maps the elements of this knowledge system using a triangular diagram based on the process of firestick land management. This is then expanded as a metaphor for human social/ecological behaviour that follows the natural processes of the land. It extends outwards in an exponential patterning of the elements of land and culture, which are not separate concepts in an Aboriginal worldview. The elements are interchangeable and exist in a profoundly interrelated way of being and knowing.

This previously inaccessible lens for viewing the world is explained by Steffensen in a deceptively simple way. His writing may seem simultaneously naive and cynical at times, but our community is very familiar with this kind of voicing, which we would simply call straight talk. Steffensen has made no attempt to alter his language for a literary audience, maintaining linguistic patterns that most would deem irregular. His publishers should be commended for supporting this bold choice in a competitive marketplace that follows style guides and standards religiously.

While at times Steffensen has acquiesced to the ubiquitous self-narrative genre of Indigenous literature, most of the book is completely out of the box and like nothing you have read before. At the start of the book I thought, “Oh, here we go, another rambling life story.” But the writing very quickly changes to something quite remarkable — an intimate sharing of complex knowledge that makes readers feel like the author is sitting alongside them and yarning within a deeply respectful relationship.

Considering the amazing work Steffensen has done all over the continent with communities and organisations that were often initially hostile towards him, it is clear that his writing is an extension of his extraordinary gift for connecting with all kinds of people in all kinds of contexts. You get the sense that he is not even aware of this gift, that it is just an integral part of who he is, unaffected and free of ego. Steffensen is signalling nobody, and is not remotely interested in building a personal brand. He is just a man of the land, working to save it from destruction.

One big message the reader might take from this book is that we may have to break a few rules to create urgently needed change. More than a few stories in the book are about community actions and fire-management activities that Steffensen describes as “cheeky,” in which participants have disregarded bureaucratic directives or regulations in order to apply Indigenous knowledge solutions. Sometimes this is in the ballpark of the corporate catchcry “it’s better to seek forgiveness than permission,” while at other times it’s more like “light the match and run like hell.”

A more sobering message is that it will take a thousand years to rehabilitate our landscape. That is the lifespan of the trees that have gone, trees he refers to as “parent trees” that perform vital roles in the ecosystem. The knowledge in this book about the complex ecologies and cultures spiralling out from those parent trees is breathtaking in its scope. Different kinds of Country are formed when particular species of these trees become dominant, and they create different kinds of soils that demand different kinds of fire (or sometimes no fire at all), because light-coloured soils reflect heat while darker ones absorb it.

Different seeds require different kinds of burning and even smoke from specific grass species in order to germinate properly, and these different ecosystems require burning in different seasons. They fit together like a patchwork quilt, so that areas burned in previous seasons can prevent the spread of fire into neighbouring areas in the next season. Of course, there are also irregularities depending on proximity to ridges and rivers, and there are exceptions to every rule. “Never burn on a riverbank”? Well, in some cases you need to. Mixed-species Country requires mixed methods of management, and wetlands require different approaches depending on a thousand different vectors.

All of this knowledge sits within an algorithm that is very familiar to me, both from my connection to Cape York and my experience walking and reading Country all over the continent. In all these diverse landscapes the algorithm is transferrable as you walk through and observe, “Okay, from this soil I can see that instead of ironwood they have this species here, and so the ants will be over here, and I will find medicine plants over there,” and so forth. The translation of patterns across contexts of different Country is a particular gift that Steffensen has, but it is not limited to landscapes. He also transfers these patterns and principles to various disciplines, including health, education, psychology, media and governance.

He extrapolates pedagogies, social systems and methodologies from encounters with a sentient landscape. This is the most exciting element of his work — the potential for applying patterns of Indigenous logic to disciplines beyond biology and culture. It may seem strange to look to a book on fire management to find a blueprint for things like transformational leadership, but seriously, look no further.

It’s all here in straight talk, from a man who has no interest in culture wars or guilt or the myriad categories of identity that currently pepper our discourse. He has a very simple, deracialised rubric that identifies only two kinds of people — connected and disconnected. As he says, “There are even Aboriginal people who have become disconnected too. Today the disconnected people come in all colours, from black, white, brindle and brown.”

This is the most potentially game-changing book to emerge in this time of turbulence and transition. It is not a book only about fire. It contains Indigenous knowledge that will work for anyone, from any discipline and any walk of life. It is an easy read with a hard impact that will change the way you live. •

The post Carrying the flame appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s been that kind of year from the start — even before this pandemic showed up. As the year began, I was working on a large orchestral piece and it was going well. The piece in question was a response to the climate emergency, and in late 2019, as the temperatures soared and bushfires raged, the project had gained a certain urgency.

Then in January the fires came closer to the NSW Southern Highlands where I live with my family, and on a couple of occasions it seemed prudent to evacuate. We went to friends in Sydney, the second time missing a close call. The fire didn’t come to us in the end, it changed direction at the last minute, but when we returned our little town was eerily quiet, shrouded in smoke, and so still that the only perceivable movement was tiny flecks of ash floating down from on high.

A few days later, I had an email from Britain. My friends in the Brodsky Quartet had seen the Southern Highlands mentioned in a news report and wondered if I was okay. After a few messages back and forth, we settled on an idea for a piece of music in response to the fires. I wanted to do it quickly, like musical reportage, and they suggested an April premiere, since they had a concert in Bristol with the didgeridoo player William Barton and would be able to slip it into the program. It seemed a shame for William to sit my piece out, so I called him up to ask if he’d like to be in it too.

Accordingly, the orchestral piece was set aside, and over the next few weeks I worked furiously on my seventh string quartet, entitled Eden Ablaze, with an optional part for didgeridoo (not all string quartets are able to rustle up a didgeridoo player). At the end, little high-pitched specks of sound drift down like that ash. I completed the piece in late February and booked my flight to England. The concert was cancelled a few weeks later.

So much for musical reportage! Of course, now bushfire stories have themselves dropped out of our newsfeeds. Still, if composers are never likely to be much use as reporters, especially in these days of fast-breaking news and ever-changing world events, there’s always crisis management — particularly if a crisis can be foreseen.

The viola-playing doctor is Tim Senior — no stranger to Inside Story — a GP working with the Tharawal Aboriginal Corporation community-controlled health service in Campbelltown, southwest of Sydney. He’s also principal violist in the Southern Highlands Symphony Orchestra, which I conducted late last year in the first performance of my Big Bang. Now he wanted a solo piece that he might learn and practise, when, as seemed likely, he succumbed to the coronavirus.

On the phone, Tim mentioned a number of pieces he liked, including Benjamin Britten’s Lachrymae, variations for viola and piano on the Elizabethan tune of that name by John Dowland. Midway through Britten’s piece, the composer memorably quotes another Dowland song, “Flow My Tears.” Perhaps this is what put Purcell’s song “O Solitude, My Sweetest Choice” in my head. That, plus its title. I sent the Purcell to Tim to see what he thought about making “O Solitude” my starting point, and he approved, so I got to work.

It took me a week and a bit to write and, as with any piece that’s going well, it threw up some surprises along the way. Tim had requested two to three minutes of music and, I think, imagined the piece to be elegiac in tone. That’s what I expected, too, and certainly that’s the vein in which the music sets out. Before long, however, it was straining at the leash. Every time I pulled the piece back into line, it tugged more vigorously. In the end, the struggle between what I wanted to do and what the music wanted to do became a defining feature of the piece, which turned out to be about three times longer than Tim had asked for.

Just as I was completing it, I was in touch with my friend, the composer Brett Dean — himself, as it happens, a fine viola player — who is presently recuperating from his own bout of Covid-19. Brett mentioned that the music he’d been craving in isolation was fast and rhythmically driven, providing him with “a much needed shot of energy.” His comment made me understand my piece.

As I write these words, Dr Senior is still well, but he tells me he’s already working on In My Solitude, as the piece has come to be called (thank you, Duke Ellington). Naturally, I very much hope he remains well, that solitude isn’t forced upon him, and that his only problem in the coming weeks is when to give the online premiere of our piece. •

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On a special edition of Radio National Breakfast from Bateman’s Bay on 30 January, Bega MP Andrew Constance gave an emotional account of the plight of those around him. The inadequacy of responses tied to bureaucratic procedures, he said, reflected an underlying failure to grasp the urgency and scale of human need. “Middle-tier bureaucracy doesn’t get it. The charities don’t get it. This is not business as usual. We’ve got to think differently and outside the square.”

Just how differently? The loss of so many homes and livelihoods this summer confronts us with the urgent challenge of reasserting the fundamental economic rights of citizens.

For three decades we have inhabited an economy that invests in the corporate sector, allowing the major players to recycle profits into greater profits while drawing on our natural resources and taking advantage of our infrastructure at knockdown tax rates. Now the consequences are confronting us. It’s no longer a matter of “which side of politics” we support; it’s a stark question of whether we can survive without a fundamental transformation in our political economy.

If we are indeed in the business of thinking differently, consider how a basic income scheme could transform the situation of people and businesses in bushfire-ravaged communities. Basic income is an idea that has yet to gain traction in Australia: the Pressenza press agency’s major documentary on the topic, released in September, featured exponents from a dozen countries around the globe, none of whom were Australians. Have we become so embroiled in political wrangles about minor changes to our tax system that we are incapable of entertaining any genuinely transformative economic idea?

The unfolding events of recent months should force us to break the deadlock. We need to find a real alternative to the absurdity — and cruelty — of expecting people who have lost their houses to fill in application forms for very modest one-off grants, or offering them loans that will only add to the financial anxieties they face in the longer term.

Think how different the situation would be if a basic income scheme provided every adult citizen with $1000 a month. No loans or repayments involved, no application process, no fraught determinations of eligibility, no delays — a guaranteed, ongoing payment, regardless of circumstance.

The sum might seem inadequate — at $1000 a month it would be less than Newstart — but its aggregate effect would be significant. Individual recipients would gain immeasurable psychological and social benefit from the knowledge that it was also there for family members, neighbours, and those trying to keep essential businesses and services going in their area. In small towns such as Rappville, Mogo or Mallacoota, the entire local economy would be underpinned.

Of course, basic income is not a replacement for the major infrastructure costs of rebuilding civic amenities, nor is it meaningful compensation for those who have lost homes, or for capital losses suffered by farmers and other businesses. Such needs should be addressed separately. But where commercial and civic premises need to be rebuilt, it is vital to have some confidence that they will be able to thrive again. A guaranteed income across the local population would enhance the value of major reinvestments by fuelling an increase in commercial activity.

In this way, basic income could enhance community bonds and regional cultures. The most hopeful aspect of the crisis response so far has been how people have come together to help each other. Frustration at the failure of governments and charities to respond to the needs of those in bushfire areas is countered by stories of mutual generosity and collaborative survival strategies. As Constance testified, “I’ve seen the most beautiful outcomes in terms of people working together, regardless of backgrounds… Unity in survival, unity in recovery.”

This should be the optimal social environment for basic income, which is associated with the ancient principle of the commons as a “first estate,” a form of land rights as birthright. Through the idea of the “common wealth” of shared natural resources, the commons principle asserted an entitlement to subsistence. Providing a monetary allocation is a reinterpretation for a post-industrial society. A basic income would serve as a substitute for the entitlement to land use, keeping the principle of sharing work and responsibility to make the communal economy function.

A basic income is not a “handout” that would discourage people from working, as some critics claim. An aversion to receiving handouts runs deep in Australian culture, especially in the bush, and even those most drastically affected by the fires may feel conflicted about receiving government assistance. A payment of $1000 a month is about half what most adults need to afford food, rent and other essentials. It should be seen not as a substitute for paid work but rather as a subsidy for work that does not pay for itself through the generation of commercial profit.

Building on the socioeconomic infrastructure created by a basic income scheme would enable human work to move away from the profit-driven corporate sector towards community and environmental forms of service. In the aftermath of this summer of disaster, those forms of service are of the utmost importance and urgency.

Nor, in comparison with other recovery schemes, would it be a costly exercise. With funds pouring in from the Firefight Australia concert and other major donation schemes, surely this is one of the fairest and most effective ways to invest in social and economic restoration? It would save expenditure on clumsy administrative schemes for compensation on a case-by-case basis. To the plus side of the equation we should add increased economic activity and employment. In human terms, the reduction in stress and consequent improvement in mental health would have immeasurable benefit.

Introducing a basic income across the whole Australian population would be a complex matter involving comprehensive changes to the national economy. A restricted approach, concentrated in areas worst affected by the fires, would test how well such a plan might work more broadly. Comparative studies in several such locations would provide valuable insights into where and how basic income provides benefits, and what kinds of problems arise. If it proves more successful in some communities than in others, there is an opportunity for focused identification of the factors involved.

Basic income is a big idea, calling for an enlargement of public imagination. While it is embedded in principles with a deep cultural history, it is a fundamentally transformative economic proposition whose time may have come as we enter the crisis-ridden third decade of the twenty-first century.

Australia has not so far played a major role in international debate on its implementation, but that is set to change. The 20th Basic Income Earth Network Congress is to be held in Brisbane on 28–30 September, jointly hosted by Basic Income Guarantee Australia, the School of Social Science and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Queensland, and the School of Public Health and Social Work at Queensland University of Technology. •

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Speers departed from the informal style of his distinguished predecessor Barrie Cassidy, making his debut in a sharp suit, commencing with a longer monologue to camera, and offering some explicitly judgemental commentary in place of Cassidy’s sly irony. Perhaps we are beyond irony in this new landscape. Adjudication is part of the job of political journalists, and when things get seriously rocky, the pressure is on to show their hand and reveal where they draw the line on matters of principle rather than simply scoring the key players on how successfully they manage the narrative.

If there was some prevarication in Speers’s opening remarks, it was more than compensated for by the brilliantly incisive video montage that preceded them. It’s hard to know whom to credit for these sequences, but the pace of the cross-cutting and the killer instinct for juxtaposition did more to expose deceit, hypocrisy and incompetence than any verbal commentary.

The panel discussion, featuring veteran insiders Niki Savva and Phillip Coorey with newcomer Renee Viellaris (political editor of the Brisbane Courier Mail), led off with the bushfire crisis. Savva was not mincing words. The PM’s Hawaiian holiday was a big mistake, she said. Coorey agreed. A mistake compounded by the attempted cover-up. “They lied about it,” said Savva. It was Viellaris who sought to fudge the issue, suggesting that the real problem was an ineffectual deputy.

Underlying the task of adjudication is the fundamental distinction between political issues and matters of government. Politics is a game of perceptions; government is consequential. A good commentator should never confuse those registers.

Here it was Savva who stood out, refusing at every point to revert to a merely political view of what had transpired by focusing, laser-like, on how Morrison’s essential failure has been his incapacity to act and think like a head of government. An attempt to rescue his image with a party-political ad, she said, was revealing in precisely the wrong way. “The last thing people needed at that stage,” she said, “was a reminder that his driving instincts are political instincts.”

Speers is less firm on where political instincts need to be called out. He deserves his accolades as an interviewer, but the interview with treasurer Josh Frydenberg on Sunday was a mixed bag.

Starting off in low gear with questions about the evacuation and quarantine of citizens caught up in Wuhan, Speers almost immediately steered into a gotcha moment of some significance. What about the plan to charge them $1000 each for the flight to Christmas Island, he asked. “Why do you have to do that?” “Well, we’re not,” was the stark response. Frydenberg was here contradicting a statement by the prime minister that Peter Dutton had reiterated that very morning. The Department of Foreign Affairs, Frydenberg said, had given the wrong advice. This was surely a major embarrassment for the government, especially since Morrison had explicitly pronounced that this was the standard rule.

At this point many interviewers would have gone in for the kill, but that is not Speers’s style. He has a very effective way of increasing the speed of questioning without raising the intensity, especially as his quickfire comebacks are based on meticulous command of the relevant facts and figures.

On the topic of sports rorts, though, he missed an opportunity to push home the case for the prosecution. “Do you admit the government used taxpayers’ money for blatant pork-barrelling?” sounds like a confronting question, but the choice of words actually let Frydenberg off the hook. This was so much more than the traditional political game of pork-barrelling, with its folksy connotations. It was something planned and executed in knowing contravention of due process, a matter of government, not politics, and of behaviour that dangerously tests the boundaries on ministerial — and prime ministerial — integrity. As Coorey put it, it was at the least “an abuse of ministerial discretionary powers.”

Insiders looks set to continue its strong track record. When it risked degenerating into a coffee morning for sparring political umpires, Cassidy always managed to get it back on track, building a cohort of serious-minded journalists who know the importance of holding government to account. With these stalwarts to depend on, Speers brings pace and agility, and his own form of authority. The succession plan, it seems, is working out well.

The following night, Four Corners and Q&A presented coordinated perspectives on the bushfire crisis, both introduced by Hamish Macdonald. In place of Four Corners’s trademark style, the inferno was documented by citizens caught in its path. They reported in conditions so terrifying and perilous no professional journalist, however intrepid, would have been authorised to venture into them. Some of those caught up, though — like Macdonald — were journalists who continued to front the camera without any assurance that they would find a way out.

On the Gold Coast hinterland in September, the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales in November, Gospers Mountain and the Adelaide Hills in December, East Gippsland and the NSW south coast as the new year turned, and Kangaroo Island in January, the catastrophe unfolded. The images recurred: a chopper against an amber sky, silhouettes of firefighters dwarfed by seventy-metre flames, vehicles moving through ember attacks so dense that the surrounding environment looked like molten lava. The colours of the natural world were gone, sucked into blackness and then erupting in bursts of crimson and fluorescent orange.

People spoke of the fires as if they were a motivated enemy force, attacking with ever greater fury and vindictiveness. Just to watch it all was an ordeal. We were blitzed with every mythological human nightmare: the fire-breathing dragon towering over some tiny human adversary, the great snake working its way across the landscape. It was darkness at noon, the inferno, the apocalypse. But it is happening now.

The immediacy was like nothing else I have seen on television. As a fire truck is engulfed in bushland south of Nowra, the driver continues to report over the radio. The crew speak to each other in steady voices, focused on the practicalities. A father and daughter experience the full onslaught of the fire front as they defend their home with ordinary hoses. People survive because they are quick-thinking, collaborative and disciplined.

But now, in the aftermath, those same people are in need. Many will suffer traumatic recall, and are faced with intolerable ongoing stresses. Homes and businesses have to be rebuilt, stock must be fed, fences replaced, injured animals tended. Where are the resources, and how are they to be channelled most swiftly and effectively? That was the overriding question for the studio audience of Q&A, assembled in Queanbeyan from the fire-ravaged towns of the NSW south coast and northeastern Victoria.

Practicalities were to the fore. Panellists Kristy McBain, mayor of Bega Valley, and Cheryl McCarthy of Surf Life Saving NSW have been on the front line, working to provide safe refuges and essential resources to evacuated communities. Both have exercised exemplary leadership. They understand how survival depends on responsibility, cooperation and generosity, and that was the spirit in which they responded to a succession of urgent questions about what happens next.

But Macdonald, in the chair, wanted to go beyond the practicalities, to generate “a big conversation” about causes and consequences. That meant talking about climate change. Here Michael Mann, billed as a “renowned US climate scientist,” faced off against Liberal senator Jim Molan. In one exchange that immediately went viral, Molan said his mind was open, and Mann quipped back that it was good to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out. With almost the entire studio audience now audibly hostile to Molan, Macdonald intervened to point out that his views were representative of a recently re-elected government and therefore reflected widespread public opinion.

It was a significant moment — not because the exchange between the senator and the climate scientist mattered, but because it did not. We learned nothing from Mann, who didn’t even explain what he was an expert in, and less from Molan, who was very good at hogging the airwaves but had done no new thinking in response to the catastrophe. Why were they on the program at all? This is a serious question for the producers. If Q&A is losing audience, it is because so many people have lost all tolerance for the “both sides of politics” convention in public discussion.

More time needed to be spent with those on the panel who had something substantive to offer, like Indigenous fire practitioner Victor Steffensen, who left us in no doubt about what he knew and how. For twenty years or more, he said, elders had been talking about changing conditions. We need to listen to those who are trained to read landscapes, who understand the soil and how to reduce fuel in the right ecosystems at the right time. Introduced vegetation has changed the flammable potential of ecosystems. “What would you say to the authorities about what we could do ahead of next summer?” asked Macdonald. “I would say jump in the passenger seat and let us do the driving,” Steffensen responded, without missing a beat.

A truly big conversation can only happen if everyone in it knows when not to speak, and can give the floor to someone who really has something to say. Just as Four Corners showed how these fires are so much greater than the human scale, Steffensen was showing how we must enlarge our thinking to meet the emergencies we face.

People don’t come through those emergencies unchanged, and part of the change is a fundamental shift in priorities and perspectives. Andrew Constance, Liberal MP for Bega, contributed to the discussion not as the representative of a political agenda but as someone who had been brought to the limits of his own abilities. Constance is calling for an embargo on political wrangling over the causes of the fires and a focus on community-generated response strategies. His is the kind of voice we need on Q&A if it is to have a future.

Macdonald is a dynamic and original figure, one of the most promising talents in contemporary Australian media. There could not be a better choice of host for the program, but please, can we dispense with business as usual in the choice of panel members? •

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Okay. The New South Wales minister Matt Kean says there are a group of senior Liberals, including federal colleagues, urging your government to adopt stronger climate policies and a commitment not to use the so-called carry-over credits to meet Australia’s emissions commitments. Will you consider those calls?

Mr Morrison could have answered a completely different question. He does that quite a lot. He could have engaged in some mellifluous waffle. God knows, he’s an expert at that. He could even have pointed at a spot just behind Ms Lane’s ear and shouted, “Look out, there’s a spider!”

But he didn’t. He abandoned his usual style of obfuscation and well-rehearsed talking points and started using short, declarative, intelligible sentences. “Matt Kean doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” he said. “He doesn’t know what’s going on in the federal cabinet. Most of the federal cabinet wouldn’t even know who Matt Kean was.”

Suddenly a tiny chink appeared in the PM’s public persona. Before our very eyes Daggy Dad in the Baseball Cap had become Angry Dad with a Baseball Bat.

So who is this Matt Kean and how did the mere mention of his name cause the PM to start speaking so uncharacteristically clearly?

Matt Kean is the Liberal member for the NSW electorate of Hornsby and environment minister in that state’s Coalition government. He is a former student politician, naturally, and a former accountant. He is still young — and still young at heart, it seems.

In 2018 he sent some indelicate texts to a female Coalition state MP that his girlfriend at the time thought appropriate to put up on Instagram, thus ending her relationship with Mr Kean. He is now back with an earlier love, who happens to be the woman who introduced him to the Liberal Party. They have just had a baby together and intend to get married.

So, other than having had a child out of wedlock, Matt Kean is pretty much your typical, white bread, Liberal MP.

But there are three further things you need to know about Matt Kean. He believes that climate change is a scientific fact, he is a major player in the moderate faction of the NSW Liberal Party, and his friend, factional ally and boss is premier Gladys Berejiklian.

It seems like ancient history now, but back when houses and lives were being destroyed in the unprecedented bushfires he had been warned about months before, Mr Morrison returned home from his holiday in Hawaii to find the nation in a state of grief, shock and anger. He set about doing what any modern political leader does when faced with a career-threatening crisis: he looked around for someone else to blame.

According to the well-connected political commentator Peter van Onselen, writing in disgust on Twitter in early January, “the inner sanctum of Team Morrison are actively backgrounding media against the NSW Coalition government to try and make sure the PM doesn’t wear the blame for his handling of the fires.”

Remember when the PM tried to run the politically obtuse line that “fires are a state responsibility”? And remember when Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reported erroneously that the Berejiklian government had rejected offers of further military help from the federal government? Matt Kean remembers; he is, in fact, the NSW government’s point man for matters prime ministerial.

Premier Berejiklian’s revenge is to do her job better than Morrison. And Matt Kean’s job is to put a thumbtack on the great man’s chair when he least expects it.

For the next few months — at least — the PM will be tiptoeing barefoot through a still-smouldering political landscape, desperately trying to find the right words, gestures and ideas to summon up an escape chopper.

Whatever he’s tried so far, it hasn’t worked. He tried to meet some bushfire survivors. He tried making a video extolling his own virtues. He threw the army and lots of cash at the problem and people asked — quite rightly — what else have you got? The recent Newspoll figures were predictably savage.

After doing his bit to make Matt Kean into the sort of Liberal who gets good press on the letters page of the Sydney Morning Herald, the PM paused to blow some steam through his nostrils and stamp the ground. Lane enquired pleasantly, “How are you going to deal with this internal angst?”

The prime minister deployed the full weight of his office to splutter: “Well, who are the others? Who are the others, Sabra?” Like he didn’t already know. He has spent decades in the famously vicious factional politics of the NSW branch of the Liberal Party.

And if he can’t remember, then several names had already been thrown about — some by the News Corp journalist Sharri Markson. Whatever you think of Ms Markson, there’s no doubt that people in the Liberal Party tell her stuff. In fact, it was her Sunday evening interview with Matt Kean on Sky that got this ball rolling in the first place.

On Sky, Markson name-checked two members of the moderate faction of the NSW Liberal Party, Trent Zimmerman and Jason Falinski, and the recently elected member for Higgins, Katie Allen, as some “others.” And she offered up the tantalising titbit that they had lobbied treasurer and deputy Liberal leader Josh Frydenberg about the issue in a recent meeting.

The three backbenchers don’t pose much of a threat to Morrison, but the mention of the treasurer’s name is gold. Equally ominous could be the fact that the new Tasmanian premier, Peter Gutwein, elected unopposed on Monday, immediately told journalists that “we must do more” about climate change. A couple of days later, Victorian Liberal leader Michael O’Brien was lamenting the lack of a sensible national policy.

The prime minister is currently involved in the tricky task of overhauling the federal Coalition’s policy on climate change. He wants to become the PM for Hazard Reduction, the Scourge of Arsonists Everywhere, but he doesn’t — can’t — won’t — advocate for tougher policies to drive down Australia’s carbon emissions. For that purpose, he offers hopes, prayers and accounting tricks; and he’s obviously getting pushback from inside his own party.

While he’s trying to achieve this delicate task of bomb disposal, his energy and emissions reduction minister, the egregious Angus Taylor, is busy helping the police with their enquiries, as they say, and his former sports minister, the Nationals’ Bridget McKenzie, is doing a pretty good impression of a woman sinking slowly into a muddy paddock.

No wonder the prime minister started talking plain English during a live radio interview with the national broadcaster.

Parliament is back on 4 February. The next Newspoll is due within a fortnight. Summer has another six weeks to go. •

The post How good is Matt Kean? appeared first on Inside Story.

To say that experts, researchers and practitioners disagree about the answer is to put it mildly. Academic mentors have warned me to stay away, lest I be caught up in interminable debates and distracted from my main research. Among experts, suspicions about motives and trench mentalities abound, tied up with cross-disciplinary rivalries, political ideologies and implicit knowledge hierarchies. Your model versus my anecdote; your beliefs versus my facts. The debate can seem a like a black hole, sucking in and grinding up.

Fire management, and especially prescribed burning, has dominated public discussion in recent weeks. In this highly charged political context, I must admit to some scepticism about the calls for a royal commission or other inquiries. As the American fire historian Stephen Pyne has observed, fire is almost never considered on its own terms. Three bushfire royal commissions over the past century demonstrate how prescribed burning can become a proxy for other political issues.

1939

One of Australia’s most iconic disasters was Black Friday, which took the lives of seventy-one Victorians in 1939. The subsequent royal commission is well-known for the eloquence of commissioner Leonard Stretton’s lamenting of the environmental ignorance of settlers: “They had not lived long enough. The experience of the past could not guide them to an understanding of what might, and did, happen.”

The Stretton commission attracted a great deal of public interest and deeply influenced land management policy across Victoria. It also served as a public stage for bureaucratic infighting and blame-shifting, especially over the role, if any, that prescribed burning should play in managing the state’s forests.

A.E. Kelso, an engineer with the Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works, sought forests with closed canopies and “clean” floors in order to safeguard Melbourne’s water supply from erosion. Drawing on American ideas of forestry, he argued for the complete exclusion and suppression of any fire within the forest. By contrast, rural Victorians generally called for much greater “broadcast” burning, sometimes every three to four years, in order to keep the forest safe. But forester C.E. Lane-Poole derided such proposals as a self-interested desire for the fresh stock feed that grew in the fires’ wake, claiming that graziers saw “a box of matches as the best grass seed.”

The state’s Forests Commission tried to exclude fire — controlled or otherwise — wherever possible, believing it damaged the mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans) forests. But it reluctantly accepted the need for strategically important areas such as ridge lines to undergo some prescribed burning.

Stretton ultimately found that excluding fire altogether was impractical in Australia, and that the amount of prescribed burning performed before 1939 had been “ridiculously inadequate.” Stretton’s phrase has been quoted ever since as a foundational legitimation of prescribed burning. Less well-known is his later qualification: “it is not suggested that the practice be followed in mountain ash country… [except] where necessity demands that it should be done.” In 1939, Stretton recognised that prescribed burning could not be thought of as a blanket solution.

1961

Stretton’s recommendations for fire management were extended by the royal commission following the 1961 Dwellingup fires in Western Australia. Organised forestry in that state had followed a fire suppression paradigm since it had been established in the early twentieth century. Also inspired by American ideas about fire, early WA foresters believed that bushfire was harmful to timber and that it was possible to banish it entirely from the forests of jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata) in the state’s southwest. In recognition of the increasing failures of this policy, and after discovering that jarrah forests were less sensitive to fire than mountain ash, conservator Allan Harris overturned the policy in 1954. Broad-based, rotational prescribed burning became the norm in jarrah forests, burning 10 per cent or more of the forest annually.

This policy came under close scrutiny following the 1961 fires, which caused significant forest damage but no loss of life. Royal commissioner Geoffrey Rodger found that prescribed burning had worked reasonably well in Dwellingup and the WA Forests Department should “make every endeavour to improve and extend” the practice in jarrah. But he also noted that it would not stop a fire under extreme conditions; instead, the aim was to “reduce the fire intensity and rate of spread and so allow fire suppression forces to attack the fire more easily and with greater safety.” This formed the philosophical basis of the “Australian Strategy” of prescribed burning that was exported across the continent and even overseas.

At the commission, many farmers argued for extended prescribed burning, some calling for the state’s southwest to be burned “whenever possible” or “as often as it will burn.” Much of their testimony was coloured by resentment at the department’s existing policies, “high-handed” official attitudes or even individual prosecutions for illegal ignition — a “natural antipathy to government departments and civil servants,” in the words of forester Angelo Milesi. As the commission progressed, Rodger increasingly suggested to witnesses that perhaps they were not up to date with department practice, and he ultimately found that many critics had “little real knowledge” of either the forests or department policy. Prescribed burning levels functioned, he believed, as a proxy for other complaints and long-held grudges.

2009

The royal commission set up following Victoria’s devastating Black Saturday fires in 2009, which killed 173 people, chose to be guided in its assessment of prescribed burning by a panel of experts. The panel emphasised that the practice was the “most effective mechanism” to reduce fuel; but it also found that under the catastrophic conditions on that day “the probability of effective suppression was negligible,” regardless of just how much fuel reduction burning was conducted, and that the level of burning “did not mitigate the immediate impacts of fire.” Yet reduced fuel levels from prior burns did help contain and suppress the fires, according to the panel, once conditions moderated following the wrenching wind change on the evening of the conflagration.

The panel agreed that a hectare-based target for prescribed burning should be a guide rather than the sole policy aim, because not all hectares are of equal value. But the commission chose to recommend that 5 per cent of all public lands be burned on an annual basis. After heavy criticism that this burning was being disproportionately conducted in remote areas where escaped burns were less liable to damage property, and after a review found the target not to be “achievable, affordable or sustainable,” the policy was replaced in 2016. Prescribed burning in Victorian is now guided by the evidence of where it will best reduce bushfire risk.

As in 1939 and 1961, the submissions and media response to the Black Saturday commission reveal that prescribed burning functioned as a proxy for other issues. Climate change, a defence of public lands, cattle grazing on the Victorian High Country, the decline of the native timber industry — factors like these were hopelessly entangled with discussions ostensibly about fuel levels. Very few participants considered the complexities of catastrophic conditions, or whether a strategy developed in jarrah was applicable to mountain ash. Aside from the familiar confusion between prescribed burning and “back burning,” there was no real consensus on how to refer to different types of burning, from strips around settlements or on the edge of wet forests to the broad-area burns developed in Western Australia.

As those three commissions demonstrate, Australia has always had a ready supply of armchair fire generals. But the reaction to the current southern fires seems, like the fires themselves, to be more extensive. The opinion industry has been churning out hot takes, rural and interface communities are genuinely outraged, and we are even confronted by the horrifying prospect of a coordinated online campaign of bots and sock puppets encouraging quick fixes and undermining nuanced discussion.

The recent fires have also boosted interest in Indigenous cultural burning. Movements like the Firesticks Alliance, which seeks to reignite cultural burning in the southern states, hold great promise both for hazard reduction and especially as way for Indigenous Australians to assert and fulfil their responsibilities to country. But while cultural burning and prescribed burning might seem like the same thing, they are not identical, and they often differ in method, effect and especially intent. Appropriation is a danger, as is exploitation or rushed failures. Cultural burning isn’t the answer; it is part of a multitude of answers, and needs to be considered patiently, respectfully and locally.

Prescribed burning resists easy, grand, continent-wide narratives. It’s a tool, not a panacea, and one that must be thought of and used subtly on a local basis. We also need broader recognition that it is hazard reduction and not hazard removal. A vigorous contest of ideas, policies, and practice is obviously desirable, but it will be challenging to create a space where this can happen without being overshadowed by the broader politics of fire and land management. We have too many armchair fire generals and not enough fire stewards.

How we manage this discussion may well have significance beyond our shores. The response to the 1910 “Big Burn” in the United States locked the US Forest Service into a fire-suppression paradigm, culminating in the unsustainable maxim that all wildfires must be extinguished by 10 am the following day. Fires were suppressed on the ground and fires were suppressed in the mind; research showing their vital ecological role was shamefully buried or ridiculed.

This fire suppression paradigm was exported around the globe, including, as we have seen, to Australia. It took decades for Australians to abandon it, and we played a small but significant part in convincing Americans to do the same. In recent years disastrous wildfires have struck (among other places) California, Greece and Portugal. Climate change is challenging established fire management policies and strategies. It is also challenging established fire politics. With these fires, we have an opportunity to lead the world again. •

The post To burn or not to burn is not the question appeared first on Inside Story.

That brainwave was reminiscent of the Gillard government at its nadir in 2012. Widely perceived as fiscally incompetent and prone to trying to spend its way out of trouble, it attempted to lift its standing with a social media campaign on the new School Kids Bonus, incautiously hashtagged #cashforyou.

While so many Australians are still going through terrible suffering, and with the death and destruction still fresh in our minds, Morrison’s travails are trivial. Yet the prime minister seems to be the only thing that some folks can talk, write or tweet about.

The pile-on is happening not just on social media, though that’s where it’s most ferocious. Twitter, around the #auspol hashtag, is a sight to behold — so much energy devoted to one person. It all seems to be coming from people who never liked him anyway, and much of it appears driven by a determination to destroy him. His every utterance and facial expression is cited as further evidence not of mere incompetence, but of sociopathy. Finally, the general community will see what we’ve always known: that this man is totally unfit to lead the country.

Inevitably, the ferocity is having an effect in the real world.

Is the criticism of Morrison fair? In a way, this question is beside the point. Politics isn’t fair. Was it fair to win an election last May by misrepresenting the opposition’s policies? If you’re tempted to feel sorry for the PM at the moment — well that’s just life in the big city. How do you think Bill Shorten has been feeling since 18 May?

Morrison leads a government with a deep climate science problem. Too many of its MPs are immersed in the self-sustaining bubble of News Corp papers and Sky News After Dark. Most of all, and tragically for our policy-making, the events of 2009–10 taught them that campaigning against climate action is an electoral winner. (See Michael Pascoe in the New Daily on the vital role of News Corp, though I would add that the necessary ingredient was Labor’s capitulations to Tony Abbott during 2010, and most disastrously the leadership change. On the road not travelled — a comfortable Labor 2010 re-election with the carbon pollution reduction scheme as policy — we’d be somewhere quite different.)

Very few countries are doing their bit to bring down emissions, and Australia is among the worst of a bad bunch. (Rod Tiffen has laid out Australia’s long history of weaselling out of meaningful commitments.) If we were seriously doing our bit, we could lobby others to act as well. That might not count for much, but it would be something.

As far as the current disaster goes, the most substantial criticism of this government is that, despite warnings over the years, it has not taken the fire threat seriously. That inaction stretches right back to Malcolm Turnbull and climate-sceptical Abbott. It’s perhaps a function of the Coalition’s infestation by climate change denial, its attitude to the role of government, its reluctance to spend large amounts of money tackling something that might not happen for years anyway and, more recently, its determination to preserve the much ballyhooed 2019–20 budget surplus.

Turnbull told the Guardian Australia in November that Morrison believes in doing the right thing on climate but has been constrained, just like he himself was, by a small, mad right-wing rump (Abbott, Eric Abetz and Craig Kelly were the names he gave) who would rather see the party in opposition than take meaningful action. But Morrison still possessed an authority that Turnbull never had, thanks to last year’s spectacular against-the-odds election win. That should have enabled him to pull his party out of its comfort zone on matters he considered important. Perhaps he was too timid to use it, or doesn’t care enough about climate change. Or about anything. He’s never come across as a big-canvas kind of guy.

The PR nightmare was set rolling by last month’s Hawaiian holiday, and the attempts by Morrison’s office to keep it secret. Reports appeared along the lines of “Yes, he’s entitled to a holiday, but…” It was of those meta media memes in which the journalists have their cake and eat it: scolding politicians for being politically inept, but saying little about the substance.

An article appeared in News Corp papers under the PM’s name acknowledging the bushfire catastrophe but urging Australians to still try to enjoy the summer, the beach and the cricket. You can sort of see what he was trying to do — let’s keep our morale up, not let this get the better of us — but it was a fiendishly difficult mark to hit, requiring a writer in the league of, say, Don Watson. Which the PM’s current staff evidently doesn’t remotely possess.

Everything he does now is reported (News Corp aside) through a particular template. Such dynamics long predate the internet, but social media turbocharges them. Those scenes of people refusing to shake the PM’s hand and that firey yelling “tell the prime minister to get fucked!” probably stem from Hawaii. And they make for excellent television, much better than boring ones of the people who did accept his handshake.

It was, perhaps, a damning editorial from breakfast host Karl Stevanovic last Saturday that sent his office into the frenzy — if you lose the brekky crowd you’re finished! — that produced the misjudged advertisement and quickly upped the defence force’s role without consulting the fire chiefs.

One of the ironies now is that the fierce criticism is largely directed at the superficial: that he’s not striking the right note, that his mind seems to be on other things. The nation is crying out for a leader! So he succumbs to these demands for more spin and makes matters worse.

His fumbles are reminiscent of his first months in the job in late 2018. Having proven himself so crafty at manipulating the party room, he seemed clueless about the general public, relying on hokey ideas about connecting as the bloke next door with all those references to the wife and children and car trips. Such a try-hard, voters rolled their eyes. But he won the May election by buckling down and leading a very effective hip-pocket scare campaign.

During the Queensland flood disaster in January 2011, much was made of the contrast between the emotionally engaged premier, Anna Bligh, and prime minister Julia Gillard’s apparent woodenness and distance. Bligh lived the recovery exercise day and night, while Gillard was mostly doing her normal job. In the absence of the national framework being belatedly constructed by the Morrison government, it would be incongruous for a prime minister to try to create an ongoing national leadership role. It would be a recipe for dysfunction — like taking television cameras into a devastated town with nothing to offer and receiving abuse for lack of action by the state authorities.

Still, both the Rudd and Gillard governments were quick out of the blocks with assistance both in 2011 and after the 2009 Victorian fires, with Rudd engaging to a degree not necessarily appreciated by John Brumby’s state government. Meanwhile, this government has turned Centrelink, which played and will play a key role, into a Kafkaesque nightmare you wouldn’t inflict on your worst enemy. On this, again very late, it has announced amnesties of debt collection for people in affected areas. Did no one think of this before?

Every action taken by the government that was urged on it months or years ago is a belated acknowledge of earlier error. It is now accepting responsibility, and that precious budget surplus has gone.

In the real world, reports suggest that Morrison is out of favour with people in affected areas, which doesn’t necessarily extend to the majority of Australians. But the coverage must have damaged him. The rain will come and the fires will be brought under control, but the evidence of this tragedy will remain forever. And there are many more summers to come.

Morrison’s godlike status in the party room, which he neglected to employ to any meaningful end, is no more. Perceptions of his campaigning skills — never underestimate him, they’ll still say, recall what he did in 2019 — will endure. But if he had the authority last year to drag his party’s extremists towards a rational approach to climate change, that is no longer the case.

What a waste of political capital. •

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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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He’s right to call for a cooling of tempers, but the claim that people are “angry about the debates” makes no sense. We are in a situation in which anger and debate can’t be separated; they are fuelling each other in an escalating feedback loop. Every day of this unfolding calamity has seen a flare-up go viral, as firefighters and displaced community members vent their fury on those they hold responsible.

Some, in accord with the Morrison government’s line of rhetoric, blame environmentalists and “inner city raving lunatics” for impeding hazard-reduction plans. Others blame the government and its backers in corporate media for fostering what former prime minister Kevin Rudd calls “a denialist cult,” which resulted in a response that was “evasive, tepid, tone deaf and above all, too late.”

When arguments get so heated that they explode in a volley of accusations and counter-accusations, we no longer have a debate, we have a slanging match. It’s something of an irony that this inflammatory exchange has come to a head over the matter of hazard reduction, one of the most complicated and uncertain aspects of bushfire management.

Brian Gilligan, former head of New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service, wrote recently about the challenges he faced in trying to explain why reducing fire hazards is far from straightforward. “I worry,” he said, “that the ill-informed commentary that passes for debate is rolling around again.”

Twenty years ago, faced with the same “repeated haranguing” about burning off, he took a group of media representatives on a flight along the Kosciuszko Range to show them the mountain ash forests along the ridge. Mountain ash’s natural relationship to fire is very different from that of the eucalypts on the slopes. Its life cycle, moisture content and reproductive methods mean it can’t be managed with the same techniques.

All this was explained in fascinating detail in the Catalyst documentary Earth on Fire, aired on the ABC in June 2014. I reviewed it at the time, and it has remained in my mind as a model of public communication about bushfires and climate change, outstanding in its unassuming, concentrated engagement with the learning curve on which rangers and forest ecologists are travelling. Reporters Anja Taylor and Mark Horstman followed teams conducting parallel research into megafire behaviour on opposite sides of the globe: in the Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico, where the Las Conchas fire swept through in 2011, and in Victorian and Tasmanian forests where preconditions for megafire are at their peak.

US ecologist Craig Allen, who studies the deep history of forest fire, explained the changing conditions created by increases in average temperature and decreases in rainfall. The Las Conchas fire caused a paradigm shift in his understanding because it burnt the topsoil, a new phenomenon in fire behaviour. Much of the area is now a moonscape.

The capacity of megafires to traverse cleared ground by burning the earth itself has changed how researchers in Tasmania are modelling potential spread patterns. On a worst-case scenario, they could extend right through the city of Hobart.

David Bowman, a forest ecologist working in the Victorian alps, focused on how the whole bio-region is irreversibly changed by mega-fires. While government ministers make aggressive proclamations about the inadequacy of fuel-reduction programs, he and Peter Jacobs, chief ranger for the area, were confronting the loss of vast areas of forest that will not regenerate. Human-induced changes to the three key components of fire — oxygen, fuel and heat — have created a whole new scenario. “I’m not sure if there is a natural fire anymore,” said Jacobs.

Forget the noisy debate. There’s no substitute for following these professionals into the remote forests they have spent their lives observing and documenting. They don’t offer opinions, just detailed knowledge along with all the uncertainties that genuine researchers must acknowledge.

If politicians want to make pronouncements on such specialised matters as fuel reduction, they had better educate themselves in the physics and biochemistry of forest fires. They could start by watching this documentary. I would urge the ABC to show it again: it might help to calm things down and enable better public communication about how best to respond to the emergency we are faced with.

Rewatching Earth on Fire has strengthened a conviction I have long held that disastrously misconceived communications strategies took hold after Al Gore launched a worldwide campaign for action on climate change with his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

One of the film’s highlights was a graph tracking temperature and CO2 concentrations over a 650,000 year timespan, showing how CO2 suddenly breaks through the glass ceiling of 350 parts per million at the turn of the second millennium AD. Gore used a scissor lift to show how far and how steeply the graph shoots upward — “off the charts” if the present trend continues. He cited a study that sampled 10 per cent of all peer-reviewed scientific articles on global warming in the previous decade, finding all 928 supported an anthropogenic view.

The challenge of persuading the public was never going to meet idealistic dreams of enlightenment. Nor, for that matter, was the science itself. Ray Evans, co-founder of the Lavoisier Group, a right-wing group devoted to contesting climate change research, was quick to use Gore’s own tactics against him, claiming that this level of certainty and belief amounted to “preaching a gospel.”

Gore’s political affiliations as former Democrat presidential candidate played right into the hands of those who — like Evans, a crusading neoliberal closely associated with mining magnate Hugh Morgan — sought to politicise the debate. Evans alleged that Gore’s “hockey stick” graph had been debunked by two Canadian researchers who demonstrated that the same statistical pattern could be produced from almost any data using the algorithm from which it was generated.

Gore’s stridency took its toll. His invocation of the unassailable authority of science has done the opposite of what he intended. Instead of capping the debate and sealing off all avenues of viable opposition, he threw a grenade into the arena.

What if the process of developing public awareness had instead been led by rangers, wildlife workers, farmers and fire chiefs? What if, rather than issuing proclamations of absolute certainty at square one, they had taken us with them on a journey on which doubts and uncertainties were part of the process of coming to an understanding?

I recall a conversation I had with a neighbour in Toowoomba — a retired farmer from a property on the Darling Downs — soon after the massive flood of January 2011. It’d happened before, he said. The trouble with all the talk of climate change was that people didn’t study the records. Reports show that Toowoomba had indeed experienced similar events in 1873 and 1893. Farmers often have weather logs for their property going back several generations, and are not easily persuaded by claims that any particular event is unprecedented.

It was a brief discussion, but I’ve often thought about it since. My neighbour wasn’t trying to engage me in an argument; he was just making an observation. He was sceptical in the genuine sense, unconvinced of the evidence and keeping his distance from beliefs and commitments. What if he were invited to join David Bowman and Peter Jacobs in one of the evening discussions we saw in Catalyst, deep in the Victorian forest? That’s the kind of communication we need. •

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Scott Morrison is not a strong leader. I offer this judgement not in a pejorative spirit, but as a simple description of political reality. He is neither a Putin nor a Trump, each of whom likes to project himself as a spectacularly successful version of his adoring followers — an image that wouldn’t work in a culture such as ours with its strong tradition of social egalitarianism. Nor is Morrison a Boris Johnson (who has also been holidaying on an island, in his case in the Caribbean). Yet, while Johnson appeals to the prejudices of the ordinary man and woman as he understands them, this Homer-reciting (in the original Greek) graduate of Eton and Oxford is not in the habit of claiming he is one of them. In their heart of hearts, those northerners who voted Tory know that behind the artifice necessary for electoral purposes, Johnson regards them as “chavs, losers, burglars and drug addicts,” to use his own words of a few years back.

Morrison’s prime ministerial persona was unveiled a year ago this month, and that brilliant exercise in public relations underpinned the strategy he maintained all the way up to election day. Labor, as it admitted in its post-election review, was caught wrong-footed. Political parties and leaders have long used marketing expertise, but we have never had a product of that industry as prime minister. Nor have we ever seen a government go to the voters with most of its ministers and policies in hiding, making the leader’s image something like the grin of the Cheshire Cat.

The unveiling occurred in an article in the Daily Telegraph on 14 January. In due course, that article should become for Morrison what “The Forgotten People” broadcast was for Robert Menzies. Morrison is unlikely to govern for sixteen years, especially in the wake of his abject leadership failures this summer. But that doesn’t mean his prime ministership will be without significance for future historians. Even if its fruits are as barren as they are shaping up to be, he will need to be taken seriously as an emblem of the failing politics that Australia’s people must now endure.

Morrison’s op-ed was purportedly inspired by his family holiday, which was not in Hawaii on that occasion but on the south coast of New South Wales, an area that has now descended into a living hell. There, a year ago, he encountered “no sign of the angry mob on social and in other media, shouting at each other and telling us all what we’re supposed to do, think and say.” Rather, the place was full of people with “a positive outlook” — “Locals, holiday makers staying at caravan parks, small business people from western Sydney, surf lifesavers, fishing and rural fire service members, professionals, kids, mums, retirees, pensioners. It was refreshing.”

“I wasn’t there on any political visit,” Morrison hastened to add, although he quickly turned it into one with his op-ed piece. The place was full of people just like him, holidaying in his case “with Jen and the girls enjoying the flathead and chips like everyone else.” Morrison was gratified by what he had supposedly discovered, this “great reminder that there are quite a lot of us who actually think Australia is a pretty great place and we don’t really have too much time to be angry.”

Morrison contrasted these people, whom he called “quieter Australians,” with the “angry noisy voices” of the people John Howard called elites. Quiet Australians were mainly interested in jobs, the cost of living and other “everyday” issues and wanted policies that would “allow us to get ahead.” (To get ahead of whom or what he did not say, but political language of this kind works via artful evasions.) They believe in welfare for the less fortunate, but resent giving people “a free ride.” They want better services but they also want taxes to be as low as possible. They want to see their kids safe, well-educated and with smiles on their faces.

They also care about the environment, “especially locally.” “Australians can always be counted on to make and keep our commitments,” he assured readers without directly mentioning climate change, “but Australians must always come first.” He was “not going to sign up to destroy our economy because of the extreme views of some.” We’d need to wean ourselves off coal eventually but let’s not do anything that might involve higher taxes or unaffordable subsidies. “Just keep it sensible. We’ll get there,” he assured his readers.

Well, we’re there now. A year later, much of that article looks ridiculous when it doesn’t look like an elaborate (although successful) confidence trick. Of course, Morrison was not describing but prescribing. Throughout the piece, he wrote of “we” as if to dramatise his own sharing of the desirable values he set out, the most desirable of them all being to keep one’s mouth closed about politics. On this matter, quiet Australians were expected to leave the job of running things to professionals like Morrison who, by some unexplained magic, could be ordinary and extraordinary at the same time.

Graham Little would possibly have called this “group leadership,” of which he saw Bob Hawke as an exemplar. Group leaders stress “neighbourliness, translating the experience of life in smaller groups, like the family, into the nation as a whole.” Clearly, a contrast needs to be drawn here: Hawke was a masterly practitioner of this style of leadership while Morrison increasingly looks like a plodder. I am unaware of any Australian prime minister who has managed to burn up political capital as quickly as Morrison has, and for so little return.

For Paul Keating, political capital was finite, and good politics was to burn it up to achieve policy ends that couldn’t happen without it. Keating understood that good policy would always result in the practitioner losing skin along the way. The key was to argue, to educate, to cajole and to hope that luck ran your way when you faced electors — that they would reward good policy even while they sometimes had to pay a price for it.

Whether or not it was the logic with which they set out, many of Hawke and Keating’s reforms of the 1980s worked in this way, as did John Howard and Peter Costello’s creation of a goods and services tax a decade later. Its promise almost lost Howard the 1998 election, and for a time its implementation threatened to cost the Coalition government in 2001. But Howard gambled and won each time, with a mixture of the skill and luck that accompanies any successful political career.

There is nothing here that is recognisable in the Morrison prime ministership so far. Morrison has governed like a political billionaire yet without a recognisable policy agenda because he refrained from taking one to the last election. But his majority is small and he cannot take for granted that the Labor Party will continue to offer the kind of break that the Coalition did so little to deserve at the 2019 election.

Like Tony Abbott’s prime ministership, Morrison’s has been a remarkable exercise in self-indulgence, although mainly of a different kind. Abbott burned capital on rubbish such as a knighthood for Prince Philip, culture wars over the Racial Discrimination Act, and broken election promises that no Senate controlled by such a cross bench was ever going to pass.

Morrison’s self-indulgence has been of a different order. Like Abbott, he has been prepared to waste political capital on the culture wars, with the religious discrimination bill shaping up as this government’s version of the 18C debate on racial vilification. But for the most part, his waste of political capital has been more personal. The photos of the prime minister holidaying in Hawaii before Christmas while eastern Australia burned and firefighters died were deeply damaging to his image as the daggy dad and all-round down-to-earth everyman. Even leaving aside his office’s foolish lying to journalists about his whereabouts, the decision to take a holiday in Hawaii while the drought continued and the country was on fire represented a lack of judgement, a failure of leadership and a carelessness about image that are usually deadly to politicians in a functioning democracy.

In the midst of this controversy, it was revealed that Morrison and his family had received thousands of dollars of upgrades on a family trip to Fiji in the middle of the year, and had occupied a $3000-plus per night villa. There was nothing improper about any of this, and we all love discounts, bargains and freebies. But this kind of lifestyle — while increasingly taken for granted by the political class as their reward for a life of selfless public service — is incomprehensible to most Australians. Importantly, it is a sharp contrast with the image, presented in his January 2019 op-ed piece and in the months that followed, of an ordinary bloke mixing happily in the pub and loving nothing better than a curry with the wife and kids, a cold beer and a Sharks win.

Morrison’s return to the country was worse than the bad publicity generated by his Hawaiian frolic. It was simply fatuous to issue images of his hosting Australian cricketers at Kirribilli House — with its splendid views of Sydney’s fireworks — on the day thousands of frightened people were stranded on beaches trying to escape Australia’s version of Armageddon.

Many of his public statements about the bushfire crisis — that its victims would gain inspiration from the Sydney New Year’s Test, for instance — also seemed to be the work of a political amateur. The video images of his efforts to comfort fire victims (and, not coincidentally, generate some positive media images) were disastrous. He was virtually run out of town by bushfire victims in the Bega Valley village of Cobargo. When a pregnant woman there refused to shake his hand until he guaranteed more money for the Rural Fire Service, he decided to grab it anyway, and then turned his back on her and walked away. A local National Party worthy helpfully blundered in, holding the woman and telling her to “shush” — presumably on the grounds that if quiet Australians will not do their duty, it’s the role of municipal councillors to remind them of it. In another excruciating scene, Morrison tried to shake the hand of a similarly uncooperative firefighter at another venue. The video ends with the man walking away.

Morrison’s political authority has fallen away more quickly than anyone could have imagined even a fortnight ago, and is unlikely ever to be quite the same again. The giant-killer and performer of miracles of May 2019 is no more. Instead, we have a prime minister whose inability to respond to a crisis has resulted in widespread national loathing, international ridicule and sharp questions about his capacity for national leadership.

The background to his political nightmare is the Coalition’s failure over more than six years in office to develop a credible climate change policy to replace the Gillard-era scheme, its enduring marriage to the fossil fuel industry, and its hospitality to climate change denialists and their fellow-travellers in its own ranks. But Morrison’s crisis of leadership is also the result of the hollow nature of his leadership style. Fundamentally, he has never established himself as an adult leader capable of dealing with serious things, a dawning realisation expressed by the Twitter hashtag #scottyfrommarketing. It seems likely to stick.

There were early experiments in “strong leadership” — farcically, over pins in strawberries, and hardly less so when Christmas Island was reopened in the wake of the medevac legislation. After that, Morrison settled into a populist style of leadership well-designed for defeating Bill Shorten and a Labor Party carrying too much policy lead in their saddle-bags but unsuited to dealing with a crisis in which vast numbers of people see their country being destroyed and their lives falling apart.

Still, Morrison remains joined at the hip to the Murdoch and Stokes media, which helped him get re-elected and will be critical to his efforts to rebuild his credibility in the months ahead. We will hear often from the usual suspects what a top bloke he really is and how all the criticism is the work of lefties on Twitter. On climate policy, the basic thrust of the denialist right’s next move is plain for all to see. It will direct blame towards inadequate land clearing as the result of supposed Green influence on local and state governments. From the true believers, there will be an aggressive insistence that the summer’s catastrophes have nothing to do with climate change. From their many hangers-on in the Morrison government, the argument will be that Australia is too small and insignificant to make any difference anyway.

There is, after all, little shame in politics as it is done in this country these days. Morrison has already revealed himself as a remarkably adaptable politician and, given his powerful media allies, it might not be beyond his resources to get his leadership back into some kind of working order. But as we have seen repeatedly in recent years, when you’re on the slide, old friends tend to find new friends without taking too many backward glances. •

The post The summer Scott Morrison’s leadership broke appeared first on Inside Story.

The most dangerous component of bushfire smoke are tiny particulates, no more than 2.5 micrometres in diameter, known as PM_2.5. Over the past twenty years, studies have shown that high levels of PM_2.5 have contributed to millions of premature deaths in highly polluted cities like Beijing and Delhi. Sydney, Canberra and other Australian cities have recently joined this list. In 2016 alone, exposure to PM_2.5 contributed to an estimated 4.1 million deaths worldwide from heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, chronic lung disease and respiratory infections.

Even before the current cataclysm, air pollution was a major health hazard. While Sydney’s prevailing average of 6 micrograms per cubic metre (6 μ_g/m³) is within international health standards, it is above the levels observed in most European and American cities. A study led by the Sydney Public Health Observatory’s Richard Broome estimated that particulates and associated forms of pollution already account for between 310 and 540 premature deaths annually.

As far as can be determined, the mortality and health risks of PM_2.5 are a linear function of the level of exposure. Being exposed to 6 μ_g/m³ every day for a year, for example, amounts to 2190 “microgram days.” Broome and his colleagues’ work implies that each microgram day is associated with between 0.14 and 0.25 premature deaths. This figure is consistent with a range of international studies they cite.

The overall mortality effects are also a linear function of the number of people exposed. That’s why a city like Delhi, with thirty million people and an average PM_2.5 of 150 μ_g/m³, suffers tens of thousands of premature deaths every year.

Since the start of the bushfire emergency, particulate levels have been far above the historical average, reaching an extreme of 250 μ_g/m³ in Oakdale, ninety kilometres from central Sydney, on 10 December. According to recording stations in Sydney, the average for November and December was 27 μ_g/m³, more than four times the usual level. That implies somewhere between 160 and 300 additional premature deaths.

But the fires began earlier than November, and Sydney is not the only city they have affected. Many millions of Australians have experienced the impact of the fires, and there is no reason to expect the emergency to end any time soon. It’s quite likely that the total number of premature deaths will be more than a thousand, and possibly more than the 1300 deaths expected on our roads (some of these, tragically, caused by the fires).

Climatic oscillations such as the Indian Ocean Dipole, which have contributed to the severity of the current disaster, are expected to abate over time, so it’s probable that we won’t see a similar disaster next year, and perhaps for a few years to come. But the underlying trend of global heating that made this season so catastrophic isn’t going away. Next time the oscillations are unfavourable, further heating will make things even worse.

Our current approach to dealing with climatic disasters, developed during the twentieth century, doesn’t deal adequately with steadily deteriorating climatic conditions. At a minimum, we need a standing national body, with substantial resources, ready to respond to such disasters as they occur. This would almost certainly wipe out the Morrison government’s treasured surplus, which is why the resistance to any kind of action has been so vigorous.

Even worse than budget fetishism has been the cultural commitment of the government to climate denialism and do-nothingism. The right’s commentariat peddles anti-science nonsense on a par with anti-vaxxerism and flat-earth cosmology, eagerly lapped up by the mostly elderly readership of the conservative press. The government can’t endorse this nonsense officially, so it takes refuge in the idea that Australia accounts for only a small proportion of total emissions (on their dubious accounting, 1 per cent).

But even 1 per cent of the current catastrophe is still a disaster. And just as emissions in other countries contribute to disasters here, our 1 per cent plays its part in fires, floods and other climate-related disasters around the world. No matter how you do your accounting, Australian climate denialism is already costing hundreds of lives, with much worse to come.

We might hope that the scenes we have witnessed would shock our political class out of its torpor. So far, there is little sign of that happening. •

The post Slow burn appeared first on Inside Story.

While most of these fires have broken out in the northern half of the state, on Tuesday this week the forecast of unprecedented catastrophic fire conditions was extended to the Greater Sydney, Illawarra and Hunter regions. In areas where the largest and most troubling fires were already burning, the forecast strong winds left fire services extremely concerned that the worst was still to come. Resources were paper thin, with 950 firefighters currently on the ground.

This is spring, remember. And let’s also not forget the fifty fires currently burning in Queensland, or the fires that hit the Sunshine Coast in October.

The forecast category of catastrophic fire conditions emerged from the inquest into Victoria’s 2009 Black Saturday fires, which claimed 173 lives. With the McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index exceeding 100, this is a treacherous combination of gusty winds, high temperatures, low humidity and extreme dryness. Any fire that ignites will quickly reach intensities and move at speeds that place properties and lives in imminent danger.

Conditions like these could have occurred before the category was defined, but their frequency and intensity are on the rise. Australia’s fire seasons have increased in intensity and length, and further increases are projected, most notably during spring. Extreme bushfires are also increasingly intense and frequent: in the case of Victoria, their average frequency has doubled since 1900. Bushfires that form their own weather systems and develop pyrocumulus clouds are projected to occur more frequently, especially in spring, over the next fifty years. And extreme temperatures — a key ingredient in extreme fire weather — are undoubtedly on the rise.

So let’s be crystal clear about this. Climate change is part of Australia’s bushfire landscape.

This is not confined to Australia. Global wildfire danger has increased since at least the 1980s. Climate change made Canada’s wildfire season of 2017 twice as likely to have occurred, and detectable climate change signals were behind the 2015–16 fire seasons in North America and Australia. The fire season in the United States is also lengthening — so much so it has overlapped with Australia’s over the past couple of years. Unprecedented fire conditions, impacts and costs plagued California during its 2018 and 2019 seasons.

How have Australian governments responded? NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian answered a question this week about the role of climate change in the fires with a curt, “Honestly, not today.” Barnaby Joyce blamed Greens policies (a claim that was quickly fact-checked and found to be wrong), and deputy prime minister Michael McCormack notoriously slammed anyone who linked the fires with climate change as “raving inner-city lunatics.”

If now isn’t the right time for discussion and action, it’s hard to imagine when will be. How many times will a state of emergency be declared before a conversation about bushfires and climate change is welcomed?

The Climate Council has released numerous reports linking bushfires and climate change, with no notable response from the government. Together with more than twenty other senior emergency personnel, former Fire and Rescue NSW commissioner Greg Mullins attempted to convene a meeting on climate and bushfires with prime minister Scott Morrison and his colleague David Littleproud but was “fobbed off.”

Strikingly similar discussions about the relationship between climate change and bushfires have been sparked by a spate of other recent fires, including Tathra and Queensland in 2018, Tasmania early in 2019, and the Blue Mountains in 2013. These, too, were ignored by the federal government.

This attitude extends to climate change in general. Just last month, a parliamentary petition requesting the declaration of a climate emergency, signed by more than 400,000 people — the biggest e-petition ever submitted — was thrown out of parliament, despite more than 1180 jurisdictions across twenty-three countries (including sixty in Australia) having made their own declarations. When 11,000 scientists from across the world declared that the adverse effects of climate change are already here, the government was again silent.

In its Global Warming of 1.5°C report, published late last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of the devastation further temperature increases will wreak on the Great Barrier Reef, yet our emissions-reduction targets remain woefully inadequate. The recent 300,000-strong climate marches have also fallen on deaf ears, with the government not only ignoring those voices but also threatening to punish harshly those who protest.

This failure to recognise the impact of rising temperatures and respond to majority public opinion is bewildering. Whether it’s manifested in bushfires, heatwaves or coral bleaching, climate change is here, now, and we must deal with it. As Margaret Thatcher said way back in 1989, “Every country will be affected and no one can opt out.” No amount of deflecting will change that. •

The post If not now, when? appeared first on Inside Story.

Spring is a time when southern cold fronts and warm northern air often battle it out all over the country. This makes for changeable and sometimes unpredictable weather, with the southern states topping 40°C one day but barely reaching 18°C the next.

As summer approaches, warmer — and in the tropics, more humid and wetter — conditions become the norm, and they usually fall within a more predictable envelope of variability. Extreme events occur when that envelope is pushed. And while a couple of extreme events in a season is fairly standard, a greater number of extreme events is starting to become the norm.

This is particularly true of temperatures. Since at least the 1950s, the frequency, intensity and duration of heatwaves have increased. The exact changes depend on the location — Canberra has seen a doubling of the number of heatwave days since the 1950s, and heatwaves in Adelaide are 2–4°C warmer — but one thing’s for sure. Heatwaves are on the rise and it’s not going to get better any time soon.

I have written before about how, while heatwaves fluctuate naturally from year to year, long-term changes can only occur because of climate change. I’ve also shown in recent research that the amount of global warming we experience dictates changes in average heatwaves. If we reach 2°C of global warming, Australian heatwaves, on average, will be more than 2°C warmer and we will experience an extra thirty heatwave days per season; if we reach 4°C, these numbers increase to 5°C and sixty more days.

In other words, the relationship between average and extreme temperatures is very sensitive, and it only takes a small shift in average temperatures to invoke much hotter and more frequent heatwaves. So far, the globe has warmed by almost 1°C. This quite modest increase is responsible for the much larger changes in heatwaves we have measured.

There are similarities between this sensitive system and a toddler on the brink of throwing a tantrum. Toddlers only need a small change in their environment — such as being refused something they really want — to lose the plot. Their reaction is undoubtedly extreme compared to the underlying change, but it is also inevitable and unpleasant. The same is true of the relationship between average and extreme temperatures. We know that extremes are increasing, and we also know they are having adverse effects on human health, native ecosystems, agriculture and infrastructure.

Current predictions for the Australian summer show an ideal recipe for heatwaves. Both daytime and night-time temperatures are predicted to be warmer than average, as a result of both human-induced climate change and the other physical drivers that push the envelope of variability. Of the latter, there is a good chance of an El Niño developing, and there’s no doubt about the significant, positive relationship between the strength of an El Niño phase and the frequency of heatwave days over most of eastern Australia (though the NSW summer of 2016–17 demonstrated that this is not a hard-and-fast rule).

Dry conditions in New South Wales and Queensland during the 2017 and 2018 winters will further boost heatwaves: the drier the atmosphere, the more intense heatwaves can be, and the longer they can last. And we are much more likely to experience persistent synoptic high pressure systems, which transport hot air from the centre of Australia to heatwave-affected regions. Add our sensitive, tantrum-throwing toddler to that pushed envelope, and parts of Australia are perfectly set up for heatwaves this summer.

Then there are the flow-in effects of the heatwaves themselves. Droughts in winter and spring influence the duration and intensity of heatwaves, and then the heatwaves amplify drought conditions by drying out the land surface more quickly than usual. Not surprisingly, this tends to increase severe fire conditions. The hot winds and dry air synonymous with heatwaves further enhance bushfire conditions by fanning any fires that ignite.

We already have indications that an extreme summer is on the way. Although the recent heatwave and bushfire conditions in Central Queensland have eased, they were unprecedented. Persistent heatwave conditions have followed over much of the Northern Territory and Western Australia, and drier-than-average conditions are expected to persist in some regions throughout summer.

But weather, even at the seasonal scale, is a chaotic system. Seemingly small changes in current weather can result in larger, unpredictable events further down the line. This is why seasonal forecasts are expressed in terms of the chances of a particular temperature being attained or amount of rain falling, rather than the absolute values presented in weekly forecasts. While a hot and in some regions dry summer is highly likely for Australia, there is still a (somewhat small) chance that the next few months will not be as extreme as predicted.

Moreover, what drives hot conditions varies over the country. El Niño has no influence over heatwaves in the south, for example, and the extent to which recent droughts have primed current heatwave conditions varies greatly at local and regional scales. Thus, an extremely hot summer in one part of the country doesn’t always mean an equally extreme summer in another part.

It’s not that we should be distrustful of seasonal forecasts. Their reliability has dramatically improved in recent years, and they provide us with the best possible snapshot of what is most likely to happen, based on conditions when the prediction was made. Without them, we’d be flying blind into the season ahead.

Extreme temperatures will continue to fluctuate. Some summers will be hot, others will be closer to average. Yet, as average global temperatures continue to increase across the years and decades, longer, hotter and more frequent heatwaves will become much more regular seasonal fixtures. We can expect the toddler to be throwing tantrums much more often, and that’s something I doubt anyone really wants. •

The post Age of extremes appeared first on Inside Story.

The fires that swept through the Las Conchas region in New Mexico in June 2011 intensified at four times the rate of any previously known outbreak, consuming almost an acre of forest each second, incinerating even the mother trees and, along with them, any prospect of cyclic regeneration. Specialists in fire and forestry were left confounded by the scale of the impact, and also by its implications. These fires seemed to have defied the laws of physics. They burned uphill, against the wind, feeding not only on debris and groundcover but also, apparently, on the earth itself, leaving the crust baked hard to deep below the surface. Something went on in the fire column that no one can understand.

We in Australia are acutely conscious of living in a fire-breathing land. Across the states we have had our Black Fridays, Black Saturdays, Black Thursdays and Ash Wednesdays, and the stricken areas have been revisited with increased fury at unpredictable intervals. Fires feed our national mythologies and our sense of cultural identity, and we have developed our own traditions of knowledge about them.

Earth on Fire, an ABC TV Catalyst special, provides some insights from other parts of the planet, beginning with a visit to Las Conchas, where reporters Anja Taylor and Mark Horstman interview Craig Allen, a research ecologist, and Bill Armstrong, a fuels specialist with the US Forest Service. Neither is interested in engaging in polemics about climate change. These are specialists whose knowledge is derived from long-term engagement with the terrain they study. They don’t pontificate, they contemplate.

Allen offers a deep-time perspective. Putting the Las Conchas event in the context of patterns of landscape change over several thousand years, he’s specific about the contributing factors, which include increased temperatures and human modification of natural cycles of burning and regeneration. Armstrong is something of a natural philosopher. “This is a landscape of wounds,” he says. “I find it very sad and foreboding.” But he’s not moved to apportion blame. The problem is one of understanding and misunderstanding; the errors, which go back a long way, have been the consequence of premature assumptions of knowledge. What matters now is that we are faced with the recognition of what we don’t know.

Paradigm shifts in science are traditionally accredited to individual human geniuses and their landmark discoveries, but here we have a potentially seismic shift in cognition brought about by catastrophic engagement with an environment we thought we knew better. Megafires are the stuff of high drama and make for sensational television footage. But the real story is the learning curve and where it’s going, because those in the best position to know want to focus – at this stage, anyway – on questions, not answers.

In Tucson Arizona, Tom Swetnam is studying fire history by examining tree rings. Swetnam has discovered that there is a gap in fire events of almost a century after 1900, corresponding with the takeover of land by graziers and with longstanding government policies of fire suppression. What we may be seeing is a backlash effect, to which the urgent response is an escalation of burn-off regimes, but the public isn’t ready for this. Most of us admire the heroism of fire-fighting, Bill Armstrong says, but we don’t like to see large-scale, wilful burning of forest, a costly exercise requiring government support and government funding. If public intelligence hasn’t caught up with the realities of the situation, though, much greater costs may be attached to the delay in acting. A research team in Hobart has modelled the potential spread of a megafire with and without the burning-off of ground fuel: without, there is a serious prospect that the entire city of Hobart could be engulfed.

The Australian side of this story is explored through conversations with Peter Jacobs, chief ranger of the alpine district for Parks Victoria, and David Bowman, a plant scientist at the University of Tasmania. Jacobs and Bowman sit by a campfire in the Victorian alps and exchange speculations about the impact of recent megafires on the mountain ash forest. They foresee some controversial changes to land management, including intervention in the distribution of seedstock in order to regenerate high-ground forest areas that may have been permanently eradicated by the firestorm. But what happens, says Bowman, when you run out of seed, money and commitment? Sometimes you have to accept landscape change, and that may be what we are faced with, though “it would be a courtroom argument that this is unprecedented.” Jacobs and Bowman agree that it’s a matter of finely balanced evidence. There are no easy positions.

Earth on Fire is concerned with humanity’s role in some grand planetary equations in which the calculations of modern science have so far proved dangerously inept. American scientists are trying to learn from the strategies of Pueblo Indians in the fourteenth century; in Australia, we defer again to Indigenous traditions of knowledge and practice. In the meantime, the forests suffer; but so do we, blindsided as we are by overheated opinions from various political camps and a “debate” about climate change that can only tighten the lockdown on any genuinely responsive thinking. For Bowman, our hope lies in forming “all sorts of relationships, covenants, agreements, rapprochements with fire and flammable landscapes.”

That may involve some of us in rather more than most of us bargain for. Moira Fahy’s documentary Afterburn: In the Tiger’s Jaws is concerned with the impact on human lives following the Victorian fires of Black Saturday in February 2009. Ten people died in the small community at Steel’s Creek, where the film follows the experiences of three families who lost their houses. Their unfolding story is tracked at intervals over the subsequent year as they come to terms with the immensity of what has happened to them.

In the first series of interviews, they relive the events of the day, recalling how they monitored reports of a fire front that had reached a township fifty kilometres away, how one resident picked up on the danger from a radar image that indicated a much larger fire than they’d imagined, and how in the late afternoon the fire announced itself with a “deep-throated roar” like a set of jet engines at takeoff. By the time it came over the hill, the front was over eighty metres wide. Embers rained from the sky “like an air raid.”

Four months later, in June, the shock is still reverberating. They are, in the words of one member of the community, “thrust down the rabbit hole of grief and loss.” To lose your home, your business, your car, all your personal possessions, the future you planned for your children and the past that was a whole way of life, all within the space of two or three hours, is something no one outside the trauma zone can really imagine.

Trauma is an easily available word for the designation of psychophysiological states that are often impossible to communicate. Rob Gordon, a Victorian psychologist specialising in trauma arising from disaster experiences, provides some essential insights. “We should understand it as an experience sufficiently intense to injure or damage the mind, the connection to society and to other people,” he says.

From outside the echo chamber of traumatic experience, friends, would-be helpers and members of the public typically do and say all the wrong things. Someone who has just been rendered homeless in a fire doesn’t want to be given bags of secondhand clothes, or be asked immediately about whether they are planning to rebuild, or be featured as a “victim” in press coverage. As one of the participants says, “I don’t see myself as the victim of anything.” Admitting what we don’t understand, scientifically or emotionally, may be the beginning of a better way of managing our future in a changing landscape, and of engaging in the process of making the covenants, agreements and rapprochements David Bowman envisages.

Afterburn is the fourth documentary from director Moira Fahy about the social impact of bushfires. It can be ordered on DVD from the director, and plans are in progress to screen it soon on television. It is an effective counterpart to Earth on Fire which, with its searching conversations, globe-crossing perspectives on new directions in research, and lucid accounts of complex events in remote environments, is doing some of the best work television can do. This is so much more genuinely informative than the personality-driven genres of classroom TV dominated by over-enthusing presenters, and so much more compelling. •

The post Landscape of wounds appeared first on Inside Story.

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.

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. •

The post From the ashes appeared first on Inside Story.

IN A POWERFUL passage in his report on the 1939 Black Friday bushfires in Victoria, Royal Commissioner Leonard Stretton highlighted the failure of public memory to convey the threat posed on that day. “Men who had lived their lives in the bush went their ways in the shadow of dread expectancy,” he wrote. “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 recommended a public education campaign to promote awareness of fire prevention and forest protection. Five years later, the Save the Forests Campaign Council was formed, aiming to build a “forest conscience” that focused on revegetation and forest management. But did this essentially bureaucratic response achieve Stretton’s aim of inscribing the lessons of the 1939 fire in public memory?

The desire to learn from events like the 1939 fires has been echoed in a campaign by Melbourne’s Sunday Age for a museum to commemorate the bushfires in February. The campaign reflects the key role that museums play in such a task, and it also signals the changing ways in which we publicly recognise major events.

After the first world war the excesses of Victorian monumentalism gave way to simpler, personalised memorials to represent the local and national sacrifices during that conflict. Architectural modernism and a desire for “useful” structures gave us war memorial town halls, parks and swimming pools after the second world war. The rise of social history from the 1960s brought museums and their focus on lived experience to the fore. The Northern Territory’s Cyclone Tracy display, cited as a model by the Sunday Age, shows how museums can use personal narratives to convey the impact and significance of larger events, especially natural disasters. Canberra’s National Museum of Australia featured the 1939 Victorian bushfires amongst its 2001 opening exhibitions, with the ordinariness of the display’s centrepiece, charred items retrieved from the ashes of a house, providing a poignant reminder of the affective power of museums.

While the bushfire museum is a commendable suggestion, the idea of a single structure based in one of the townships most severely affected by the fires inevitably raises the question of representativeness. Who speaks on whose behalf in recording the terrible events of 2009? This core problem for museums has increasingly been approached through the idea of co-curatorship. Here, museum curators step away from their expert role to provide resources and guidance for communities to tell their own story. But the campaign also raises the less publicised issue of sustainability. The interpretive, educational and research functions sketched for the bushfire museum are ambitious, generally beyond the scope of a local community museum. But building the museum in a “neutral” location, perhaps serviced by existing research resources, runs the risk of disenfranchising local memory.

The role of local museums is to engage with their surrounding histories, cultures and environments. They seek to interpret and reflect on the local past and deepen understanding of the present. They collect and preserve significant aspects of a region’s material and visual culture. They provide a window on the creative talents and cultural expressions of a region. If they are truly connected with their surrounding community, they operate as fora for public debate and reflection.

Their reach and impact, though, may extend well beyond local environs. Studying the local can illuminate global themes. Think of the ceramic peacock saved from the 1878 shipwreck of the Loch Ard, displayed at Warrnambool’s Flagstaff Hill maritime museum. Or the fragment of Eureka flag held by the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery. These objects tell significant stories about local pasts but also highlight themes of trade and democracy that are major currents of nineteenth century history.

The stewardship of collections is a core activity of local community museums. The value and significance of the material heritage held by local museums – the largest museum sector in Australia – is immeasurable. Yet these collections are often kept in substandard and vulnerable conditions. Heightening awareness of local museums’ role in preserving their collections, and providing material assistance to better protect collections from disasters, is an additional response to the 2009 Victorian bushfires. Counter-disaster preparedness is a task that confronts all collecting institutions, whether in fire-prone areas or not. And with predictions that climate change will bring more extreme weather events and new risk factors, it is a task that is becoming more urgent.

The month of May is a particularly appropriate time to reflect on this issue. Blue Shield, the cultural equivalent of the Red Cross, is calling on Australian collecting institutions to conduct a MayDay campaign by enhancing the protection of their collections from disaster. The blue shield is the symbol specified in UNESCO’s 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property to identify cultural sites and protect them from attack in the event of armed conflict. Blue Shield Australia suggests that local museums improve their counter-disaster preparations through measures such as identifying the most significant items in their collections, getting to know local firefighters and police, and finding partner organisations to assist in emergencies. Counter-disaster preparations, ranging from staff and volunteer training through to improved storage facilities, can significantly help to preserve local cultural heritage. They can also make local communities better aware of the value and vulnerability of their museums.

Cultural infrastructure projects in Australia have an unfortunate set-and-forget history. Construction funding can be relatively easy to obtain, especially if state or federal governments are looking for “shovel-ready” projects to stimulate a sluggish economy. Finding funds to pay for recurrent expenses, which can quickly surpass original building costs, can be more difficult. Local councils are often left to pick up the tab for community facilities built through concerted local campaigns, or government partnerships, that have failed to plan for the long term.

It is important for local museums, especially in affected areas, to reflect on the events of 2009 in Victoria in ways that resonate with their local communities. But it is also important to recognise the significance of the 2009 bushfires for all collecting institutions – museums, galleries, libraries. The MayDay initiative provides a decentralised option that can commemorate the bushfires by assisting all museums to better discharge their role as trustees of our cultural heritage. •

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This discussion is based on Tom Griffith’s article about the Black Saturday bushfires for Inside Story, We have still not lived long enough.

Podcast theme created by Ivan Clarke, Pang Productions.

The post Black Saturday’s prehistory appeared first on Inside Story.

WHILE AUSTRALIANS reached deep into their pockets to assist those who have already lost everything, residents of Warburton, Daylesford and Upwey were wondering whether their towns were about to be destroyed and whether they should stay or leave. Victorians are being told to brace themselves for more extreme fire weather. We have March and April immediately ahead of us, and it seems inevitable that this means more bushfire damage. What is to be done?

How should people build their houses? How close should trees be to property? How much should be backburned? Should people stay or should they evacuate? Should every household have a bunker in the backyard? How should destroyed towns be rebuilt? Most of the discussion surrounding the recent horrific bushfires has been focused on prevention, preparedness for response and recovery. It is essential to debate these issues. But there is another component of bushfire management that seems to be missing from public debate and government commitments. We need to be talking about how we fight these fires, how we can get to these fires early and stop them raging out of control. Fires are unlike other “natural” disasters. Whether they originate in sparks from a power tool, a lightning strike, or something more malicious, bushfires start as small fires. This is why early detection and rapid aggressive response is so critical.

Australia is not the only place that has to contend with perfect bushfire conditions. In California, which is three and a half times the area of Victoria, a fleet of aircraft patrols vulnerable areas in time of high fire danger. From bases strategically positioned throughout the state, firefighting aircraft and aircraft containing firefighting ground crews can reach any fire within twenty minutes. From agile helicopters to DC10s, there is a range of firefighting aircraft to suit a range of conditions and there are military aircraft retrofitted specifically to fight fires. There is also a strategy enabling effective coordination between all levels of government and the community in order to fight fires. If a fire proves too big for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection to handle, the National Guard, a bit like the Army Reserve here, is called in to help fight the fire. Similarly, the approach of the British Columbia Forest Service in Canada is “Hit Hard and Hit Fast,” with air patrols and thermal imaging technology used to detect fires and map their progression.

We have incredibly brave and selfless individuals fighting the fires, but they are not supported by the communications systems or the technology that would enable them to hit hard and hit fast. Details are murky and will no doubt come out in the royal commission into the Black Saturday fires. But already it seems clear that the fire at Bunyip State forest burned for almost a week before Black Saturday, that the fire which surprised Marysville at about 5pm was first spotted from a fire tower at 3pm, that the first official alert about Kinglake didn’t go out until almost an hour after the fire had arrived there, that spot fires around Kilmore started after that fire had been burning for two and a half hours, and that the only additional resources that Whittlesea Country Fire Authority had to draw on in preparation for the worst fire conditions in recorded Australian history was an extra firetruck.

It is not just people whose homes are surrounded by bush who live with the risk of large-scale destruction from fire. Fortunately, the recent grass fire in Heidelberg was swiftly brought under control, but this fire in drought-stricken, middle-suburban Melbourne was a reminder of the possibility of an urban conflagration, the uncontrolled spread of fire from building to building. While partially fuelled by timber roofing materials, the 1991 urban conflagration in the San Franciscan suburb of Oakland gained momentum from the extreme radiant heat generated by the high density of buildings. This fire destroyed almost 3000 homes.

If a fire breaks out in Victoria, its geographic location determines which firefighting body will have initial responsibility. Victorian forests are under the protection of the state government, and most metropolitan areas are under the protection of the Metropolitan Fire and Emergency Services Board, a fully funded fire service. Other parts of Melbourne and regional properties are under the protection of the Country Fire Authority, which relies on volunteers and donations to function properly. Bushfires do not recognise these administrative borders and the resources needed to stop a bushfire going out of control in extreme weather conditions are beyond the means of any Australian state or territory. As Anthony Bergin rightly points out, uncontrolled fire is a national security issue. As well as taking lives and destroying homes, towns and animals, the recent fires threatened Melbourne’s water supply and power supply. Local knowledge is indispensible when dealing with fire but perhaps we also need a national firefighting service. Certainly we need systems of early warning and rapid response to be coordinated between national, state, and local agencies. And we need appropriate levels of funding for these systems. Some of the $17 billion allocated for defence this year needs to be allocated to defending Australia from uncontrollable bushfires.

It has been argued that the United States has erred too far on the side of wanting to bring all fire under control and, indeed, bushfire is an essential part of the landscape of Australia. But let us be clear-sighted about the distinction between regenerative bushfire and this new breed of raging monster. These forces of destruction are fuelled by the effects of climate change on weather conditions and they can only be brought under control if we can hit them early enough and hard enough. As Wurundjeri elder Joy Murphy said recently, the fires on Black Saturday bore no resemblance to the customary burns conducted by traditional custodians of the land; the fires on Black Saturday were “torture of the land.”

One final point. In 2009, the world has firefighting technology, communications technology and decision support systems far more sophisticated than those used in Australia, to deal with bushfires. These are still insufficient. We can fly people to the moon and destroy cities or individual buildings with speed and precision only because massive amounts of money were injected into research in these areas. We need the vision which was applied to the space race and the political determination which underpins military spending to be applied to learning how to stop bushfire in its tracks. Our people, our towns, our suburbs and our diversity of bush are depending on it. We need to be working towards a future where bushfires raging out of control are a thing of the past. •

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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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