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A tragedy beyond belief, beyond precedent and beyond words ... one of the darkest days in Australia's peacetime history.

Fire in Australia

Fire has been an elemental part of the Australian environment for as long as the continent has existed. Much of the vegetation in Australia has evolved to survive, thrive in and even promote frequent exposure to fire. The seeds of many native species require smoke or intense heat to germinate.

In southern Australia, hot, dry summers and bush dominated by oil-bearing eucalypts create an ongoing bushfire hazard.

Fire in Aboriginal Australia

Aboriginal people have used fire as a complex land-management tool for tens of thousands of years. Across country they adapt the heat and intensity of fire to individual environments to burn off grass and bush, to keep trails clear, promote new growth that will attract kangaroos and other prey, and to drive animals towards waiting hunters.

Over many millennia, these controlled burns have altered the continent's environment, favouring the survival and spread of fire-resistant plant species and creating open grassy woodlands. Frequent burning reduced the fuel load of dead leaves, branches and grass, and lessened each fire's intensity.

From 1788, those fire practices began to change. European settlers, who were afraid of bushfires, brought their own ways of using fire.

At first they used fire to clear land but as they put up fences and buildings, raised crops and increased their herds, uncontrolled burning became a threat to life and property.

The first bushfires in the colony were reported in 1797. As Aboriginal people were driven off their land, their regime of low-intensity fire management went with them, and bushfires became more prevalent. From then, the government sought to limit Aboriginal and settler use of fire as an agricultural tool.

Duke of Portland (Home Secretary) to Governor Hunter, 1798

To remedy so alarming an evil it will be proper to oblige all persons holding farms adjoining waste and uncultivated land to keep plowed up so much ... as shall be adjudged sufficient to stop the progress of the fire.

Urban Australia and fire

As Australia became more urbanised, the fringes of cities encroached farther into the bush and it is here in the frontier zone between bush and city that bushfires do much of their damage. Devastating, large-scale fires have increased in size and frequency over the past 200 years.

It was in this edge environment that the Black Saturday bushfires inflicted the damage that made them the most destructive in Australian history.

Days before Black Saturday

A heatwave struck south-eastern Australia in the weeks before 7 February 2009, building on two months of hot, dry conditions. Melbourne endured three days above 43 degrees and the temperature peaked on 30 January at 45.1 degrees, one of the hottest days ever recorded in the city. These temperatures combined with extremely low levels of humidity to create tinder-dry conditions in the Victorian bush.

On 6 February, Premier John Brumby issued a public warning that the next day was expected to be the 'worst day [for fire conditions] in the history of the state'.

Black Saturday

On the morning of 7 February northwesterly winds in excess of 100 kilometres per hour scoured the state, bringing hot, dry air from Central Australia. The storm helped create almost perfect fire conditions and when the winds brought down powerlines around 11.30am in the Kinglake/Whittlesea area, the resulting sparks ignited the Kilmore East fire.

As the day progressed, the size and intensity of the fire increased. In the evening a cool change from the south-west lowered temperatures but raised wind speeds again to more than 100 kilometres per hour. Spot fires, ignited by embers blown ahead of the main blaze, were reported up to 35 kilometres from the fire front.

Other fires began across the state in Horsham, Beechworth, Bendigo and Marysville. By evening almost 400 individual fires were burning and Victoria Police had announced the first fatalities.

The weeks after

The following day, 8 February, the Kilmore East fire and the Murrindindi Mill fire around Marysville merged to create the massive Kinglake fire complex. Hot, dry conditions continued and despite the concerted efforts of more than 19,000 Country Fire Authority members, the fires continued to blaze.

It would take weeks before weather changes, reduction of fuel loads and human intervention extinguished the fires.

Consequences

The Black Saturday bushfires killed 173 people, 120 in the Kinglake area alone. Another 414 people were injured. More than 450,000 hectares had burned and 3,500 buildings including more than 2000 houses destroyed. The RSPCA estimated that up to one million wild and domesticated animals died in the disaster.

The Black Saturday bushfires were the most devastating in Australian history.

Aftermath

The impact of the bushfires was so overwhelming that Premier Brumby announced a royal commission into the fires on 13 February 2009, even before the full extent of the disaster was known.

The commission investigated 'all aspects of the government's bushfire strategy' and included among its 67 recommendations that the Victorian government revise its advice around preparation for bushfires along with its bushfire education policies, and that it modify building codes, including banning the construction of homes in high-risk areas.

Class action lawsuits initiated in the Supreme Court of Victoria against electricity distribution company SP Ausnet eventually led to a $494 million settlement in relation to the Kinglake fire and a $300 million out-of-court settlement in relation to the Marysville fire. At the time these sums were the largest class action settlements in Australian history.

Victoria Police investigated the cause of the fires and charged one man with arson in connection with the Churchill fires near Morwell. They also charged two youths with arson in connection with the Bendigo blaze. However, Supreme Court Justice Paul Coghlan found the two youths were unfit to stand trial because of their intellectual disabilities.

Personal cost

The lasting damage of the Black Saturday bushfires has been the personal cost to individuals, families and communities.

Loss of life and injury to family and friends, loss of homes and the memories they contained, the complete alteration of familiar landscapes and the sense of foreboding that such a disaster could happen again have affected people across the fire-ravaged region.

Doctors and psychologists have reported a rise in suicides among bushfire survivors along with alcohol and drug abuse and addictive behaviour such as gambling.

Further reading
The Victorian Bushfires Collection on the Recollections magazine website Fire in Australia - Years 9-12 learning resource on the National Museum of Australia website
Geoffrey Cary, David Lindenmayer and Stephen Dovers, Australia Burning: fire ecology, policy and management issues, CSIRO publishing, Canberra, 2003.

Peter Clack, Firestorm: Trial by Fire, John Wiley and Sons, Milton, Queensland, 2003.

Related Defining Moments

1864: The Great Fire of Brisbane

1974: Brisbane floods

2003: Canberra bushfires

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'Black Saturday' bushfires kill 173 people in Victoria

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A tragedy beyond belief, beyond precedent and beyond words ... one of the darkest days in Australia's peacetime history. Fire has been an elemental part of the Australian environment for as long as the continent has existed. Much of the vegetation in Australia has evolved to survive, thrive in and even promote frequent exposure to fire.

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https://landcareaustralia.org.au/project/traditional-aboriginal-burning-modern-day-land-management/

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Indigenous communities used fire across Australia, and in some areas this created expansive grassland on good soils that in turn encouraged kangaroos to come and were later hunted for food. Historians and researchers believe selecting what areas to burn, when, and how often, was part of Indigenous knowledge of the land. The result was a mosaic of trees and grasslands that meant the highly combustible Eucalyptus forests were not likely to create intense bushfires.

With the arrival of Europeans, much of this practice has given way as fire became feared rather than harnessed as a tool to manage the scrub. The result was the grass plains gave way to thick scrub and bushland that was prone to intense bushfires.

Australian National University professor Bill Gammage, an expert of traditional Aboriginal burning, told Landcare in Focus the use of fire could be adopted across the country and used for a variety of land management problems.

"Fire can be used for one of three outcomes. The first, to encourage native grasses to regenerate and produce new feed, the second to reduce scrub and fuel to prevent intense bushfires, and thirdly to promote biodiversity," Bill said.

It is already in extensive use across the country, but particularly in the north where native grasses grow more vigorously in summer and need to be controlled, and where Indigenous communities actively manage the land.

"On public land, national parks and public reserves and larger pastoral land it could be applied very effectively," Bill explained.

"Aboriginal people would apply it to very small areas if necessary, like back burning along creek front or pushing back bush in grassland," says Bill Gammage.

The adoption of traditional Aboriginal burning requires a sound understanding of local conditions to ensure it is effective and safe.

"Local conditions, climate, plants, and animals, all matter and have to be taken into consideration," Bill explained when considering the fire stick farming.

He also said land managers need to understand how plants relate to fire and that this was local knowledge.

The type and timing of fire was dependent on the season and location. This was important, particularly in the north where grasses dry out and a fire would be uncontrollable. Bill said fire was used at a time following the wet season while the grasses and soil was still damp.

Across Australia there are a number of groups that work with farmers and Indigenous people and encourage them to work together to share knowledge and manage the land. Some of these groups include Local Land Management, the Aboriginal Land Management Councils, and Landcare groups.

These groups encourage farmers and Indigenous people to work together to adopt land management practices closer to those used by Australia's first inhabitants. While the use of fire is not the only tool, it is one the Indigenous community can share.

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Traditional Aboriginal burning in modern day land management - Landcare Australia

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By Christopher Gillies For over 50,000 years,...

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Bill Gammage has been awarded the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History for his work The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Based on extensive research, he sets out the case that Aboriginal people managed the land with fire. He says it is clear that from paintings and written records of the early European explorers and settlers that they found a land often described as 'park-like' or 'like a gentleman's estate'. This he says was the result of centuries of land management based on the use of fire.

Gammage, adjunct professor at the Australian National University, says Aboriginal use of fire to manage the land is the key to modern bushfire management.

He says the pictorial and written records make it clear that the landscape Europeans discovered was not a natural one, but instead it was a landscape that had been made by Aboriginal people systematically burning forest in order to create grassland, and then using fire to maintain and refresh that grassland.

He came to Bega to tell regional fire emergency managers all about it, as he has been doing all over Australia, to highly receptive adudiences of people whose jobs are all about learning how to live with fire in the Australian bush.

I sat with Bill Gammage looking across the Towamba River to a thick forest extending in all directions through the Nullica State Forest to the Mount Imlay National Park behind us.

Many would say it was a pristine wilderness that needed preserving, and many would oppose burn-offs to reduce fuel load as a bushfire prevention method.

However Bill Gammage says that Aboriginal people from 1788 or earlier would see the same land as dirty country that has been let run wild.

He says that in pre-European times Aboriginal people would have managed the land as grassland, with the dense forests being confined to mountainous country.

Early explorers frequently recorded finding open country with scattered trees, like a park, where it was very easy to gallop a horse.

Early paintings and sketches often present the land as 'park like' but art historians explained it away as European artists 'stylising' the landscape to a European look.

Go to the location of those paintings and sketches now and the same sites may be covered with dense forest.

Gammage says that Aboriginal people created grassland as habitat for game, often up to a line of forest from which they could hunt, based upon a deep knowledge of how to control fire and especially and how to generate 'cool fires'.

Over many generations Aboriginal people used fire to clear forest and then they were able to maintain grassland by doing what was termed 'firestick farming' by ANU Archeologist, Rhys Jones, when he wrote in 1969:

"What do we want to conserve, the environment as it was in 1788, or do we yearn for an environment without man, as it might have been 30,000 or more years ago?

"If the former, then we must do what the Aborigines did and burn at regular intervals under controlled conditions."

Gammage describes how Aboriginal people would light small fires on damp ground to create small firebreaks to join up with other burnt patches and create a ring of them or perhaps join the ends up to a creek to create a ring of firebreak around an area that can be burnt to create fresh grass growth.

Fire was a fundamental tool with these and other methods being applied constantly all over Australia for centuries longer than since European settlement.

It's not the first time this message has been delivered.

Rhys Jones talked about it in the 1960s and back in 1890 Alfred Howitt delivered a talk to the Royal Society of Victoria that detailed much of the evidence Gammage also presents, but he says the Royal Society 'just did not get it'.

And he says that people still have great difficulty comprehending the fundamental importance to Aboriginal culture of caring for the land and their depth of expertise.

Gammage says that while Australia now has a far larger population there are far fewer people involved in fire management than pre 1788 when all Aboriginal people were involved in caring for the land.

Aboriginal methods of fire control both protected them from major bushfire as well as creating grasslands for hunting.

Gammage says that modern fire managers and pastoralists through their experience are edging towards the methods used by Aboriginal people, mostly so far as learning how to control fuel loads.

He says the Aboriginal experience shows that it is possible to control fire and to avoid catastrophic bushfires.

However he says there is a European mindset that prefers trees, whereas Aboriginal people preferred fewer trees and more grassland.

The imperative to improve bushfire prevention and control techniques is provoking more research and much dialogue between fire managers and Aboriginal people.

When Gammage recently addressed a meeting in Bega at the NSW Rural Fire Service offices the large audience filling the large conference room comprised members of the RFS, NPWS, Forests NSW, and Aboriginal organisations; environmentalists, farmers, and others all learning how to live with fire in Australia.

The Prize for Australian History is now incorporated into the Prime Minister's Literary Awards which this year also introduced a poetry award.

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Gammage: Prevent bushfire the Aboriginal way

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Bill Gammage has been awarded the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History for his work The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Based on extensive research, he sets out the case that Aboriginal people managed the land with fire.

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https://wild.com.au/people/opinion/can-fire-stick-farming-reduce-bushfires/

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What is this 'Farming'? (Hint: Its not farming)

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What is this 'Farming'? (Hint: Its not farming)

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http://austhrutime.com/fire-stick_farmers.htm