by Bill Gammage
Settlers described fearsome fires in the Adelaide hills,15 but all or most were out next day. Angas wrote that hills trees had their
massive trunks blackened, in many places as high as fifteen or twenty feet from the ground, by the tremendous fires that sweep through these forests, and continue to blaze and roll along, day and night for many miles, in one continuous chain of fire. These conflagrations usually take place during the dry heats of summer, and frequently at night; the hills, when viewed from Adelaide, present a singular and almost terrific appearance; being covered with long streaks of flame, so that one might fancy them a range of volcanoes.16
At any time, let alone in the dry heat of summer, forest fires rising a mere 15–20 feet to blacken trunks but not canopies are not big. The South Australian Register thought hills fires less fierce than those on the plains: ‘though the fire has evidently raged fiercely in many places, yet it never seems to attack anything but the grass and the leaves of the lower bushes, leaving the trees unscathed, the larger ones being seldom found hollow and blackened as are those on the plains below’.17 Not even new chums thought plains fires fierce.
Hallam points out that in southwest Australia settlers stood downwind of fires, so they were hardly intense.18 In Victoria in 1824 Hovell met fires he thought hot, but which left big unburnt patches, indicating cool burns. ‘All the country from where we started this morning is all burned’, he reported, ‘and in every direction the bush is all on fire . . . a little to the westward of our course, we can see the blaze some feet above the ground. At noon we rested for a few hours beside some waterholes, where there are a few acres of grass which had escaped the fire’, and a week later, ‘the grass for miles around was burnt . . . we at length came to a spot of about two acres where grass had escaped the fire . . . beside some waterholes’.19 Breton wrote of ‘tremendous fires’ which scorched trees annually, even bi-annually (ch 3):20 annual fires could not find the big fuel loads typically fed to today’s infernos.21
These were summer fires, yet Europeans could travel near them, and most were out in a day. A Pitjantjatjara elder explained, ‘before the arrival of white people Anungu did not know about really large bushfires, but now they do . . . the country had been properly looked after and it was not possible for such things as large scale bushfires to occur’.22 A Darling and Paroo pioneer noted
another remarkable characteristic of the aborigine . . . the care taken by them to prevent bushfires. In my long experience I have never known any serious bushfire caused by the blacks, and the condition of the country, the growth of the trees and bushes, such as sheoaks, pines, and acacias and a score of other kinds of trees that bushfires always destroy were, when the white man arrived, flourishing in the perfection of beauty and health . . . Australia in its natural state undoubtedly was liable to the ravages of extensive bushfire, and with so many hostile tribes it seems as if they would be a frequent occurrence, yet they evidently were not.23
Controlled fire and its ceremony was 1788’s main management tool (digging sticks were second, dams and canals third). To burn improperly was sinful. Even innocent mistakes might be punished severely, and unleashing uncontrolled fire was a most serious offence. Fire was a totem. Whoever lit it answered to the ancestors for what it did. Understandably, fire was work for senior people, usually men. They were responsible for any fire, even a campfire, lit on land in their care. They decided which land would be burnt, when, and how, but in deciding obeyed strict protocols with ancestors, neighbours and specialist managers. On the Gulf of Carpentaria a Tiger Shark Ancestor put Australia’s biggest cycad stand on the Wearyann. He requires it to be burnt annually, so people can feast on abundant nuts ripening at the same time. Generations of elders obeyed, but today the stands are in decline because ceremonies are fewer and the land burnt less often.24 ‘What must be made absolutely clear,’ a West Australian researcher concluded, ‘is that the rules for fire and fire use are many and varied, and are dependent upon an intimate knowledge of the physical and spiritual nature of each portion of the land. Without this knowledge, it is impossible to care for country in the appropriate way.’25 An Arnhem man explained, ‘you sing the country before you burn it. In your mind you see the fire, you know where it is going, and you know where it will stop. Only then do you light the fire.’26 Burning was purposeful—as Leichhardt put it, part of the ‘systematic management of their runs’.2728
The first reason to burn was to control fuel. This meant neither today’s ‘No fuel no fire’, nor yesterday’s ‘Prevent bush fire’. Fuel was a resource. It was managed, not eliminated. People wanted to choose, to plan, to make most fires cool, some hot, and some between, for each had its time and use. In a fire friendly continent this was not easy. Fuel accumulates quickly even in grassland. In 1841–2 Robert Murray wrote that grass fires in Victoria were
common during the summer . . . The flames came on at a slow pace . . . as the grass happened to be short, the fiery line seldom rose above the fuel on which it fed; and it would have been no difficult matter to have leapt across it . . . The frequency of these fires is the principal cause of the absence of underwood, that renders the forest so pervious in all directions, and gives to Australia the park-like appearance which all agree in considering its characteristic feature. All the trees were scarred black, and any shrubs which sprouted were cut down by the next fire.29
In the next decade settlers regularly lit fires, but let them burn. This was a mistake. On Black Thursday, 6 February 1851, in conditions very like 7 February 2009, a fire burnt almost half Victoria. On a suffocating day in a drought summer, hot northerlies linked up small fires in remote bush which had been let burn for months. William Howitt reported, ‘300 miles in extent, and at least 150 in breadth, was reduced to a desert. It was one blackened and burning waste . . . the country was actually one blaze for thousands of square miles.’30 The inferno fed on crops and hay as well as forest and scrub, but its speed and extent only a decade or so after European occupation shows how readily the bush leaps into deadly flame.
This alone was cause to manage every corner of the continent. There was no remote bush in 1788. To the furthest places, sooner or later, the firestick came. People burnt the most useful land most and the most sterile or sensitive land perhaps not for generations, but sooner or later they burnt everywhere, in ‘every part of the country, though the most inaccessible and rocky’; on ‘the highest mountains, and in places the most remote and desolate . . . [in] every place’; in ‘every portion of their territories’.31 In the Centre one hot day Giles found himself in ‘such frightful and rocky places, that it appeared useless to search further in such a region, as it seemed utterly impossible for water to exist at all. Nevertheless, the natives were about, burning, burning, ever burning . . . The fires were starting up here and there around us in fresh and narrowing circles.’32 If fuel built up, it was burnt.
This sparked a learning curve in fire management.
1. The more fuel is reduced, the more easily fire is controlled, and up to a point the more useful it is.
2. Even hot fires leave unburnt patches, but the cooler the fire the bigger the patches.
3. Burnt and unburnt patches benefit animals by balancing burnt (feed) and unburnt (shelter) country.
4. Patches form mosaics, which can be adjusted in size by varying fire intensity.
5. Intensity can be regulated by fire frequency and timing.
6. Frequency and timing are local. They depend on local flora and local moderators like rain, wind, temperature and aspect.
7. The better people understand these variables, the more they can burn with purpose. They can move from limiting fuel to shaping country.
8. This lets them selectively locate fire tolerant and fire sensitive plants, situate and shape mosaics and resources conveniently and predictably, and arrange them in sequence so one supplies what another does not.
9. Australia becomes a single estate, varied in means but not ends.
10. Maintaini
ng the estate is enforced by universal Law (ch 4).
In 1788 most fires were cool. Cool fires burnt most land, and patches were common from rainforest to desert. In mid-summer 1802 a valley south of Port Lincoln (SA) was ‘recently burnd, the old Casuarinas remaining. Besides the general fire there seemd to have been others more partial & more recent.’33 In southeast Queensland ‘natives had very recently fired the grass of the plain, but as its herbage was generally very young and verdant, only small patches of it had become ignited’.34 In central Australia,
although fires were lit wherever sufficient fuel was available the fires rarely extended over large areas. The effect of traditional burning regimes was to produce a series of small patches of country at different stages of recovery from fire with associated different plant and animal communities. This almost completely eliminated the risk of large scale wildfires which would have been disastrous for any group attempting to survive in a completely burnt-out area.35
In east Arnhem Land,
As soon as the grass begins to dry in a normal season—often as early as April—the people start to burn it systematically in conjunction with organized hunting drives. The grass is not fired at random but in limited areas always held under control . . . The burning of the grass, although it yields much animal food, has the disadvantage of destroying the vines of food plants and so is carried out with great care until the vegetable harvest is well advanced.36
People burnt some patches every year, balancing each burn against those past and future. In September 1891 Lawrence Wells met at least three fire recovery stages in mallee ‘burnt in vast patches a year or two ago. The fires must have been enormous . . . entered the unburnt giant mallee country . . . [then] found burnt country with young mallee 3 ft to 6 ft high.’37 As the Wet ended, north Queenslanders burnt a succession of fires to make a mosaic of recovery stages, stopping in the hot months of the late Dry, when ‘fire climb up over the mountains . . . it might kill some yam and all that you know, kill the trees, too hot’.38 It might take 4–5 years to build a good Spinifex mosaic, but with fuel stifled and neighbours consulted, central Australians could let patch fires run over big tracts of country. On plains west of the MacDonnell Ranges in 1872, Giles commented,
the country seemed to have been more recently visited by the natives than any other part, as burnt patches could be distinguished as far as the vision could be carried . . . probably forty miles away, we saw the ascending smoke of grass fires still attended to by the natives . . . We camped in a grove of casuarinas, where the old grass had been burnt, and some young stuff was springing.39
Latz explained:
In a simplistic sense, all that is required to obtain this mosaic is to burn over as wide an area as possible as often as possible. To see how this system works one must take the end of a drought as the starting point. The first good rains will produce little fuel and most fires will only cover small areas. If good seasons continue, fires lit in the second year will extend over greater distances but will be either halted by the previous year’s burnt areas or by natural features such as sandy riverbeds or rocky hills. The third year is the dangerous period. By this time there is enough accumulated fuel to enable intense fires to spread over large areas and even to enter fire-sensitive communities such as mulga stands. This, of course, will not occur as the fires initiated previously will have reduced the fuel load and provided natural firebreaks. (Even so, it does appear that Aboriginal people rarely burn during the summer months at this critical period.) This system of burning, with minor adjustments in relation to the particular type of country and the time of the year, produces a mosaic of plant communities in different stages of fire recovery. Once this mosaic has been initiated it would be relatively easy to maintain and could be used to protect certain areas from fire for a considerable time.40
Fire was a life study. Seasons vary, rain is erratic, plants have life cycles, fire has long and short term effects, people differ on what to favour. How each species responded to fire had to be set against deciding which to locate where. In the Centre old-growth fire sensitive plants are rare and in poor country, because in good country fuel builds up and fire kills them.41 Here was a dilemma (fire kills sensitive species but no fire lets fuel build up) and a solution (locate such species on poor land where less fuel means fewer fires). Many such dilemmas demanded detailed local knowledge, yet in 1788 people shepherded fire around their country, caging, invigorating, locating, smoothing the immense complexity of Australia’s plants and animals into such harmony that few newcomers saw any hint of a momentous achievement.
Fire managers burnt precisely. They did not light in the wrong conditions or with the wrong fuel. ‘They pick the grass up, and scrunch it up in their hand, and if it gets too powdery well it’s no more lighting grass.’42 They aimed fires at breaks or patches. At Albany Isaac Nind reported, ‘The violence of the fire is frequently very great, and extends over many miles of country; but this is generally guarded against by their burning it in consecutive portions.’43 If necessary they put fires out. In the 1870s people complained to a station manager near Narrandera about his carelessness with fire. When a fire menaced the station while its men were away, an elder studied the flames, then organised women and children to light spot fires in five staggered rows across the advancing front. This broke up the fire, and it was put out.44
Above all, managers kept control. Near Westernport (Vic), ‘About 6pm [they] doused their fire at once, although it must have covered near an acre of ground.’45 In Cambridge Gulf (WA) King saw
four natives seated on the sand, watching the progress of a fire they had just kindled; which was rapidly spreading through, and consuming the dry and parched up grass that grew scantily upon the face of the island . . . The fires . . . rapidly spread over the summit of the hills, and at night, the whole island was illuminated, and presented a most grand and imposing appearance.46
Yet the men who lit it simply sat down. In the central desert where fires so often seemed big and random, in years of research Gould ‘never encountered an occasion when a fire actually invaded an area that was already producing wild food crops’,47 and Dick Kimber concludes, ‘large Aboriginal fires were not accidental, random or otherwise uncontrolled’.48
How quickly fuel built up, or what balance people wanted, could be decisive, for quite small differences in frequency and intensity might re-set the ratio of ground, mid-storey and canopy plants and the animals in them. Broadly, the faster growing and more fire welcoming the dominant plant, the more frequent the fire. In fire prone communities ‘a fire a day kept bushfires away’, while protective burns ringed fire sensitive places. Northern grassland was burnt annually, Kangaroo Grass every 2–3 years, Mulga at most once a decade, dry ridges perhaps every 15–25 years, Tuart every 2–4 years and Jarrah every 3–4 in early summer, Karri about every five years in late summer. Mountain Ash needs fire every 400 years or so, yet is the most flammable eucalypt. Whole forests rage with a ferocity none can fight and few survive. Almost certainly people managed Mountain Ash in winter: they lived on the coast in summer (ch 9). Perhaps for generations they winter burnt to keep edges back and clearings open, sensibly beginning when a forest was young. Yet a winter cool-burn could not ensure enough heat for those wet forests to kill and replace themselves. That needs a dry summer, yet it was done. It must have been a time for brave men, their families safely on the coast.49
Burning whenever possible is too often for many plants and animals. Max Lines learnt near Alice Springs, ‘Sometimes you burn at the wrong time and it’s too bloody hot; it scalds everything and it takes a couple of years to come back.’50 Fuel rationing and timing kept most fires cool. Cool fires could burn one species without much harming another, speed regrowth, let people hunt close up, and stop or cage random fire. Sometimes people had to work to keep the fires going, but they were precise and malleable. North of Cairns rainforest people combined timing and precision (pictures 44–5): ‘You burn . . . in the bulur [cold] time, insid
e the old scrub is still damp, wet, it won’t go into the scrub, you just sort of burn on the edge with the dry, that’s how we save the scrub . . . [fire] only follow the kangaroo grass right on the edge, doesn’t go far into the scrub.’ Precision burning exposed animal tracks, protected yams on forest margins, and shielded forest from dry season hot fires. When the wind was right, people burnt inside the forest, gently to reduce surface litter, more intensely to make clearings and tracks.51
In early summer John Lort Stokes
met a party of natives engaged in burning the bush, which they do in sections every year. The dexterity with which they manage so proverbially a dangerous agent as fire is indeed astonishing. Those to whom this duty is especially entrusted, and who guide or stop the running flame, are armed with large green boughs, with which, if it moves in the wrong direction, they beat it out . . . I can conceive no finer subject for a picture than a party of these swarthy beings engaged in kindling, moderating, and directing the destructive element, which under their care seems almost to change its nature, acquiring, as it were, complete docility, instead of the ungovernable fury we are accustomed to ascribe to it.52
In southwest Australia Lew Scott recalled 1920s graziers burning docile summer fires:
