A TASMANIAN professor has hit upon a solution to cut the risk of bushfires of in Australia - elephants.

No, wait. David Bowman is serious.

Because elephants, you see, can't get enough gamba grass when they're roaming the African savannas.

And gamba grass - a tough tussock that grows to 4m tall, has been spreading through north and western Australia since, well, since around the time we introduced cane toads.

And look how well that went.

But elephants are a different story, Prof Bowman says.

"The idea of introducing elephants may seem absurd," he writes in today's issue of Nature, "but the only other methods likely to control gamba grass involve using chemicals or physically clearing the land, which would destroy the habitat."

Gamba grass is not only big and invasive. It's major fuel for wildfires and Prof Bowman says that - perhaps as a result of climate change - "fires have been more intense and widespread" around Australia.

So one answer would be get elephants to eat it. Eat it all.

And not just elephants. Rhinoceroses too. And Komodo dragons, which don't eat gamba grass, but do scoff feral pigs and buffalo like there's no tomorrow.

But while it sounds like an obvious solution to everyday Australians, Prof Bowman's contemporaries aren't being particularly kind in their dismissal of his ideas.

"If we did go down the road of introducing elephants to Australia, we had better develop the technology to clone saber-tooth tigers to eventually control the elephants," says Dr Ricky Spencer, a senior lecturer with the Native and Pest Animal Unit at the University of Western Sydney.

Another environmental specialist, Professor Patricia Warner at the Australian National University, says elephants are actually tree terrorists.

"Are we in Australia (to) hope that the elephants don't find our native Australian trees tasty?" she asks.

"Can we somehow command them to eat only introduced African grasses?"

And what happens if the predators go feral, they ask. Who or what will kill the Komodo dragons and saber-tooth tigers?

"It might be more realistic to emply Aboriginal hunters ... to .. control feral animals and restore the the traditional practice of patch burning," Prof Bowman suggests.

Because the man who wants to repatriate elephants, rhinoceroses and Komodo dragons in our wide brown land is nothing if not a realist.

Food webs, he claims, are out of whack due to mass animal extinctions around the arrival of the first Australians 50,000 years ago.

We've filled the gaps with pigs, goats, cattle, horses, donkeys, camels, buffalo and deer.

Poisoning and hunting aren't working, so why not give elephants a go?

"I realise that there are major risks associated with what I'm proposing," Prof Bowman writes.

"It would be essential to proceed cautiously, with well-designed studies to monitor the effects."

Originally published as 'Introduce elephants to fight fires'