Our bushfire history shows politicians could learn a lesson from Indigenous Australia

Updated

Flying towards Canberra from Melbourne in January 2003, the Qantas pilot told those of us seated on the starboard side of the jet we'd see something extraordinary if we peered out the window.

"It looks like cumulonimbus cloud but it's not," he said.

It was, as you can see, quite the sight. We had barely started descent by this stage so we can't have been much more than 20,000 feet, yet this enormous, angry, billowing creature was bullying its ways into the upper atmosphere, browns and dirty greys betraying its evil. I took a couple of snaps in awe.

The next day, January 18, Canberra burned. Four people perished, almost 500 homes destroyed and two-thirds of the ACT was torched. By one estimate, 95 per cent of wildlife was killed in southwest ACT.

The Canberra disaster, though not the most lethal or destructive in recent Australian history (the 2009 Victorian fires killed 173 and destroyed more than 2000 homes), is referenced in a celebrated study of Aboriginal land management.

"People could not have survived such fires in 1788. Had they faced the Black Saturdays and Ash Wednesdays white Australia has suffered, most must have died," Bill Gammage writes in The Biggest Estate on Earth.

"Any uncontrolled fire menaced: a day's fire might eat a year's food.

"This situation rarely arose. [Aboriginal] people had to prevent it, or die. They worked hard to make fire malleable, and to confine killer fires to legends and cautionary tales."

For those who haven't read Gammage's book, or Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu which followed it, the central thesis is that Australia was far from a virgin landscape at the time of the First Fleet's arrival but a land that had been altered and tamed by sophisticated firestick farming.

Together, these books demolish the myth that Australia at the time of white settlement was a wilderness occupied by merely hunter gatherers.

The evidence is in art

Gammage cites explorers and early settlers who commonly remarked how much of Australia looked like a "park", with plenty of grass, open forest and little undergrowth. They saw chains of plains unexplained by soil type and corridors of pasture edged by tall forest.

James Cook had made a similar observation as he sailed HMS Endeavour down the east coast in 1770, noting "mountains chequered with woods and lawns".

Every part of the continent had been visited by firestick at some time or other to create genius mosaics: green pasture on the best soils to attract game, the worst soil left for forest; regular low-level burns to keep edges and promote grain and yam.

One conclusion reached is that there are more trees in national parks now than there were in 1788.

Gammage uses the work of early colonial artists to make his point; John Glover with his Tasmanian masterpieces, the deft work of convict forger Joseph Lycett and Austrian landscaper Eugene von Guerard, among them.

Though sometimes accused of romanticising the Australian bush (Glover for example, depicting native Tasmanians in apparent idyllic peace when the reality was they'd either been shot or rounded up), their work depicted landscapes unmistakably forged by a regimen of fire.

Von Guerard's 1858 picture of the crater of Mt Eccles shows a patchwork of steep strips of grassland down to the water, making a trap for prey, surrounded by belts of trees. This has since thickened and grown over.

Debate over levels of hazard-reduction burning

The point of all this is that in the context of the current fires, it might be important to consider whether Australian bush in its "natural state" is what we see now.

Millennia of so-called "cool" burns by Aboriginal people changed the landscape and probably contributed to 70 per cent of Australian flora being dependent or tolerant of fire.

Not that this is a particularly new debate.

Bruce Pascoe quotes ANU archaeologist Rhys Jones who wrote 50 years ago: "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."

Nor is it new for politicians to squabble over who is to blame when catastrophic fire strikes.

Politics no stranger to bushfire debates

After the Canberra and Victorian fires, the forest industry said state governments were being held hostage by conservationists resisting hazard reduction burns.

WA MP Wilson Tuckey, then the territories minister, went further, blaming environmentalists for the fires because of their opposition to controlled burns.

Then, as there is now, there was a proper conversation to be had about whether land management practices have got dangerously out of sync with the fire-loving bush.

But now, the argument's wrapped up in another, even more flammable topic: climate change.

Nationals backbencher Barnaby Joyce's comments about two NSW fire victims being "most likely" Greens voters didn't help, nor did Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack's denunciation of Greens MP Adam Bandt and "inner-city raving lunatics" after Bandt's blaming of Prime Minister Scott Morrison and McCormack for the fires ("When you cuddle coal in Canberra, the rest of the country burns").

Greens Senator Jordan Steele-John's took the inflammometer to 11 with his claim that major party politicians were "no better than a bunch of arsonists".

Australian politics appears incapable of sensibly discussing climate change at any time, but particularly at times of natural disaster of the sort that scientists say will worsen as the globe warms.

The big dries, which according to scientists will be exacerbated by climate change, may have complicated the ability to conduct hazard burning, even if there was consensus on it being required.

Of course, when conditions are ideal, controlled burning has the extra challenge of urbanisation, mixed title boundaries, fences to contend with, let alone resourcing.

But as one Aboriginal community has shown, there might be big benefits from Australia re-learning its ancient people's fire skills.

The question remains whether Australian politics is mature enough to allow it.

Topics: government-and-politics, bushfire, nationals, liberals, alp, greens, political-parties, australia

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