Walcha treechanger Fiona McCormack ponders the perils of a lack of hazard reduction burning
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The practise of burning off the bush in a controlled manner by our Indigenous founders has long been known about. The condescension of the Australian government and other influential bodies that determine policy, regarding the care of our bushland, is almost negligent and this could be a contributing factor to the current "Catastrophic State of Emergency" that most of eastern Australia is experiencing at the moment. There have been government enquiries regarding the use of burning off as a tool to minimise the occurrence of catastrophic bushfires. There are various viewpoints about this.
Burning off the bush or fire-stick farming was the practice of Indigenous Australians. They habitually used fire to burn vegetation to assist with hunting and to change the structure of plant and animal species in an area. This type of farming had the long-term effect of turning dry forest into savannah and therefore developing the population of grassland species like the kangaroos. Bill McCormick from the Science, Technology, Environment and Resources Group, in December 2002, concurs, that the extent of fire lighting by indigenous Australians was significant, with one estimate being that forty people inhabiting 3000 hectares would light an average of 5000 fires annually.
The ABC tells of a current example of how effective this method of bush fire reduction is. Tathra, a small coastal town in NSW, was devastated by a huge bushfire and over 100 homes were destroyed. However, on the south-western edge of Tathra, is a small patch of green bushland where the fire came to a halt.
Burning off the bush or fire-stick farming was the practice of Indigenous Australians.
The land is part of 71 hectares owned by the Bega Local Aboriginal Land Council (LALC) at Tathra West. In 2017, they began a cultural burning program as part of the management strategy for their ground. With training and support from the Far South Coast Rural Fire Service (RFS) the cultural burn crew prepared and burnt 3.5 hectares of land at Tathra West using methods informed by traditional knowledge.
Six months on from the 2018 wildfire, the land where cultural burns were undertaken in 2017 is sprouting with native grasses, in stark contrast to the scorched trees and dense bracken that mark the surrounding landscape.
Mr Steffensen is a Cape York man who shares his traditional knowledge with Indigenous people throughout Australia maintains that "The land is their food, their livelihood, their country, their home. If they'd allowed wildfires to burn the country to a cinder, they wouldn't have survived for so many thousands of years."
In a cultural burn rather than a hazard reduction burn consideration is taken of habitat trees
In a cultural burn rather than a hazard reduction burn consideration is taken of habitat trees. A cool fire is used to protect the seeds and nutrients in the soil. As part of their ongoing land management, the LALC crew conduct flora and fauna surveys to evaluate biodiversity outcomes from the cultural burns. Cultural burning proves to be labour intensive, which can be difficult.
"But there's a lot of knowledge here that we need to be looking at. It's a win for the community, getting that fuel reduction work done, as well as bringing life back to the land." stated Mr Steffensen.
Risk reduction, burning has been used in Australia to manage fuels and fire risk since the 1950s. Fires are generally lit in autumn to reduce the volume of leaf litter and reduce the intensity and rate of spread of subsequent bushfires. A cohesive national plan should ensure an overview and provide feedback to support risk management burn offs.
Many Australians choose to live close to bushland. Recommended burning in metropolitan bushland is an unresolved issue. The challenge would be to balance the need for risk reduction to life and property alongside conserving biodiversity, environmental requirements and controlling air pollution near urban areas.
The Royal Commission, in 2013, into the Black Saturday fires specified that, "the prospect of increasing fire risk as the climate warms (section 6) brings the prescribed burning issue into even sharper focus." and it received more submissions on hazard reduction burning than any other topic.
Bill McCormick stated that " Since the available forest fuel determines the amount of heat that potentially can be released in a bushfire, low intensity burns to reduce the fuel loading in a forest (fuel reduction burning) is one component that can be modified by land managers to reduce fire risk.
He further positions that "research has found that doubling the fuel in the forest will double the rate of spread and quadruple the fire intensity. While low intensity fires will tend to burn dead fuels below six millimetres in diameter, medium to high intensity fires will burn young trees, thick twigs and branches, bark and deep litter. Fuel reduction burning can reduce the hazard of spotting from eucalypt bark, in some cases for up to seven to ten years."
For fuel reduction burning programs to be effective they need to be well planned and applied to specific vegetation types and executed by properly trained and resourced staff. Proper assessment of these burns should be carried out to show if the outcomes meet the objectives of the program.
Recent studies from North America and Europe claim that prescribed burning could produce major reductions in emissions from forest fires and thus diminish the environmental impact. Burning programs should be planned to ensure complete coverage of all areas. A nation-wide approach should be developed to provide a cohesive plan to diminish these heartbreaking happenings.
In 2013, John Fisher of New South Wales State Forests told the Black Saturday Inquiry "Our aim with fuel reduction burning is to burn a proportion of the landscape during autumn when fuel moisture levels are sufficiently high, and sensitive environments, particularly rainforest gullies, stream sides, buffers et cetera that are sensitive to fire, are not impacted by fuel reduction burning.
That allows us to constrain fuel reduction burning in that period of time to the areas that are short-term fire-dependent ecosystems blackbutt ridges, et cetera. That breaks up the fuels in the landscape and allows an effective suppression effort. Our research demonstrates that this has been quite effective."
Another perspective is that, a study in Tasmania has found. It proffers that prescribed burn-offs have little impact on reducing the extent or intensity of bushfires. Burn-offs are a scheduled part of measures taken for the bushfire season, but modelling proposes that fire authorities need to target unrealistic amounts of land to have any meaningful effect on taming future wildfires.
The aim of prescribed burning is a reduction in the amount of combustible material that is in the bush so that if a fire starts it won't spread as far or be as intense. To test how much prescribed burning would be needed to reduce the intensity and extent of a future bushfire, researchers from the University of Tasmania's school of biological sciences simulated more than 11,000 fires on a typically dangerous fire-weather day in the Apple Isle.
Is it a form of arrogance the way in which major policies have ignored the founders of our countries advice regarding maintaining our native bushland?
They found that firefighters would need to carry out prescribed burn-offs across 31% of Tasmania in order to have a significant impact on reducing the threat from wildfires. More realistic smaller-scale burn-offs, however, had almost no effect on the extent and intensity of a wildfire. Professor David Bowman alleged the conclusions suggested that planned burn-offs were still necessary but not enough.
He said governments and fire authorities needed to consider taking a more local approach and introduce on the outskirts of towns and cities clever landscape designs that included irrigation and green fire breaks in the form of parklands, that could work in conjunction with burn-offs to help mitigate bushfire risks. Consideration must be taken for the fact that the terrain in Tasmania is more difficult than that of the rest of Australia.
Examples from past catastrophic bushfires should have impacted our choice on which advice we could follow when planning an Australian Bushfire Prevention Blueprint. It seems that the people in control of these decisions should form an Australia wide summit and come up with a plan that allows for the uniqueness of the Australian bushfire danger.
Is it a form of arrogance the way in which major policies have ignored the founders of our countries advice regarding maintaining our native bushland? Is this, perhaps a continuation of the condescending attitude of the rulers of the empire? Is this perhaps 21 century racism? To have survived as carers of this land the aboriginal people must understand this land, and we should continue to listen to their advice concerning their land.