Author: Mick Holton

Since the Royal Commission into the Black Saturday fires, only a third of the area earmarked for hazard reduction burns has been cleared and former CSIRO bushfire expert Phil Cheney says there have been “excuses… and Pseudo-science to justify this”.

The photos in this post were taken from a privately owned block which ranges between 1550m – 1850m in altitude. It is the highest freehold block in Australia and is owned by Barry Aitchison, former Fire Control Officer of Snowy River / Monaro Team for 32 years who is a passionate advocate for the high country.

This block is a particularly good example as it is not only owned and managed by someone with a lifetime of both fire and grazing experience, but it contains several test plots which were initiated as part of the High Fire Project in 2006.

The numbered photos in this post tell a story that is worth sharing.

Vic Jurskis wrote a document that was published on this web site 21st January 2019.

Greg Mullins’ dad told him about 1939 when “the sky seemed to be on fire every night”. John Mulligan lived through the Black Friday fires that burnt two million hectares of Victoria and killed 71 people. There were hundreds of fires in East Gippsland at that same time, but no major problems because the bush was kept clean by burning and grazing. John’s family weren’t worried, even when his uncle’s car repeatedly stopped because of vapour locks in the fuel lines with the extreme heat. John has formed the East Gippsland Wildfire Taskforce to try and restore sanity. If we get fires under the same weather conditions today, they’ll destroy everything from Bairnsdale to Sydney.

And now, 12 months later we are see burnt country that extends from Bairnsdale to Sydney with only a few unburnt areas remaining.

The term unprecedented has been applied to almost every aspect of the fire season across the entire nation.

It has been shocking, tragic and devastating – and it is not over. But the terrible truth is that we have seen such trauma again and again, from Black Saturday in 2009 to Ash Wednesday in 1983, from Black Tuesday in 1967 to Black Friday in 1939, and further back to Black Thursday in 1851. Millions of hectares burned, thousands of properties destroyed, dozens of lives lost.

We have had disasters where more properties have been lost, more area has burned and six times as many people have been killed. We have been told the fires started earlier than ever but spring and early summer is the usual fire season in northern NSW and Queensland, and, for example, we know there were widespread fires in southeast Queensland in the winter of 1946.

Claims by climate scientist Joelle Gergis that rainforests in Lamington National Park were burning for the first time were disproved by reports from the spring of 1951 about fire taking out “2000 acres of thick rainforest country” in the park.

Without adequate management and fire reduction burn offs, the ferocity of Australia’s fires will continue to incur an “exponential effect” to the point “no firefighting force known to man” can stop them, says bushfire specialist Roger Underwood, supported by David Packham.

Indigenous fire practitioner Victor Steffensen wants to see a change in the way Australians manage the land.

Brian, you were the first person who told me and then I spoke to Vic Jurskis about it and scientist David Packham. You are the first person who said to me the intensity of these fires burns the humus content in the soil right down to the mineral layer and you then told me that it will rain because we have the flooding rains after the droughts and that topsoil is washed away and floods into the creeks and clogs them up. It’s absolute degradation.

I mean once upon a time, a lot of our areas of our national parks used to be a forested country and the sawmillers had a sustainable industry and they used to manage the bush they used to do a lot of the hazard reduction burning, people tracks open and because they value timber, timber was important. Now, we’ve closed them all the forest industry down virtually.

We’ve locked up the parks we don’t let people into them. We’ve closed all the trails off and our timber just gets burnt and wasted and meanwhile overseas they’re cutting down rainforests to supply Australia with timber. I mean how crazy is that?

It appears that scientific bush fire experts have been warning for several years that a catastrophe would be coming and yet these warnings have not been heeded by governments or their bureaucratic officials. Why is that, and what does it tell us about Australian society? John Adams and Martin North discuss. Is this also true of impending financial disaster?

Theo is 4 years old. He sent the following message to all firefighters via the VFFA web site.