Landcare, caring for countryLiddy Nevile
IntroductionAustralia is an old country and its environment is fragile. Aboriginal practices have supported inhabitants for millenia, possibly with significant evolution of the environment, but in the last two hundred years the environment has significantly changed and, in some cases, been destroyed or rendered dangerous. However climate change is relevant, severe fire events are not infrequent and the flora and fauna have significantly changed.
This talk aims to draw attention to the difference between the old and new land use practices and ask if the immigrants of the last 200 years might be able to learn from their predecessors. In particular, the role fires and associated practices can play in the environment will be considered as away of drawing attention to and interpreting land care and caring for country.
Early European paintings of Australia show it as a land with open ‘grazing’ spaces in which
hunting was easy; with bio-diversity, and safety from what is now greatly feared in Australia, uncontrollable fire.
Image 1: Painting by Eugene von Guerard, , ABC Firestick Ecology1
Image 2: Painting by Eugene von Guerard, ABC Firestick Ecology2
For a long time it was believed the early painters were simply seeing the new land through their
‘old’ lenses, imaging it as they saw the mother country. Recently, northern hemisphere visitors attested to such a temptation when they commented on the problem they saw with many
1 from http://www.abc.net.au/local/photos/2015/09/14/4312198.htm2 Op cit.
indigenous Australian trees having bark only up to a certain height. They wondered how the forests maintained their canopy.
Image 33
Today, it is slowly being recognised that those early painters were painting what they saw, and that the land had been ‘treated’ to provide those useful open spaces. The Aboriginal practice of
using fire as a tool for agriculture rather regarding it as an unpredictable, arbitrary risk and enemy, has been credited with this achievement. The role of open grazing has also been
recognised.
A friend of the author relates that his grandfather used to ‘slow burn’ their farmland. He claimed
that his neighbours did not ‘approve’ so in later years, early in the season he simply dropped some ash from his pipe in a strategic location and then took a while to get around to dealing
with it – knowing that by the time he did, his mission would have been accomplished and slow burn would be underway. His grandson recalls it as controlled, deliberate, slow burning.
Australia is subjected to very savage bushfires these days – every year, huge areas are burnt beyond repair by hot, in fact increasingly hotter, fires. These hot fires race up hillsides,
supported by increasingly strong winds it seems, but they also jump, as inflammable eucalyptusgas clouds. Many of the alpine forests where modern Australians ski are now gone. The last
fires were so hot they burnt the trees and the seeds and now it is not even possible to plant new forests because the native trees will not survive without the protective cover of older, bigger
trees.
Today, somewhat ironically, many Australian native plants cannot be propagated unless they are
associated with fire somehow – by being heated or by being wet with water that has smoke infused in it, or something similar.
Biodiversity degradationThe evolution of the landscape occurs surprisingly quickly.
3 from https://i.pinimg.com/originals/12/4f/58/124f58582b3c2c2fd86128c0e6705802.jpg
Image 4: ABC Firestick Ecology4
Vic Jurskis, an expert forester, points to the many exposed tree trunks and branches in an area as dipicted in Image 4, as typical of sick trees in a declining forest due to a lack of burning and also a lack of grazing, which he says has similar benefits to traditional burning:
The process begins with the lack of fire, seedlings grow into bushes; mulch accumulates; soil conditions and microclimates change; nitrogen accumulates in the soil; tree roots deteriorate; and as the trees get sick they lose their foliage and that lets more light in and the understory thrives; that's a vicious cycle; pests flourish that eat any part of the tree, the leaves and the roots - because sick trees are better food. (Brown, 20155)
Image 5: ABC Firestick Ecology6
In Image 5, the red gum to the left has been fenced off and is surrounded by saplings, and the one tothe right is in a grazing paddock. Jurskis says the comparison of the crowns shows that the tree in the grazed paddock is obviously more healthy. The image shows an example to support the theory that trees decline unless undergrowth is controlled and nutrient cycling is maintained by burning or grazing.
4 Op cit.5 From www.abc.net.au/local/photos/2015/09/14/4312198.htm6 O p cit.
Images 6: , ABC Firestick Ecology7
In Images 6, Jurskis is looking up at a dying ironbark that is covered not with foliage but with parasitic Mistletoe. The tree is surrounded by uncontrolled Pittosporum and native cherry that is a parasite on the tree's roots. Jurskis says that traditional Aboriginal burning kept forests clear of such undergrowth.
Image 78
Soon enough, Jurskis says, instead of an open grassy forest with spaced trees and wider crowns and open, grassy understory, and easy walking, the crowns of the spotted gums are thinning, they have epicormic growth, and they haven't got mature leaves out on the ends of the branchlets where they should be (Image 7). The crown is sort of receding down onto the branches as shown in Image 8.
Image 8; ABC Firestick Ecology9
7 Op cit.8 Op cit.9 Op cit.
Image 9: ABC Firestick Ecology10
Jurskis says Image 9 shows a forest in the last stages of tree decline. He says a thick under-storey has developed because of a lack of burning, leaving the trees vulnerable to pests, parasites and diseases.
The survivors are still there. The dead trees aren't obvious because they've broken down. It's quieter because the bellbirds have 'moved on to where there are more sick trees in the earlierstage of decline’.
The ‘space’ vacated is then filled:
Image 10: ABC Firestick Ecology11
For Jurskis, the final stage of tree decline is the invasion of wattle scrub (Image 10). "Because declining trees don't carry seeds then the site has reverted to wattle scrub." And that's how it will stay.
The wattles produce hard seeds that persist in the soil so when the current stand dies of old age or gets burnt by a high intensity fire, then we'll get a new wattle scrub.
Jurskis says this is an example of how allowing forests previously managed by Aboriginal burning to turn to wilderness ends up destroying biodiversity.
10 Op cit.11 Op cit.
Image 1112
Despite the fact that epidermic shoots will sprout vigorously from under bark that has been lightly burnt, the recovery of forests after serious fires is not good. Note that in Image 11, the canopy has been fatally burnt.
Protecting diversityInsight SBS featured Victor Steffensen, an Aboriginal fire expert:
Each year rural fire services across the country carry out vast swathes of back-burning and hazard reduction, but Steffensen says this is entirely the wrong approach: the fires tend to burn inward, creating an inferno from which animals cannot escape and a heat so strong it burns both undergrowth and canopy.
Indigenous burning, on the other hand, is cool: temperatures remain low so flames never reach the canopy.
“The canopy is [a] whole other world,” says Steffensen. “The canopy is so important to us because that's the life of the flowers, the fruits, the birds, the animals … that top canopy is very, very sacred and the simple rule is that it never burns.
If you burn the canopy, then you have the wrong fire. Fire [should] behave like water, trickling through the country [so] it doesn't burn everything.”
Traditional burns are also started from ‘fire circles’ and patterns that allow the fire to spread out in a 360 degrees radius. This allows animals to escape as they smell the
smoke and keeps temperatures down, with only one fire front to manage.
Steffensen says this kind of fire knowledge has been lost over the centuries, both as a result of colonisation – the diffusion of knowledge throughout the stolen generations, the introduction of non-native weeds that spring up when the canopy burns – and of our migration towards cities. Even European pastoralists knew how to manage the land with fire,he says.”
The author spent a day with Steffensen, Aboriginal Elders and forestry experts in Victoria learning about cool fires. Participants were shown how trees limit the height to which fires can
burn without damaging the trees and, in fact, with the cool fire cleaning their trunk and offering propagation opportunities to seeds in the surrounding area.
12 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushfires_in_Australia#/media/File:Bushfire_damage.jpg
Might it be that the trees have short bark coverage to deal with fires, by any chance?
Image 1213
In fact, many long-lasting Australian trees only have heavy bark for a short distance up their trunk. An Elder described how the bark of the tree in Image 12 controls the movement of air up
the trunk and so actually inhibits the fire at an appropriate height.
Australian ‘grass trees’ are very slow growing but in hot fires they burn and die14. Cool fires
burn up the trunk and melt resin that Aboriginal people have used for centuries as glue, to join tips to spears, for example. The tree doesn’t die because it has a weird construction with its
leaves tightly packed at its base. Often the trees are stimulated to flower after a fire.
Can we do cool burning today?In his book Firestick Ecology, Vic Jurskis tells a simple story of how Aboriginal people managed the land through fire to create and maintain the biodiversity and the fire-safe environment that greeted the first European settlers. The sub-title is 'fairdinkum science in plain English'. He says that to conserve biodiversity and live safely, we need to manage our forests with fire 'willingly, frequently and, with practice, skilfully'. The evidence of our land management failure is all around us, he says (Brown, 201515)
Bill Gammage is another forester. He has been awarded the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Based on extensive research, in this book he argues that the use of fire was a management strategy. Hesays working to control land that appears to newcomers 'park-like' or 'like a gentleman's
estate', takes centuries of management (Brown, 201216)
Justin Leonard, lead researcher in Urban Bushfire Design at the CSIRO, has argued that Australiansneed to expand their concept of the ‘backyard’ to include bush and vegetation outside the fence. People who enjoy living near areas of wilderness also need to take some responsibility for it.
There’s a way to live in every part of the landscape,” he says, “and it's this integrated way of understanding of what fire is in that location, how to find the balance and manage
the bush in the right way, and that easily unlocks how you build and live and behave and
13 from https://3c1703fe8d.site.internapcdn.net/newman/csz/news/800/2017/treebarkthic.jpg14 See https://www.bushheritage.org.au/species/grass-trees A fire may burn their leaves and blacken their trunk, but the tree usually survives: the
living growth-point is buried underground, protected by tightly packed leaf bases. In fact, some grass trees are stimulated by fire – in the spring after a summer bushfire, large numbers of plants can flower.
15 from http://www.abc.net.au/local/photos/2015/09/14/4312198.htm16 from http://www.abc.net.au/local/audio/2012/05/28/3512963.htm?site=southeastnsw
understand.” (from http://www.sbs.com.au/news/insight/article/2016/02/15/our-country-needs-burn-more-indigenous-fire-manager)
Victor Steffensen works to empower local communities with traditional fire knowledge so thoseaffected by major bushfires most, can mitigate them best.
Cool burnsSo what does a cool fire do to the ground plants, to the animals? Very little is the answer. The
burning takes place before the country is dried out and may need coaxing and gentle persuasion to do its work. See Steffensen in Image 13.
As the author’s new property in a region new to her dried out the first summer, she was alarmedby the cracks in the soil. Needlessly. Lots of little critters use the cracks to escape the heat of the
sun and also, of course, potential fires. Bigger animals like wombats have holes into which theycan go and other animals, like koalas, can wait high in the treetops. Cool fires travel slowly, and
animals like kangaroos know to run through front of the fire, from the bit yet to be burnt to the area already burnt. (Horses do this too.)
Image 1317
But researchers do not necessarily agree that cool burning will stop the fires across Australia.
One of Australia’s favourite fire prevention measures is prescribed burning – using carefully controlled fires to clear out flammable materials. We’re almost obsessed with it. Indeed, it seems the outcome of every major inquiry is that we need to do more of it.
The Royal Commission inquiry that followed Victoria’s 2009 Black Saturday fires recommended that 5% of all public land in Victoria be treated per year – a doctrine that was subsequently dropped due to impracticality.
Yet our research, published [Dec 15, 2017] in the International Journal of Wildland Fire, modelled thousands of fires in Tasmania and found that nearly a third of the state would have to be burned to effectively lower the risk of bushfires.
17 From http://www.sbs.com.au/news/sites/sbs.com.au.news/files/styles/body_image/public/hd_100216_insight_fire_victor_scrnsht_26216957_0_2.jpg?itok=FEtncF0a&mtime=1470144187
The question of how much to burn and where is a puzzle we must solve, especially given theinherent risk, issues caused by smoke and shrinking weather windows for safe burning due to climate change. (James Furlaud and David Bowman, University of Tasmania, 201718)
Cool burning and cultureSteffensen says that recently, because his people could not get the plants they need for cultural practices, they got very frustrated not being able to burn their land so the movement to think
harder about it began. Now, with years of practice, Steffensen’s demonstrations and explanations are very persuasive19.
Caring for country is a cultural practice for traditional Aboriginal people. The practice is understood through stories. The characters such as the fire itself, the weeds that are destroyed,
the plants that are promoted, all have roles. The attraction of the poetic language and imagery isstrangely disarming. Cool fires help heal the land, they bring the plants back to their original
homes, they return invaders to areas where they can thrive without causing damage: peace returns to the country. One gets a feeling of longevity that is sustainability in today’s terms.
Modern landcare, is seen more as a cultural practice than as an agricultural disruption.
ConclusionSo what is there to learn from all this about fires? Well, for a start, let’s be sure that we are talking regionally. Whatever is to be learnt for use in one context is not necessarily going to be
useful in another. Different regions in Australia have been classified according to best guesses at what Australia might have been like pre-European settlement. Today, differences perpetuate
but they are the result of a different set of causes – including misunderstanding of the nature of the countryside and agricultural ‘fashion’.
To combat fire risk we must take a multi-pronged approach that includes innovative strategies, such as designing new spatial patterns for prescribed burning, manually removing fuels from areas in which prescribed burning is not possible, improving the standards for buildings and defensible spaces, and most importantly, engaging the community in all of this.
Only by attacking this problem from multiple angles, and through close collaboration with the community and all levels of government, can we effectively face our fiery future. (David Bowman & James Furlaud, 15/12/2017)
And a major constraint that severely and appropriately inhibits the initiation of any kind of fire is security. The cost of insurance is exorbitant and it is hard to convince people that fires are
good!
18 writing for The Conversation at https://theconversation.com/to-fight-the-catastrophic-fires-of-the-future-we-need-to-look-beyond-prescribed-burning-89167
19 See for example, http://www.sbs.com.au/yourlanguage/aboriginal/en/audiotrack/traditional-fire-burning-alive
