"Now I could talk about vegetation, cause I'm a plant person, but you'll all go "duh", but if I give you a picture of something with a colourful head you'll all go "wow!", so we'll talk about birds... Birds are to landscape ecology what kittens are to Facebook."

I went and saw Ian Lunt at Ballarat a few months ago and the presentation is online. His presentation is great and he delivers lines like above so dryly, he's a pleasure to watch.

Though I totally realise that above gag will only apply to me and a handful of other landscape ecology folk. That being said later in the presentation he pays out on Eddie McGuire so you can probably get behind that.

You should also read his blog. Particularly this article, which has this following piece of homespun naturalist philosophy that I can certainly get behind:

"To the class of 2011: Leave a legacy. If you seek immortality, hammer a stake through your plots. It’ll probably outlive everything else that seems important right now."

Three Hydro-Electric Commission workers stand in front of the Lea Tree - estimated between 2,000 & 4,000 years old - that they chainsawed and drilled-and-filled as a reprisal against Franklin Dam protesters, South-West Tasmania, 1983.

The vandalism of the Lea Tree - an ancient Huon Pine (Dacrydium Franklinii) - is detailed in this chapter from the Australian Institute of Criminology. The key paragraphs, though, are as follows:

[After the High Court handed down its decision that the construction of the Franklin Dam would not proceed] officials were still concerned that the rainforest area at Warner's Landing might be vandalised in protest against the High Court decision.

These concerns proved to be well founded. Near Warner's Landing stood a Huon Pine tree some 9 feet in diameter. It was a sufficiently prominent landmark to have acquired a name - the Lea Tree. Three men, all over six feet tall, found that they were unable to link arms around the trunk. The tree was so old that it had been left by the convict cutters of the 1820s as of no use for boat building. Given its size, it was quite likely more than 2,000 years old.

On the night of 5 July, 1983, the tree was chainsawed, holes were drilled in it, oil was poured in the holes, and the tree was set alight. The fire continued for at least twenty-four hours.

Whilst it has been suggested by some that the tree was burned by conservationists to attract publicity, a more plausible explanation is that the tree was vandalised by pro-dam interests as an act of reprisal.

Allegations that HEC personnel were responsible for the incident are supported by photographs of HEC workers holding placards bearing various anti-conservationist messages in front of the charred tree. One photograph shows three workers posed next to the smouldering trunk, on which the words '[Expletive] You Green [Expletive]' were painted.

When I initially read that chapter, I could not find that photo anywhere online. Today I stopped by Readings however and found that it had been published in Alex Hungerford's "UpRiver - Untold Stories of the Franklin River Activists".

Seeing the picture really brings a whole new level of uneasiness to the story itself. Reading the tale without the image allows it to somehow remain something of an abstraction. There was a tree; some men; the assumed smell of diesel and noise; but all faceless though.

With the image, though, there are no longer abstractions. The embers of the tree glow in the background. What you assumed the expletives to be are laid out bare. They look like my father's friends, they have the faces of people I know. The lit cigarette. The stubby of beer. Hell, I own helmets with earmuffs like that. There's that line in that song by Okkervil River, ya know:

Now, with all these cameras focused on my face
You'd think they could see it through my skin
They're looking for evil, thinking they can trace it, but
Evil don't look like anything.

30 years ago in a little over a month.

The Kangaroo Tail and The Driptorch

The above photo is a composite of two photos I took this year in East Gippsland, within the vicinity of Bemm River, while working with the Department of Sustainability & Environment and the University of Sydney on a Australian Research Council project looking into the effect of prescribed burning on soil carbon in Victorian forests. This Xanthorrhoea grassland lay around 50m away from one of our forest sites (which were typically dominated by Eucalyptus muelleriana and Eucalyptus globoidea). 

The picture on the left was taken in January this year, as part of our pre-fire surveys; the one on the right taken in May, after the prescribed burn had taken place. 

Prescribed burning in Victoria is something of a controversial issue at times, and there has been much debate, opinion and research into it since the State Government committed to increasing the amount of the state treated with managed fire since the Black Saturday bushfires. 


I realise this image doesn't really contribute a constructive comment on the discussion. The fact is, photos such as these - as powerful as they are - tend to miss the third and vital component of the landscape, which is regeneration. It's lack of it, or it's abundance, it doesn't matter - but it is the conclusion to the narrative of the landscape that needs to be told.


Ideally I'll be able to return to this site perhaps one year down the track and turn this photo series into a triptych.


On a technical note - I managed to pull off both these photos using only what is available on a regular Apple iPhone. Not bad quality, I have to contend.

Ash & dust

Mountain ash regrowth from 1939 Black Friday bushfires

I periodically do this thing where I ask my girlfriend and a bunch of my friends something innocuous like “hey, want to go for a drive on Sunday?” and then, once they’ve said yes, it’s only as we’re approaching somewhere around the 40-km mark from Melbourne that I then say to them “… because by the way, we’re going to a forest a researcher from a uni was telling me about last week.” Amazingly, so far this has gone down relatively well every time.

Richard - a good friend of mine and a great scale bar.

This time, my lucky friends were treated to a drive out to Yarra State Forest to check out - and yes, I’m actually about to type this - a big pile of sawdust that’s sitting in the middle of the Mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans) forest between Warburton and Powelltown (along Britannia Creek, for the geographically pedantic among us).

Before you’re all like “~wow tom cld u get ne moar lamer~” - it's important to get a bit of context around this heap of sawdust and why I decided the fuel was worth expending to go and see it.


It's hard to put an exact date on it, but the pile originated sometime in the early 20th century. I'm tentative to put the date sometime between 1907 and 1924 - as it was in that era that the the Cuming Smith sawmilling company operated in Britannia Creek, which used Mountain ash timber for distilling purposes. I doubt this was the exact site of that mill, however it's very likely that this sawdust originated from another mill that supplied the Cuming Smith mill. (I highly recommend reading Tom Griffith's Forests of Ash for more information around this area).

Boardmarks in an old stump that was
buried beneath the sawdust 

Therefore, we can roughly estimate that this pile of sawdust - which in some parts is around 20m high - as being one hundred years old. Isn't that incredible? And because of the nature of sawdust - which ties up nitrogen from the soil and accumulates water in it's mass - no plants have been able to grow on the heap, so the effect is a preserved bald patch in the forest, ringed by seedlings of ash and fern. It's quite a confronting sight, but allows the most impressive vista of 1939 ash regeneration when you stand upon it's top.

And for that last reason I tend to find this sort of stuff endlessly fascinating. As you stand on the pile of sawdust - the detritus of the industrial exploitation of these forests at the beginnings of last century - you look across Britannia Creek and see what you can only imagine is the fullest expression of nature: towering mountain ash, an understory of Dicksonia tree ferns, the calls of lyrebirds ringing through the valley around you, the shuffling of leaves from yellow-tailed black cockatoos.

And then you walk across the road behind, and sidling between the eucalypts and acacias you find english elms and pines on curiously level ground - botanical signposts of a bygone era, the remnants of the evident gardening skills of former mill operators - and you can’t help but wonder how easy it can seem in one instance for man’s impact on the land to be washed away with time and the steady onward march of ecological succession, while in another, it stubbornly remains - heaped, bare, and sunbaked, warding off any chance of assimilation.

A planted oak tree at the former mill site.

It brings up a lot of thoughts around our ideas of nature and what constitutes the notion of wilderness that we carry with us whenever we walk into aesthetically beautiful, awe-inspiring landscapes.

Anyway, after all that personal musing we headed down to the Polish Jester in Warburton and ate a heap of pierogi and borsch and had a few bison-grass vodkas and that’s probably the reason my friends accommodate this sort of behaviour from me.

The Bushfire Cycle

Flowerdale after the February 2009 bushfires.

Reported in the media over the last week has been the release of the Bushfires Royal Commission Implementation Monitor Progress Report. As it's title clearly suggests, it serves as an audit on the implementation of the recommendations from the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Comission. Its release in the media has been not particularly all-encompassing, but the reports have generally been of the following nature.

"The Bushfire Royal Commissioner Implementation Monitor (BRCIM) report says, despite a minimal bushfire threat in Victoria during the 2010/11 season, anecdotal evidence has emerged suggesting public complacency on issues of fire preparation and planning..."

- 'Worrying' public apathy: bushfire report, Sydney Morning Herald, July 29th 2011

"'Moving towards another fire season and the third anniversary of the 2009 bushfires, the state must not be complacent and lose momentum in implementing the required actions within the agreed timelines,' the 179-page report states..."

- Bushfire apathy 'worrying', The Age, July 30th, 2011

Doesn't bode well, does it? Interesting to observe, though, is the following. Back in 2004, the Council of Australian Governments released the following graph in their National Inquiry on Bushfire Mitigation and Management.

They called it "The Bushfire Cycle":

Their explanation:

"The bushfire cycle occurs principally in southern Australia. It proceeds until the next major event and can extend over 20 to 50 years... The question is whether the cycle is inevitable or whether there is an opportunity to influence outcomes and mitigate the impact of the various elements. Although ... bushfires are inevitable and Australians must learn to live with the exposure, the Inquiry concluded that some community and government action can be taken to reduce the impact of, or even eliminate altogether, elements of the cycle."

What the authors didn't envisage in 2004 was of course the February 2009 fires, which, with their similar distribution to the 1939 Black Friday fires, would have increased their estimated cycle length from 50 to as much as 80 years. This question has been brought up previously on this blog, and can be summarised in the language of the Bushfire Cycle in the following way - "how do you explain a cycle to someone when it may very well last longer than their lives?"

Furthermore - the 2004 report went on:

"While individuals need to be held accountable for their decisions and the public needs to be satisfied that all matters of concern have been investigated, bushfire mitigation and management will not progress if blame dominates over learning."

Meanwhile:

I should have stayed at post, says Christine Nixon - Herald Sun, August 2nd, 2011

Christine failed us all and that's about the size of it - Herald Sun, August 1st, 2011

It's a fair cop, Christine (and society ain't to blame) - Sydney Morning Herald, July 31st, 2011

It can be quite disturbing when reality mirrors, so closely, a graph obviously made with minimal effort in Microsoft Powerpoint. And even less comforting is when journalists seem so content in lending a hand in leading the public in vicious circles.

"We have still not lived long enough": Fire and history

… Try, at every step, to expose the lie of terra nullius, and so move towards a post-colonial Australia that is truly at home with its environment and history, where the Aboriginal and the Asian and the White Australian can believe in the truth of history, and the justness of a future, that is so much more than a beautiful lie.

- Tim Flannery,

in the concluding line to his 2003 Quarterly Essay

Beautiful Lies: Population and Environment in Australia

Two brown paper packages arrived on my desk at work a fair few months ago now. In the first, the 1986 first edition print of Joan Webster’s Complete Australian Bushfire Book; in the latter, three heavy volumes of the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission Final Report. Two texts, different in design and style, but more or less charged with the same unenviable task of answering that plaintive question asked after one surveys the scorched earth, the smouldered homes, the vacated family Christmas seats and names stricken from the community listings – “why?” Why did these fires, these apocalyptic fires, happen? Or, perhaps more tellingly – why did we let them happen?

It was around a week and a half after the February 7th Bushfires of 2009 that Tom Griffiths, a Professor of History at the Australian National University penned an award-winning article entitled We have still not lived long enough. His title was inspired by a phrase uttered by the 1939 Black Friday fires Royal Commission Judge Leonard Stretton – that they, the people who lived and died in the forests that were hellishly consumed on Friday the 13th January, 1939, had not lived long enough.

As Griffiths points out, Stretton was not so much commenting on the youthfulness of the dead, but rather lamented the lack of environmental knowledge of both the victims and survivors – “the innocence of European immigrants in a land whose natural rhythms they did not yet understand”, and “the fragility and brevity of a human lifetime in forests where life cycles and fire regimes had the periodicity and ferocity of centuries.”

Keppel Lookout over Marysville, October 2010

Keppel Lookout, south of Marysville, the epicenter of the public effect of bushfire. The Cathedral Ranges are seen further north. As of late 2010, the effects of fire are still visible.

Stephen Smith from the local Department of Sustainability & Environment talked to us about some of the observed ecological responses to fire. Some devastated, some rejuvenated. Positively, some endangered species, such as the Buxton Gum, fall into that latter category, which is apparently flourishing after the disturbance February 7th, 2009, provided.

The story of the Barred Galaxias (Galaxias fuscus, right) is particularly fascinating. Prior to the fires, the greatest threat to the fish was due to colonisation of its habitat by introduced Brown and Rainbow Trout. Incredibly, what preserved the fish's distribution in the streams near Marysville was due to a poorly constructed culvert that acted as a trout barrier. It's incredible that, occasionally, human negligence and poor engineering skills can have a positive effect on an endangered species.

The culvert has since been repaired, and replaced with a constructed trout barrier.

Three Years Before The Fires

Ever since the Black Saturday bushfires wiped out the majority of the Kinglake National Park and the Wallaby Creek Closed Catchment, I've heard lecturers and friends talk about those forests in eulogistic tones, seemingly regretful that they could not do anything to personally spare those 300-odd year old Mountain Ash (Eucalyptus regnans) trees the girdling flames of February 7th 2009.

I was mourning them, too, as I knew that I had spent hardly any time amongst them, and as far as I could remember, had never documented them.

However, perhaps due to the general haze and confusion of undergrad, I had forgotten that I had actually been taken on a field trip to those forests in 2006 by Dr. Peter Ades as part of a Trees & Forests subject.

After some digging around on some old external hard drives, I managed to find a set of photos I had taken on that field trip.

If Peter is correct, because of the dismal crash of forestry enrollments at The University of Melbourne between 2005-09, we would have been the last cohort of forestry students to have visited Wallaby Creek before it was burnt.

It was in the Wallaby Creek Closed Catchment, which is to the west of Kinglake National Park, where some of the tallest living flowering plants in Victoria, let alone the world, resided. These Eucalyptus regnans were the product of a bushfire sometime in the 1700s, and by the sheer luck of exclusion from countless fires, including Black Thursday, Friday and Ash Wednesday, they were never engulfed in flames until only one year ago.

In the tallest trees stakes, the top of the list is still dominated by a few trees in regrowth Tasmania. For the mainland, however, it is likely that the tallest living trees are now those in the Dandenong Ranges along Sassafras and Clematis Creek.

What is most striking about a 300-year old Mountain Ash forest is largely aesthetic - due to the vast distance between the height of the understory and the sky-scraping upper stratum, it seems as the Mountain Ash are not trees but pillars holding up the sky.

Futhermore, natural thinning of these forests result in there being surprisingly few actual trees per hecatre, which is interspersed with a greater number of rainforest species and a reduced dominance of wattle.

All is not lost, of course - the Wallaby Creek forest isn't 'destroyed', per se, but rather the time has come for the next cohort of trees to grow between the marbled-toned pillars of their parents. As to whether, however, the next 300 years offers a climate stable enough for them to reach their prior height and maturity will be no more than a game of speculation.

While these two images aren't of the same forest, and represent different age classes, it's the same forest species, and gives you something of an idea of the before and after effect of a major bushfire event.

In Memory of Black Saturday, Feb. 7th, 2009

A firebreak currently being constructed along the ridge of the O'Shannassy catchment and the

forest that eventually leads toward Marysville. Some may scoff at the importance of it now, well after the

fires that devastated community forest and wildlife, but it's purpose is not for now, but in 70 years time, when

'Black Saturday' means as much as 'Black Friday' did over a year ago.

North-Eastern Forests of Victoria

Nothafagus cunninghamii (Myrtle beech) forest, near Mt. Donna Buang, January 2010

Eucalytpus regnans (Mountain Ash), near Marysville, January 2010

Eucalyptus pauciflora (Snow gum), January 2010

Lake Mountain, January 2010

Marysville, January 2010

Recent logging coup, near Toolangi, January 2010

The Old Growth That Goes Unnoticed

It's hard not to join in the chants when they come to town - mainly because it's something of a no-brainer. Old growth forests, those mythic stands of trees, whatever species they may be (if we even care in the first place what species they are), touch something deep within us that compel us to argue for them to be conserved, protected and revered. We don't care for definitions, all we care is that they're old, they're forests, and they're safely locked in reserves far from the touch of humankind.

It's a noble cause, and to paraphrase the eminent Victorian forest ecologist David Lindenmayer, we are living in a time when we shouldn't have to log or destroy our old growth forests. It is a mark of the truly civilised society, then, that the soil shall never shake with the vibration of a falling giant ever again.

But there is a question that hangs over these presumptions that no one seems to consider - what happens when the old growth dies, of natural causes? In the case of Australian old growth, the majestic Eucalyptus regnans tends to live for around 400 years - dwarfed by the 2,200 years of it's rival-in-height, Sequoia sempervirens. Are we prepared to let go of old-growth, if that loss occurs free of the hand of man or bushfire?

The greatest issue concerning Victorian old-growth forest is not so much as to do whether it is adequately mapped and protected, or whether the loss of old growth would represent a loss of a vast and efficient carbon sink. As Tim Flannery noted in his 2003 Quarterly Essay 'Beautiful Lies', it may very well be that there is an unfair level of devoted attention paid to them when it comes to debates about sustainable land management.

It's a tricky argument, and you're not likely to garner many friends (of the earth - ha!) while pursuing it - it is too easy a sentiment to be appropriated by anti-conservationists as an argument for no-holds-barred native forest harvesting. However, there needs to be a level of reconsideration when it comes to old-growth forests. As Tim Low pointed out in his 2003 novel 'The New Nature', the notion of wilderness can, at times, be an unhelpful idea - potentially even a "dangerous myth", one of the "biggest buzz words in history", an "idealised view of nature [speaking] strongly to people disillusioned with city values."

In my interpretation, the most dangerous thing about "wilderness" is that it exiles nature to that which lives outside the city limits. And thus, everything in and around our suburban gardens, city streets, and rivers - indeed, all that is closest to our hearts and homes - aren't given the due weight they deserve. This is particularly so in the case of the urban forest.

In 2007, Randy Stringer from the University of Adelaide presented a paper at the annual Treenet Symposium titled 'The Benefits of Adelaide's Street Trees Revisited'. Some of his general conclusions included the observation that trees in Adelaide's urban landscape provide not only aesthetic value, but without them, summer temperatures in the city would be 0.5-2.0 degrees Celsius warmer, translating to a per household per year air conditioning energy consumption

increase of $20. This occurred alongside stormwater reduction, carbon dioxide sequestration and air pollution reduction.

However, one of the most interesting remarks was that, all in all, older, larger street trees in urban landscapes can provide up to 60 times the benefits of younger smaller trees. Therefore - we need old growth not only in wilderness reserves, but in our cities too. This is a great challenge - it requires our planning to take account the next 50 years, and an intelligent overlap between young trees and old trees to ensure we never end up with barren streets burning in the heat of summer. Furthermore, it requires us to choose trees that will survive the hotter and drier future that awaits us.

But most of all, it is but another reason why we need to realise that we never are, and never will be, distinct and separate from nature. The distinction, if it was ever there at all, is porous and malleable. Nature's heart beats to the same ceaseless rhythm in the misty wilderness reserves as it does in the sprawling metropolis. It's just up to us to listen to it.

The Carbon Wars

Timber body under fire over climate aid claims
The Age, 27th July, 2009

A TIMBER industry body is being investigated over claims it misled the public by asserting that buying wood products helps the fight against climate change.

The consumer watchdog has asked Forest & Wood Products Australia to respond to allegations it made two deceptive claims: that the carbon dioxide stored in trees is locked up when they are logged and converted into wood products, and that forestry is one of Australia's most greenhouse-friendly industries.

The "Wood. Naturally Better" print advertisement campaign was based on variations on the slogan "It's more than attractive furniture. It's a helping hand in climate change."

It prompted a complaint to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission by the Wilderness Society, backed by advice from community legal service, the Environment Defenders Office.

(Read More)

In the small amount of time that I've had dealing with forestry workers and professionals, this is another one of those issues where you can almost visibly see the hair on the forester's back prick-up, as they adopt that feline-esque pose that signals a mixture of aggression and outright fear.

The point of the matter comes down to a basic tenet of biological science - for a tree to grow, carbon dioxide is sequestered into the tree, stored as biomass in the leaves, limbs, stem or roots. Therefore, when it comes to mitigating the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, alongside driving your car less, eating vegetables, installing power-saving globes and never taking a plane anywhere, decking your house out with timber products is the best thing you can do.

However, you can't really imagine a Climate-Change-abatin' Green-voter saying to houseguest "You'd like a Chai? No problem. Come on in, just watch your head on the Tibetan prayer flags, we can sit around my Old-Growth Mountain Ash Coffee Table. 'Bout 350 years old, it is - whole lotta carbon in dat one!"

However, it's not totally that simple. For one, as The Wilderness Society point out, not all our forests are used for 'value-added' (as they call it in the biz) products such as furniture or high-quality flooring. Even as of 2003/04, around 75% of the log sales from native forests in East Gippsland, Central Victoria and Tasmania went straight to woodchipping - not exactly a secure resource when it comes to 'locking' up carbon.

But if we assume that, idealistically, we begin to treat our timber as high-value and make only the finest furniture and houses from it, what argument do we have against doing so? This is especially a question to consider when we acknowledge that the carbon emissions from wood as a construction material as opposed to, say, aluminium, concrete or steel, is vastly minimal, almost negligible.

And so, this issue touches on the one that rumbles on incessantly when it comes to dealing with our environment - and that is, how do we wish to use it? Do we want to use it? Or am I showing my ideological bias by even phrasing the question in terms of use? Where exactly does modern man sit with his land?

For the time being, the protectionists and productionists will continue the tug of war - and unfortunately for many foresters and scientists, their only input will be to silently watch from the sidelines.

Black Saturday: Reflections and Responses (without trying to sound sanctimonious)

A few weekends ago, a friend finally left his family home and moved into a small cottage buried amongst the gravel backroads of the numerous forest towns of the Dandenongs. We spent the morning packing his fragile belongings into whatever spaces we had in our cars and delicately navigating them down graded and rippled roads, only to repeat the process, reversed, when we reached his new abode. Joining us was another friend who has recently moved into the hills with her partner. She occasionally ask me about environmental aspects of her new home. Most of the time it’s “what tree’s that?” but on that weekend, she was looking at the dried tree ferns that populate the Dandenongs and asked, “Does that happen every summer?”

To an extent, yes. The common tree ferns (Dicksonia antarctica & Cyathea australis) seen in the Dandenongs and the Central Highlands are a slow growing, fire resistant species, which shed branches during its growth. However, the conditions of the past month, with extreme heat being prevalent for numerous days, has resulted in chlorosis of the fronds, the floor of once-green areas are now pricked with auburn hues.

This scene has been repeated all around the state, the public now all too familiar with the consequences of our past summer. The wet forests that once adorned the communities of Marysville, Kinglake, and the Black Spur have been left smouldering. Journalists have frequently alluded to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as if it were prophecy, not fiction. Black Saturday, while considerably smaller than Black Friday or Ash Wednesday, has broken an ominous record in its death toll – compounded, undoubtedly, by the rise in population of mountain communities in the last 70 years.

As expected in the aftermath of any catastrophe, the public, whether represented by the media or the government, has begun searching desperately to find the cause – or, perhaps more crudely, a place to lay the blame. It is unfortunate that these searches all too quickly become misguided and, after the media coverage has ended and the public outrage satiated, the proposed solutions serve to do more harm than good.

Environmental matters typically hold a variety of stakeholders who doggedly pursue their own interests with the vigor of fantatic born-agains – the environmental scientists who preach from their laboratories and textbooks; the inner-city conservationists that admire from afar; the rural luddite townsfolk who harvest their knowledge as they plow their fields; and the public servants that so adeptly stride the fence. Each are interdependent, yet this diversity of knowledge means that successful and sustainable management of our land can become incredibly confused in the swill of vitriol, ulterior motives and personal/political agendas.

And so, in this vacuum of adequate response, we have seen an outpouring of proposed solutions from sources that could barely call themselves ‘experts’ in any field. One that has caught particular traction and has been espoused from opinonistas as diverse as Andrew Bolt and Germaine Greer is the increase of fuel-reduction burning.

The theory behind this is that with the frequent burning of our forests, implemented by the relevant authorities (in the case of Victoria, the Department of Sustainability & Environment), fuel loads will have no time to build up, and thus the devastating consequences of Black Saturday will be avoided from ever occurring again. Further justification is thrown in by allusions to the Aboriginal firestick farming hypothesis, in addition to a few photos of Sam The Koala, and - case closed.

However, this sentiment is not only phenomenally naïve, but also a horrendous insult to the diversity of our landscape. There are over 141 species of Eucalyptus present in south-east Australia, each having their own specific ecological response to fire. Boiling this vast complexity down, Eucalyptus species generally take one of two paths after a fire event – either they are a resprout (shoots grow from the bark after fire) or they seed (the tree dies, but releases a batch of seed to assist regeneration). Generally, the response is related to the frequency of fire in the area – resprouters generally found in areas of higher fire frequency, while seeders are found in areas of lower.

The hardest hit areas of these fires were in the Central Highlands, which are dominated by Mountain Ash (Eucalyptus regnans), a wet sclerophyll species found in higher elevations, sensitive to fire, characterised by vast quantities of bark, leaf and branch litter, and a seed species. The ecology of these forests are designed that they burn once every 75-150 years, and require one event of fire every 300-400 years to ensure the species legacy. The

trees themselves conspire to ensure so, with their oil-laden leaves and high litter levels. There is no strong evidence to suggest that these wet, high elevation forests were ever part of a frequent Aboriginal firestick-farming regime. Frequent fire, whether firestick or prescribed burn, would induce seeding, but kill the next generation before they reach seed maturity. The very existence of these forests provide evidence in themselves that frequent fuel reduction burning has not, and cannot, sustainably exist in the wet sclerophyll forests that featured predominantly in the Black Saturday fires.

This is not to disregard the use of prescribed burning or the role of firestick farming as a part of Australian history, however. It thus, rather, a matter of using the appropriate management technique to suit the ecological conditions, rather than assuming our environment can be managed simply under one homogenous umbrella.

Of all the environmental problems we have faced as a nation, there is one common thread that has run through them all – we have yet to completely grasp the Australian environment, and what it means to live in this ancient continent. We prefer to ignore the grand complexity in favour of simple solutions frequently driven by ideology of all shades and hues, rather than considered understanding and knowledge of the land. The broad-brush fuel reduction burn solution only seeks to administer yet another unsustainable practice upon the land, and further our misunderstanding of how to adequately respond to the challenges of our country.