Well there you go. I never realised when the first invasion fleet landed the land all the way from what is now Sydney to Bathurst was just open fields with occasional trees in the landscape.

All those early explorer's tales of attempting to bushbash their way across the Blue Mountains and failing time and time again were just imagined.

Well I never.

Bathurst was just open fields with occasional trees in the landscape.
SteeleRedux,
Yeah, a bit like the fish farming down in Victoria !

Come on SR, you should know, the Blue mountains are a very rugged bit of country. It offered very little in the way of grazing for wildlife, so little game, & even less interest to the aborigines.

Hell in that country, even if you did find game, in the unlikely event of actually spearing it, the job of carrying it back to camp would be horrendous, hence they avoided the place.

Yes the rolling planes from Bathurst were well treated with the fire stick.

Incidentally, none other than the great Captain Cook mentioned in his log that from about Sydney north the sky was never free of the smoke of fires.

Either 1770 was a very bad year for bush fires, or those rascally aborigines were running amok with their fire sticks as usual.

It was the discovery of such good grazing land that opened up the Central west.

A priority should be to lessen the impact of future bushfires on lives and property.

How can this be achieved?

The simple answer is to remove all eucalypts from the vicinity of dwellings and roads, 500 metres clearance seems a fair distance, but if experience proves otherwise then make it a kilometre.

Gum trees and dwellings don't go together, except up in flames.

Tend to agree about eucalypts next to houses. People build non-flammable homes with steel shutters right next to gum trees. The house might survive but not the occupants with swirling smoke and 500C radiant heat.