I would like to point out that by claiming the recent bushfires are due to "climate change" is to ignore reality and ensure these events continue to happen. Steps can be taken to reduce the severity of bushfires, even under severe fire weather. You cannot hope to eliminate wildfires but you can influence their impact. You only have to study WA's wildfire record from the Dwellingup disaster of 1960 through to the early 1990s. They will have a Victorian tragedy soon because they have basically discontinued the effective practice of prescibed burning over that 30-40 year period and their fuels levels are now very high and they have allowed a lot of assets to mix with these now volatile forest areas.

But I wanted to pick up on a few comments from posters as it is important to clarify some points people make to help them understand the situation. Whilst eucalypt trees and houses should never be allowed to mix, it is wrong to focus on removal of trees when in fact it is the removal of fuel that is important. The only way a fire can crown in a eucalypt forest is when there is the combination of weather (such as low humidity and/or strong winds) and high fuel levels. These fuels are what we term 'fine fuels' and are up to 6mm in diameter (leaves, twigs, small branches etc). Leave them to build up and you are asking for trouble - in fact you end up getting the fires 'nature' wants instead of the fire we want. Whenever we have assets near bush, the bush becomes a hazard that has to be managed - we cannot hide from this fact. And when we have large contiguous areas of forests backing onto these assets, having a small strategic fuel free zone adjoining the asset is useless when the bush can sustain a crown fire and spot many kilometres ahead of the fire front under a crown fire and send embers to do their nasty work on houses.

Ask any grain farmer who has to protect his house and sheds during harvest from a stubble blaze.

Us farmers though sympathetic, could feel the same about fools, knowing that if we left bush and timber near our precincts as we note in our own coastal ranges, we would deserve to be burnt out.

Sorry to have to say so,

Regards, BB, WA.

Sylvia Hallam is an 81 year old retired academic in WA who wrote one of the earliest books on the Aboriginal use of fire in SW WA. The book was Fire and Haerth, published in the mid-1970s. She recently wrote a letter to The West Australian newspaper which is well worth reading, especially if you're concerned about the use of fire in our natural lands:
Dear Sir,

Indeed Robert Dixon is right (letter to "The West Australian", 13/02/09), controlled burns have long been a necessary part of the humanised Australian landscape. Deposits in lakes and swamps, and the trunks of ancient blackboys, provide records of devastating major fires before humans entered the continent; and then of much less devastating, but more frequent, fires once the original Australians arrived, and began to protect their food sources and access routes by deliberate, systematic, socially regulated, burns, very expensive in manpower and labour.

In December 1792 a naturalist from a French voyage of exploration, stranded on our south coast, observed over several days a group of Aboriginal men lighting and relighting their fires. He approached a blaze "crowded with activity, but when I arrived the natives had gone." On his second day ashore he again watched "several natives who from morning to night were busy poking their fire". It was not a very hot fire, for they were "always standing to the windward and in the smoke". He explains that they set fire to an area "covered with bushes, and spread the flames until everything has been consumed", then "leave the fire to extinguish itself during the night and transport themselves to another place next day."

Around fifty years later, after the English had established a settlement at King George Sound, a group ashore from HMS Beagle, watched "a party of natives engaged in burning the bush, which they do in sections every year." The visitors marvelled at the dexterity with which the Aborigines managed the blaze "armed with large green boughs, with which, if it moves in a wrong direction, they beat it out".

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Riche and Stokes provide snapshots of a laborious process of lighting, spreading, maintaining, relighting, restraining and guiding fires, burning small patches sequentially, resulting in a close mosaic of burns. Over some periods of the year Aboriginal groups were prepared to put all their available able-bodied manpower into the immense labour needed to maintain a habitable productive landscape.

Their effort, skill and application may be difficult to emulate in our society, where we have come to believe that technology can solve all things. Perhaps Lieutenant Bunbury was right when, in 1836, after describing open forests around the Vasse (Busselton) maintained by Aboriginal burning, he concluded that "we might ourselves burn the bush, but we could never do it with the same judgment and good effect as the Natives, who keep the fire within due bounds, only burning those parts they wish, when the scrub becomes too thick, or they have any other object to gain by it."

Aboriginal regimes of sequential controlled burning of limited patches by very low-intensity fires kept the country in good heart, and insured against the ravages of wild fire. Fire will always be part of the Australian landscape. Human beings can only co-exist with the inevitability of fire if they are prepared to devote major resources to ensuring that they live with controlled fire, not wild fire. The original Australians devoted relatively huge manpower and effort to maintaining viable landscapes. It will be even more difficult now, because of our denser population, more complex infrastructure, introduced weeds, exacerbation of fuel buildup by logging, and past neglect of adequate burning.

Yours sincerely,
Sylvia J Hallam

Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities); Retired Associate Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology; Honorary Fellow, School of Earth and Environment, UWA, Member of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Studies.

Thank you Bernie, that describes what we should be doing - mosaic burning is the only way to manage the risks in living in our environment. I live in the Blue Mountains, and watch the hazard reductions done here - not perfect, but they help. Mosaic burning allows biodiversity to continue, where the Black Saturday fires have now, and recovery will be almost impossible in our lifetimes. I understand the need for maintaining the forests, but allowing fire trails to overgrow so a tanker cannot use them is not helping either. The policy of never clearing the understory shows no understanding of the necessary risk management. Proper planning can ensure that the mosaic burns suit the types of forests involved, and not preparing for a 'fire season' leaves everyone in danger!