Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

FOBIF has written to Parks Victoria to clarify some questions arising from the Quartz Hill, Chewton, Asset Protection management burn of a few weeks ago.

What interested us was that the burn was pretty severe on native undergrowth [as was indeed its purpose], but relatively feeble on the blackberries, gorse, bridal creeper and pampas which infests the area in question [see photo below].

Members who have read our post on DSE’s new code of conduct will know that we are at a loss to know why the Department cannot be more systematic in using fire to clear out what we all agree are unwanted–and flammable–elements in our bushlands.

Singed but not seriously: blackberry near the Quartz Hill track after the management burn. A couple of hundred metres behind the photographer, the native undergrowth is flattened.

In the case in question, the management fire burned deeply into Sailor’s Gully, but somehow failed to clear out gorse along the gully; and it completely failed to make an impact on large patches of blackberry in the lower gully. Obviously this is a function of the relatively low flammability of this vegetation at this time, but at the end of a hot summer this stuff is just as much fuel as a stand of Dusty Miller: we believe that the Department should be as enthusiastic to get rid of it now as it appears to be to get rid of native fuel.

We’ll publish Parks Victoria’s reply when we get it.

DSE’s new Code of Practice for Fire Management on Public Land has been out for consultation for some time now. The document can be found here. As we signalled in a previous post, we have had preliminary misgivings about the new draft.

Our misgivings relate to compliance matters [how can we be sure workers on the ground are going to observe the Code?], and about weakening of requirements for ecological management in Zone 2 burns. It is also unfortunate that the sensible requirement that priority be given to protection of human life has, it seems, been seen as a licence to sacrifice ecological values–which are also, in the long term, crucial to human life.

Our final submission on the Draft document is given below. The headings are the ones supplied by DSE as a template for all submissions:

1. Does the Draft Code provide an effective framework to achieve its purpose? [This purpose is set out in paragraph 3 page 1 of the Draft]

The question should be, Does the Code provide a sufficiently effective framework? Although there are good features in the draft, the framework throughout, especially in its fuel management chapter, assumes that we will act now [to ‘reduce fuel’] and find out later whether what we are doing is effective or counterproductive. It is significant that there is nowhere  in the document any reference to what DSE has found out about its fuel reduction programs over the last forty or so years. This is probably because the research required by the 2006 Code has never been done, that the long proclaimed policy of

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The asset protection burn conducted at Quartz Hill Chewton in late November has, as planned, produced a pretty bare landscape over about 140 hectares, plus what looks like some spotting outside the planned zone.

One reason to visit these burns is to observe how the landscape responds to them. And one indicator of burn severity seems to be outbreaks of the fungus Pyronema omphalodes. This appears as a pink or smouldering orange layer in the burned out remains of trees. It has the surface feel of plastic and, in its own way, is quite beautiful. Sometimes the fungus can cover the whole area of a fallen tree, so that you can see a ghostly orange outline on the ground where the tree has fallen. Such outlines were common in the Wewak control burn zone last year: click here to see images in our photo gallery.

Pyronema omphalodes at Quartz Hill track, November 30: the fungus is a direct response to fire. Photo:Bernard Slattery