Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

With grass growth pretty prolific around our region, it might be worth a look back at the 2009 Black Saturday Redesdale fire.

As far as we know, Robert Kenny’s Gardens of Fire: an investigative memoir, [UWA Publishing 2013] is the first detailed account of this fire by a householder directly involved. Kenny unsuccessfully tried to defend his house in Racecourse Road, and lost virtually everything he had. His description of his efforts to fight the fire alone makes gripping and sobering reading. He thought he was prepared, with buckets of water, plenty of tanks, a fire pump and appropriate clothing. The fire ran through grassland to his house, and his efforts at defence were defeated when his pump collapsed and embers entered the building ceiling. Kenny is hard on himself: he refers to ‘people from the city, like myself. Who, let’s be frank, had no idea’, and recalls a conversation with a local farmer when he bought his property: ‘I never forget the son of the previous owner of the property, my guide when I first moved in, looking out over parched paddocks where there was virtually no grass, and responding to my statement that there was nothing to burn with: it’ll burn, don’t worry about that.’ Continue reading →

DEPI has produced a report on its fuel management activity for 2012-13: Reducing Victoria’s bushfire risk on public land. The relevant sections can be found here and here.

The report offers a four part scale of achievement:

–‘fully achieved’

–‘achieved to the best extent possible’

–‘not achieved but is a manageable risk’

–‘not achieved’, and

–N/A (insufficient information to tell)

The Department gives itself full marks for area burned, and ‘achieved to the best extent possible’ for its efforts to reduce bushfire risk to human life and assets.

Mount Alexander 2012: weed growth after a 2009 ‘reduction burn’. DEPI is too confident in its assessment of the ecological results of its burning program.

On ecological resilience (the second major aim of the Code of Practice), the rating offered is ‘The outcome/activity has not been achieved but is a manageable risk (review process for management and/or data collection for further improvement).’ We’re not sure exactly what this means (is ecological resilience a ‘manageable risk’?) but from where we’re standing that looks a very generous mark.

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This forum–focussing on the West Central district–was held in Castlemaine on December 11 for a disappointing attendance of only 8 community members, outnumbered by DEPI officers. The West Central district covers the area from Geelong to north of Bendigo, and from west Melbourne to Avoca.

The forum appears to be part of an effort by DEPI to communicate its efforts to get a more precise understanding of the effects of fire on the community and the environment.

Wewak track, Castlemaine Diggings NHP: the draft environmental scan contradicts itself on the matter of the ‘fire dependence’ of our forests.

The information tabled at the meeting seemed heavily dependent on computer modelling. Questions were asked at the forum about ‘ground truthing’ of this modelling, and community representatives present were unconvinced by the answers.

Participants at the forum were presented with a draft environmental scan of the area which outlined the challenges and complexities of fire management. This document confirmed what we have often commented on: that DEPI confronts serious contradictory demands in its fire program. One example: winery owners prefer spring burning to autumn burning, because of the risk of smoke taint to grapes. Ecologists and apiarists dislike spring fire because it interrupts flowering and breeding processes. Unfortunately DEPI too often resorts to glib phrases like ‘trade offs’ to explain its activities, which more often than not sacrifice the environment for economic activity. Conservation organisations have consistently hammered the idea that we should aim for a better result for everyone—for example, by more detailed management of much smaller burns.

The evidence is piling up that the crude target of burning five per cent of public land every year [no matter how much land is burned in bushfires] is environmentally damaging and does not improve public safety. For that reason any process that contributes to a clearer understanding of the issues is good.

There were, however, a few unsettling blips in the info presented at the forum. A map on page 11 of the draft environmental scan shows that forests in the Mount Alexander region are ‘fire dependent’. This is NOT the case—as the text of the same document points out on page 9. Further, the scan appears to blandly accept the continuing development of housing in dangerous areas (page 20). This is not a simple matter, and the draft tells us that ‘new land use criteria will be developed as a result of the Bushfires Royal Commission.’ In our opinion these criteria are already overdue.

The forum was part of a process leading to the planned release of a new strategic bushfire plan by June 30 2014.

The Castlemaine Forum was given a summary of the bushfire risk profile developed by DEPI in cooperation with various research bodies. The profile is a working document rather than a set of conclusions, and is about risk to human life and assets: no way has yet been developed in this system of assessing risk to the environment in current burning practices [p 7]. 

According to DEPI computer modelling, risk to people and property has been reduced by 40% since 2002 by a combination of major bushfires [mainly] and controlled burning. The report adds:

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