Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

Bendigo region conservationists, including FOBIF, met with DSE officials last Wednesday April 18th,  to discuss current and future fire operations.

The meeting did not discuss State Government fire policy. It was solely concerned with the implementation of this policy, in the light of conservationists’ dissatisfaction with the way burns are being conducted.

The objectives listed below were put to DSE officers at the meeting. They would require managers to be very precise in their burn plans about how they will manage key risks and how they will take into account community submissions. They would also require the publication of clear assessments of each burn in the light of the plans:

Objective 1 – DSE to provide detailed mapping of each burn parcel, as listed in Appendix B of the Code of Practice, to identify a broad range of regionally specific ecological values.

Burned moss patch, Muckleford State Forest, March 2012. Moss is not flammable, and is sensitive to fire. It performs a valuable role in forming crusts which protect land from erosion and soil loss. Prescribed burns which destroy such patches do not reduce fuel, but they do damage the bush. Conservation groups in Bendigo want DSE to specify what its objectives are in burns--and to be open about what they really achieve.

Objective 2 – DSE to provide detailed fuel load mapping for each burn parcel and across each Fire Management Zone.

Objective 3 – To ensure the expectation for adaptive management in the Code of Practice is met, DSE to provide detailed responses to community Fire Operations Plan input, accurately describing how this has been incorporated within the approved burn plan.

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We have received a second reply from DSE’s Paul Bates on the subject of the Tarilta management burn [see below]. In addition Ewan Waller, DSE’s Chief Fire Officer, fielded questions on the subject on ABC radio on Friday March 30. On the same day, the Bendigo Advertiser carried an item on the matter featuring a statement by DSE North West Regional Manager John Rofe to the effect that ‘the aim was to reduce the threat of fuel sparking a bushfire’.

The gist of all of the above is clear.

1. The stated aim of the Tarilta exercise [in the DSE zoning system, the Bendigo fire plan and on the DSE website] was to achieve an ecological outcome [see our post]. The statement by John Rofe in the Advertiser, and the evasions of Ewan Waller, make it clear that ecology has nothing to do with it. The aim is to burn the bush, and it’s not too strong to say that this was done without the slightest consideration for ecological values.
2. It’s blindingly clear that no notice was taken by DSE of warnings that burning steep slopes before heavy rain will bring about an erosion event. Either this is because DSE, as a land manager, doesn’t think soil loss is important, or it is because the Department is so driven by its burning targets that it thinks only of burning hectares.

One of the less steep drainage lines in the Tarilta gorge area: this soil has been washed off the hilltops.

3. It’s clear that DSE has no control over what happens inside its control lines. In other    words, the idea of ‘cool burns’ is a very slippery one, as is that of ‘mosaic burns’, where patches of burned and unburned ground alternate.

4. It’s also clear that the objective to burn an area classified as a particular Ecological Vegetation Class is not based on any real knowledge of what might or should happen in the area in question. FOBIF urged DSE to consider carefully the effects of the adjacent 2010 Wewak track burn before proceeding with this one. It’s London to a brick that no such consideration was given.

Paul Bates letter is given below. We have interpolated our questions in italics:

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DSE Chief Fire Officer Ewan Waller claimed on ABC Radio on March 30 that one of the aims of his department is to create a ‘pre European’ forest structure by using fire. This seems to suggest that he is familiar with pre European fire regimes. We’re not sure what these regimes were in our area, but it’s worth brooding on one recent effort to describe them.

In his book The Greatest Estate on Earth [Allen and Unwin 2011] Bill Gammage argues that Aborigines used fire not as a simple survival tool, but as a sophisticated means of shaping the environment: and that they made Australia a ‘farm without fences’ with it, a place frequently referred to by early white settlers as ‘a gentleman’s park’.

Gammage argues that Aborigines used fire throughout the continent, but the picture he creates of indigenous methods of burning provides an interesting contrast with the kind of massive, blunt and destructive exercises we are seeing today. In brief:

–Aboriginal groups had territories they understood in intimate detail.

–their burns were small scale, modified for different species patterns, conducted with an expert eye on the weather, and controlled. Although he doesn’t discuss practices in our area, he mentions, for example, that in the Western Desert, most patches burnt were ‘less than five hectares.’ This contrasts dramatically with the hundreds of hectares being burned around here, and the thousands being done at a time in the Mallee.

–They managed their territories in varying degrees of intensity depending on use, spiritual significance, etc

–Management included long periods without fire for some areas [eg, no burning for ‘generations’] if that is what they perceived the country as needing.

–They were conscious of shape, topography and access, and burned diligently at, say, forest edges, clearings, access routes.

–Aborigines timed ‘most [not all] fires to go out at night: overnight fires could confess loss of control’.

–They very rarely killed mature trees with their fires.

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Last week FOBIF secretary Bernard Slattery wrote to DSE Bendigo to express our concerns about Tarilta Gorge, in particular the massive soil loss resulting from the Department’s management burn [see our post].We’ve received the following answers to our questions from Paul Bates,Forest Manager, Bendigo Forest Management Area. For convenience of readers, we’ve put our questions in italics before each answer. Readers can assess whether our questions have been answered:

1.     Last year in our submission on fire zones we drew attention to the steep slopes in this area, and the need to be extra careful in any burning operation. Given that heavy rain was predicted in the week after the proposed burn, why was there evidently no effort to protect the steeper slopes? [Sludge in the creek is up to a metre deep in parts. In walking along the creek bed I went up to my waist at one point in soil and ash]

DSE: ‘DSE monitors fuel and weather conditions when completing prescribed burns. The weather records over the days when this burn was ignited show that the conditions were within the limits for burning in this type of forest. DSE also monitors weather forecasts for the days following ignition of a prescribed burn including potential rainfall. Predicting accurate rainfall amounts and intensity can be difficult, especially predictions several days ahead. All weather factors are considered and a decision was made in this particular case that ignition of the burn area would proceed.’

Destroyed candlebark, ten metres from Tarilta creek. We estimate that the tree was about a metre in diametre at breast height. Although it is hard to estimate its height, it may well have been the tallest tree in the valley [see additional photo below

2.     We’re still at a loss as to DSE’s inability to protect large trees from these burns. Red box on the slopes and even larger trees on the valley floor have been destroyed. We’d like to know what kind of supervision takes place in this area.

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Following our visits to the DSE burn site in the Tarilta Gorge [see our post] we have written to DSE management in Bendigo seeking a response to the following questions:

1. Last year in our submission on fire zones we drew attention to the steep slopes in this area, and the need to be extra careful in any burning operation. Given that heavy rain was predicted in the week after the proposed burn, why was there evidently no effort to protect the steeper slopes? [Sludge in the creek is up to a metre deep in parts. In walking along the creek bed you can go up to your waist at one point in soil and ash]

2. We’re still at a loss as to DSE’s inability to protect large trees from these burns. Red box on the slopes and even larger trees on the valley floor have been destroyed. We’d like to know what kind of supervision takes place in this area.

3. The Ecological Management Zone’s purpose is ‘promoting biodiversity and ecological renewal. Planned burning will be used to manage native species and ecological communities which require fire to regenerate.’ Can you tell us which species you had in mind in this operation? Is there baseline data to enable an assessment of the success of the operation?

4. We were under the impression that in this zone the intention is to do a mosaic burn covering about one third of the area. It seems to us that much more was actually burnt. Can you tell us what your estimate is of the burn coverage?

We’ll post the reply as soon as it’s available.

FOBIF was represented at a meeting in Bendigo on March 7 with DSE land and fire community engagement officer Simone Blair. The meeting was organised by the Bendigo and District Environment council.

The meeting was an opportunity for community groups to table their difficulties in communicating with DSE on matters specifically to do with fire management. FOBIF believes that these difficulties arise mainly because DSE is obliged to implement a very blunt range of policies, the main one being that of burning off five per cent of public land, regardless of local conditions. Nevertheless, we believe that even under these constraints, DSE could do better: and we are of the view that some of their efforts smack of carelessness or neglect—the burning of Tarilta Gorge being one [see below].

BDEC members present were insistent that DSE should try more actively to counter unreasonable fear of the bush, and that the dangers of grass fire should be made clearer to the public. The belief persists that the Bracewell Street Black Saturday fire was a bushfire, when it burned mainly through waste grassland. They also underlined the importance of fire protection works on private land.

There will be a follow up meeting in April.