Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

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.