Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

What is a heritage landscape, and what difference does the tag ‘heritage’ make to the way a landscape should be managed?

Of course, all landscapes are ‘heritage’ or ‘cultural’ landscapes in one way or another: but there’s only one in Australia which has protected dual National Park/Heritage Park status, and that’s the Castlemaine Diggings.

That’s why we were disappointed in the VEAC Historic Places Investigation Draft Proposals Paper. This paper explicitly adopted a limited meaning for the phrase ‘heritage place’, one that seemed to exclude ‘landscape’ from consideration.

FOBIF has submitted a response to the Draft. It is set out below.

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Although we believe there are many constructive and sensible proposals in this paper, we wish to focus on what we believe to be a serious—and strange—deficiency: that is, the failure to acknowledge the particular challenges presented by cultural landscapes. In fact, it appears that the authors of the paper do not believe that these landscapes are ‘historic places’ at all, as witness this passage on page 31:

‘It is important to note that although VEAC’s focus is on the management of specific places on public land, Traditional Owners customarily have a broader view that every part of the landscape is of significance, including landforms and the whole landscape itself, not only those places where associations are evident or documented.’

Shallow shafts being reclaimed by nature, Sebastopol Creek: how is the bushland setting to be interpreted in the National Heritage Park?

We are not suggesting that our cultural landscapes can be considered in the same way that Indigenous people look at country: but the concession made in the above paragraph essentially concedes that VEAC has not considered ‘landscape’ at all in this draft.

We can’t see the reason for this exclusion: after all, on page 4 of the draft we read that ‘historic places’ include ‘historic sites or areas’. What is a landscape if it’s not an ‘area’? And in Appendix 2 [Historic groups or typology] we find Landscape area: natural and cultural historic landscapes. Other group categories in this Appendix are given numerous examples, but for some reason Landscape area has only one: Tower Hill.

There are significant areas of Victoria which are landscapes on the state and national heritage list: the Grampians/Gariwerd, the Alps, and the Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park. We therefore find it puzzling that the draft paper has failed to consider the peculiar challenges presented to managers of these areas.

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The recently abolished ‘five per cent target’ policy aimed at burning at least 390, 000 hectares of public land per year.

This target was never reached, and was probably never going to be possible. In the last five years, the highest annual total was 250,542 hectares burned.

Under the new ‘risk management’ policy [see our post below], bushfire management will still be heavily concerned with fuel reduction burns on public land:

‘From 1 July 2016, our fuel management program on public land will be driven by a state wide target to maintain bushfire risk at, or below, 70 per cent of Victoria’s maximum bushfire risk. Based on the current assessment of risk, this will involve treating between 225,000 and 275,000 hectares in 2016-17.’ [Page 13, Safer together]

In other words, there’s still a target, and it’s about the same as now.

As we’ve pointed out before, recent documents on fire have been very keen to tell us that fuel management is ‘only one’ of several approaches to bushfire control. For example: ‘Fuel management is just one strategy for reducing bushfire risk…Beyond planned burning, we take many other actions to reduce bushfire risk – slashing, mowing, creating fuel breaks and maintaining infrastructure like water points and lookout towers in our forests and parks. Other ways to reduce risk include positioning firefighters and aircraft across Victoria for rapid response to bushfires when they start, building standards for new housing, developing neighbourhood shelters, issuing community warnings and coordinating evacuations.’ [page 8, Safer together]

There are also challenges around prevention [arson, for example], and issues to do with housing development in bushland.

Unfortunately burning is the approach that gets heavy priority treatment.

And fuel reduction on private land? On this, we have vague gestures about what will happen in the future [See below: Lessons from Lancefield 2].

The management burn which escaped from the Cobaw State Forest in October with disastrous results was the subject of an independent investigation led by Stuart Carter. His report was released last week. It can be found here.

We won’t comment on the report’s wider judgments, since we’re not familiar with the Cobaw area, but would like to highlight two of its findings, which we believe are applicable virtually anywhere in the state. The first is on resourcing:

‘Interviews [with DELWP staff] also revealed that there is a resignation by staff that district resources and budgets are tight and this may result in resources at a burn being “thin”. The Investigation Team noted that many of the staff interviewed commented that the resourcing for the  Lancefield-­‐Cobaw  burn  was not optimal however “we do what we can with what we have” or “we are just used to managing with what we have”.’

How many times have we heard a version of this? Policy and colour documents are fine. Too often they have been used to cover up what we are unfortunately used to: land management on the cheap.

A second point worth highlighting in the Carter report is the importance of integrating public and private land in fire preparations. The report says: ‘The Department must adopt a tenure-­‐blind approach to the management of bushfire risk including the planning of  burns.’

In the case of Cobaw:

‘A common response from some [DELWP] staff interviewed who had responsibility for planning part of the burn was that in spring the surrounding area was green paddocks, but in reality this burn is surrounded by public and private forest, much of it long unburnt. The burn plan contains little information about the surrounding area, the fuels outside the burn, neighbours and the broader context. It will be stated throughout this report that the focus of the Department in relation to the Lancefield-­‐Cobaw burn was clearly on its own tenure with inadequate attention to external considerations. The Investigation Team does however note that processes are afoot to shift bushfire risk management, and therefore burn planning, to a broader landscape approach… This will provide some impetus for change however significant cultural and procedural shifts within the Department are also required to increase the focus on external factors and contingency planning.’

The policy of integrating public and private land into bushfire plans is still undeveloped, as we’ve pointed out before. The Safer together document [see below], while enthusiastically embracing the idea of private participation in bushfire mitigation, has this to say:

‘While our bushfire risk target will only apply to the delivery of the fuel management program on public land in the immediate term, we will build our systems and processes to enable a bushfire risk target to guide planning and investment across all bushfire risk reduction activities on public and private land in future.’ [p 13] [Our emphasis]

In other words, ‘processes are afoot’, but as for action: not yet.

The risk we run is that the ‘new’ policy will look very like the old one.

The State Government has finally accepted the recommendation of the Inspector General for Emergency Management to scrap the policy of burning five per cent of public land each year. The government will instead pursue a risk assessment policy.

The new policy is outlined in a 20 page colour document entitled Safer together: a new approach to reducing the risk of bushfire in Victoria. It can be found here.

The new approach will be delivered in three stages. DELWP expresses it as follows:

‘ · From 1 July 2016, the Government will apply a risk reduction target
for fuel management on public land.
‘ · In 2017-18, land and fire agencies will partner with communities to
manage fuel loads across public and private land in the highest risk
areas.
‘· Ultimately, we will apply a risk based approach to all bushfire
management strategies, working as one fire management sector, so we
can invest in the most effective ways to reduce risk.’

The new policy is not a panacea for bushfire control, though it’s preferable to its unlamented predecessor. It’s significant that the policy has been announced on the same day that DELWP revealed that the Lancefield escaped reduction burn disaster was caused by a failure in risk assessment and resourcing. In other words, good decisions still have to be made, and their implementation still has to be properly resourced.

What are the prospects for the new Risk Assessment approach? We’ll have a look at this question over the next week.