Note to Yarns from the Farm readers: I wrote this paper for the Hamilton Literary Society in Hobart. I thought you might enjoy the perspective from several months after the fire. Nan
In February of this year, what could have been a catastrophic bushfire started on the highway boundary of my farm. In 80 kph winds, power lines clashed together, sending sparks into the undergrowth below. The fire quickly took off through dense gorse, then up a steep hill covered with young native trees planted a few years ago. At the top of the hill, the fire took hold in several old white gums and then jumped over 300m of long, dense grass, to set fire to two old cabbage gums.
By the time the older trees were alight, the local fire brigade had it under control, with the help of two fixed-wing planes dropping fire retardant, three helicopters dousing the fire with water, and most of the fire trucks in the district, Directly downwind of the cabbage gums sits my new house, about 500 m of long, dense grass away.
When I arrived home, after a tense 40 minute drive from Brighton, I realised none of my sheep, nor my home nor my working dogs were any longer in danger. When I went to inspect the fire, I was struck—or perhaps dumbstruck would be more accurate—by the unburned grass between the two sets of trees.
The big white gums were well and truly alight, and shedding sparks like crazy in the gusty wind, yet the grass wasn’t lighting up. My first thought was self-congratulatory—my low impact grazing regime is designed to let the grass grow long enough to set seed, often ending up well over a meter high.
The tall dry grass stalks cover and protect the new growth at the base of the grass tussocks. Needless to say, I’ve taken lots of flack over the years about the fire risk of my long grass. ‘Hah!’ thought I. ‘See, I was right all along—long grass isn’t a fire hazard, it actually suppresses fire!’ And then the part of me that tries hard to guard against hubris chimed in, a bit timidly, ‘Maybe it would be best not to jump to conclusions until you know more.’
As the afternoon wore on, and the big trees were still burning merrily, the fierys decided to deliberately burn the grass around them as a deterrent, since they were unable to put out the burning trees—they would leave them to burn out on their own—but didn’t want wind-blown sparks to set things alight overnight, when it’s impossible to do more than patrol. Moving big fire tankers through rough country at night is just not a good idea.
The fireys were unable to get the grass to burn, even when they tried. My self-congratulatory side re-emerged, feeling quite smug. Clearly, my superior management techniques were working in our favour.
And yes, while it was true at this particular moment in the seasonal cycle my long grass with green at the base was in fact inhibiting fire even in these extreme conditions of wind and constant streams of embers, the larger truth began to dawn on me over the next few days: at some point in our summer season, my long grass, however carefully managed, would absolutely burn. If it had been ready to burn on the day, it’s likely my new house would be a pile of ashes.
The humility of this realisation sent me back to re-read the books I have on indigenous cultural burning in Australia. Indigenous burning is the power tool used by Australia’s first nations people to create the landscape they needed: open spaces to hunt in, side-by-side with dense bush to create habitat for the animals they hunted. The precision with which fire was used over the millennia resulted in a park-like landscape perfectly suited to the needs of indigenous people.
Europeans believed this was the natural state of the environment, and liked its similarity to the big estates of England and the continent, not realising the extent to which it was a landscape constructed for specific purposes—arguably agricultural in nature—by the original owners of the land. This mis-conception led to misguided neglect of the necessity of burning to maintain the shape of the landscape and its biodiversity, and ultimately to extreme fire risk from overgrown bush.
Indigenous Australians burned for specific results: biodiversity, habitat and access to game, not to reduce overgrowth. They didn’t let things get to the stage of risking hot fires in summer conditions. Here’s Victor Steffensen (Fire Country) quoting his mentor Poppy, on the start of the burning season in Awu-Laya country:
‘You have to take notice all the time, know all the trees, and know the country. So you don’t get lost.’ He then grabbed a handful of the long grass and ran it through one hand to feel the moisture, to see if it was ready burn. If the grass felt cold, there was too much moisture. If it felt warm and dry, it was ready. Then he showed me how to visually read the curing of the grass and when it was ready to burn. The grass was about half green and half dry when it was ready. All the seeds on the grass had already fallen off and settled on the ground.
If the grass didn’t have all of those signs, he wouldn’t even bother striking a match. The time boxwood country is ready can be between late March and early May, depending on how good the rain season was. When we burned boxwood country at the right time, no other system would burn because they were still too green. They act as firebreaks, and the same rule applies to all the fire ecosystems if you burn them at the right time. The later burns would then stop where the earlier burns were done, and so on.
The more I re-read Steffensen, Pascoe and Gammage, the more humility I felt. I’ve known for several years about the subtlety of indigenous cultural burning, ever since I started exploring the use of fire to enhance biodiversity on my farm. It took the in-my-face reality of my long grass not being ready to burn to take me the next step—knowing I don’t know, but that the land can teach me if I let it.
References:
Gammage, B. 2011: The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia, Allen and Unwin, 343 pp
Pasco, B. 2014: Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture, Magabala Books, 277 pp
Steffensen, V. 2020: Fire Country: How Indigenous Fire Management Could Help Save Australia, Griffin Press, 221 pp