I know what we did that summer Part 1 - Fire

Between July 2019 and February 2020, 18.6 million hectares of forest, grassland and agricultural landscapes across Australia burnt. The fires behaved in ways that defied control or containment, often as extreme temperature events known as firestorms. Around 21% of Australian temperate broadleaf and mixed forests were burnt. In NSW, this included 37% of the NSW Park system.  Over one billion terrestrial vertebrates died. Billions more lost habitat.

Wet sclerophyll and rainforest communities ignited, often from lightning strikes. Coupled with high spring temperatures and low rainfall for months if not years, forests were primed to explode. In some areas, the large amounts of trash left after clear felling in industrial forestry practices contributed to the severity of localised fires. Drought had prevented winter hazard reduction burns. 

Locally, 80% of the Namadgi National Park burnt following a fire that started 27 January 2020. A landing light on a fire reconnaissance Australian Army helicopter ignited a grass fire. The crew delayed reporting the blaze for 45 minutes which gave responding fire agencies no hope of containing the blaze in the hot, windy conditions.

The ferocity of these fires is something more usually seen in Central, North Central and West and South Gippsland fire districts in Victoria. There eucalypt forests are dominated by forest giants who have evolved in response to high rainfall, occasional drought and once rare intense heatwaves which drive conflagrations that consume the forests ideally every two or three hundred years. Most of the areas burnt during the Black Summer fires do not share this pattern of ecological response to fire. 

These fires did something else that few Australians had experienced before. It filled our cities and towns with smoke for weeks. Choking acrid smoke that reduced visibility to metres, filling our houses, lingering in our clothes and hair, introducing us to masks months before we heard of COVID. The health consequences of extreme air pollution will continue for years to come. 

The fires also revealed the failure of the Federal Government which for decades has denied or dismissed the science of climate change and the need to politically respond to it. The best the Prime Minister could manage when disturbed during his holidays in Hawaii was that “he didn’t hold the hose, mate”. Little of the $4.7 billion of federal funding promised for bushfire recovery has been spent to date.Two years later and people are still homeless, support services nonexistent, communities still traumatised.

And still the Federal government has failed to commit to even the modest targets of COP26. Still they and state governments support the expansion of coal and gas extraction. Still our governments insist that Australia is special, exempt from targets. Miraculous new technologies will somehow magic all this away. 

Changes to the forests that stood across Australia before colonisation began the moment trees were felled on the shores of Warrane in 1788. Like all Anglo-Celtic colonial societies, natural resources were plundered, landscapes cleared, soils and water polluted and lost. The very things that support life including our food production have been trashed. We have not just failed to understand the limitations of the planet’s oldest soils and its ephemeral water systems, we have failed to appreciate the inherent preciousness of these systems.

We continue to dispossess, incarcerate or belittle the First Nations who here became the peoples of the land and the sea, living through the rhythms and patterns of seasons, centuries, millennia, ice ages, witness to the last active volcanoes. The peoples who know these places intimately, living through catastrophe and plenty, change and memory. The peoples who continue to survive the apocalypse of our invasion.

We are making a terrible bequest, as the impacts of climate change on Australia, particularly in the south-east, will be severe.

The forests that burned in 2019-2020 are gone. They will not grow back. Our reckless indifference and greed will ensure that climate change, increased severe fire events and more frequent droughts will see the great forests disappear. Open acacia grasslands with its savannah-like habitat will come to dominate.

And disappear too will the animals, the birds, the plant communities that have evolved from the forests of Gondwana over millions of years. I know what we did that summer.