Aborigines managed much of the Australian landscape with fire. This management strategy favoured fire tolerant and fire resistant species – perhaps why gum trees dominate so much of the Australian landscape. But river red gums, Eucalyptus camaldulensis ssp., unlike most gum trees, are not particularly fire tolerant.
A boat on the Murray River in the Barmah Forest. Photograph taken last Tuesday.*
The timber cutters and cattlemen who live and work along the middle Murray (river) have gone to great lengths to keep fuel-loads in red gum forests low through controlled grazing and the collection of firewood. This, combined with a network of rural fire fighting brigades, has made it possible to stomp out fires started from lightening strikes or camp fires.
This may explain why some foresters and aboriginal elders call river red gums ‘white fellas’ weed’ and why areas which were once open woodland are now covered in dense red gum forests including at Barmah.
This area in Barmah Forest was once known as Duck Hole Plains
But the situation is changing. The Victorian Environmental Assessment Council (VEAC) wants more wood and grass on the forest floor apparently to increase biodiversity. This means higher fuel loads and according to some white fellas** the forests will ultimately be severely degraded by uncontrolled and uncontrollable feral fires.
A wildfire in the Barmah Forest, in an area known as Top Island, burnt out 800 hectares last October.
Burnt forest at Top Island in October 2006, photograph taken Tuesday November 6, 2007.
Old habitat trees are apparently the first to go when a hot wildfire burns through red gum forest. Last week the Barmah woodcutters showed me how the old trees ‘burnt like chimneys’ from the inside – out.
Parts of ‘Top Island’ look like they are regenerating. But I’m told that the green coppice growth will eventually fall off – that these fire-damaged trees will never develop as habitat trees. Habitat trees have hollows for wildlife.
Coppice and a burnt-out old habitat tree.
Where the forest has been completely burnt, for example after the sand-spit fire of the late 1960s, and where there has been no management, the red gum regrowth can be very dense.
Regrowth from the 1968 Sand-spit fire, Photograph taken November 6, 2007.
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* All the photographs in this blog post were taken in Barmah forest last Tuesday - on Melbourne cup day.
** I use the term 'white fellas' to refer to the guardians of traditional European knowledge in the Barmah forest.
[...] After the ‘Top Island’ Fire in the Barmah Red Gum Forest, November 10, 2007 https://climatelab.com.au/blog/2007/11/after-the-%e2%80%98top-island%e2%80%99-fire-in-the-barmah-r... [...]
[...] After a fire in the Barmah forest: https://climatelab.com.au/blog/2007/11/after-the-%e2%80%98top-island%e2%80%99-fire-in-the-barmah-r... [...]
Spot on, David. The greenocidal maniacs clearly do not give a toss about the well being of wildlife once they are brought under centralised green tenure. If they did then heads would most certainly have rolled long before this.
They practice the politics and ecology of exclusion. And as long as local communities and their legitimate uses are excluded from forests then the greens have no further need to waste a moments thought on the consequences of their "stewardship".
You should write to the Vic Minister to formally advise him that the writings of Edward Curr are "relevant facts" within the meaning of the definition of proper exercise of power, which must not be ignored in determining a pre-european benchmark level of retained debris.
You could then suggest that he initiate a trial sequence of classical firestick burning to determine the likely proportion of his 125m3 that is retained after such a sequence has taken place.
That should rattle a few departmental dags.
Jennifer,
A good summary of the consequences of poor management in the Barmah forest.
It is important to consider two things.
One, that the Top Island fire was almost entirely within the Barmah State Park and was stopped only when it crossed into the adjoining, logged, State Forest.
The other (which has been touched on) is that the Barmah-Millewa group of forests has been influenced by humans since it was created.
The Murray at this point was dammed by an uplift, the Cadell Tilt, that occured after human settlement.
This caused the Murray to flow north along the Edward river which probably already existed as an anabranch. The Edward could not carry all the water and a series of large lakes and wetlands formed. This pool of water would have originally prevented the flood-sensitive e. camaldulensis from taking root. But the Murray then cut a new channel (one researcher claims as recently as 500 years ago) through to the Goulburn river, near Echuca. That section of river borders the Top Island fire area.
Edward Curr, whose squatting runs in the 1840s took in most of the Barmah forest, wrote of open forests and very attractive grassy plains within the forest. He also wrote about the practice of firestick farming and the constant campfires. He calculated that the pre-smallpox aboriginal population of the area had been several thousand. Several thousand people foraging daily for firewood would have had a considerable impact on the woody debris of the forest floor. Additionally the regular floods would have helped clear what remained.
Yet VEAC has decreed that the pre-European density of woody debris was 125 tonnes/hectare.
"The estimated current level of coarse woody debris in river red gum forests is approximately 20 tonnes per hectare, reduced from a pre-European level of about 125 tonnes per hectare" their draft report proclaims.
This is a late 20th century estimate which ignores the possibility of interference from mankind. VEAC appears not to have examined Curr's observation; a great pity as he was the first European to see (and document) much of the forest.
To return to my first point, the State Park was set aside about ten years ago and has not been logged or grazed for years. Presumably it has been off-limits also for firewood collection. So the build up of woody debris had been considerable by the time the fire started.
What was possibly the worst firestorm in Victoria occurred on February 6 1851, "Black Thursday". It incinerated, by contemporary estimates, about one third of Victoria in a single day. The smoke crossed Bass Strait bringing mid-afternoon darkness to northern Tasmania.
It happened after the aboriginal population, decimated by European diseases, had left their traditional way of life and become dependent on the new occupiers of their lands.
The resultant fuel load combined with a scorching northerly created a fire storm of previously unseen fury, though not unlike those which have confronted our firefighters in recent years.
Until late in the 20th century we had a fire-management policy built on the wisdom of the ages but in the rush to take humanity back to the dark ages of pristine wilderness all that sensible observation has been abandoned.
The thing that puzzles me most is that when a fire like Top Island occurs with its attendant loss of fauna and flora, we never hear any protests from those who campaign for more national parks instead of demanding that we make today's lot safe for the wildlife they are supposed to protect.
I have said that there is a mountain of evidence on frequent burning in the past by Aborigines. The Esplin Report on the 2003 Victorian fires glibly dismissed Aboriginal fire as irrelevant. Here is one historical observation.
“During my excursions in the bush my interest in bushfires has often been aroused … Others ascribe them entirely to the blacks … who light fires all over the place to cook their food but leave them unextinguished. During the hot summer the grass dries out and becomes highly inflammable, and the leaves of the myrtaceous plants, which are full of essential oils, also get very dry. The consequence is that bushfires quickly spread over enormous areas, though without becoming a danger to human beings…” Ludwig Leichhardt, 1842, New South Wales.
The observation that the fires were no danger to human beings is irrebuttable evidence of low fuel levels, due to a fire every few years. Recent fires in long unburnt National Parks in New South Wales were very dangerous to humans, and native animals, and would have been in Leichardt's day, if there had been little, or no, burning.
If Mr. Esplin is interested I can supply much more historical evidence, and I have no doubt many other people, such as Dave Ryan and colleagues, can too. History is an essential part of ecology, but needs some insight. Perhaps Mr. Esplin's expert advisers did not advise him well on this matter. Ignoring the dimension of time in ecology is dangerous.