Monday, Oct. 02, 2006
Darkness at Midday. The fire a wall of black and orange surf, roaring "like bombs going off." Heat so intense it melts roads and twists steel. Showers of red-hot cinders; zooming balls of flame. Trees exploding, animals colliding in panic, birds ablaze in mid-flight. Trapped people going mad and running directly into the flames, or jumping into water tanks to be boiled to death. And afterward, dead sheep in black piles. Morticians sawing off limbs to get contorted bodies into coffins. Survivors returning to smoldering ruins, refugees in their own suburb. The miracles—a baby pulled from under her sister's body. The headlines: six children roasted. Even if they haven't been in one, all Australians know that bushfires are hell.
And yet ... Arsonists are said to get a thrill from watching a fire and then, in many cases, rushing to help fight it. But in Burn: The Epic Story of Bushfire in Australia (Allen & Unwin; 420 pages), historian Paul Collins argues that until recently his countrymen's relationship with wildfire was not that much saner.
For much of their history, he writes, Australians have been "a nation of pyromaniacs ... fascinated by fire and addicted to it." Over and over, we read variations of: "Someone had started the fire, deliberately or carelessly."
Graziers used fire to clear land and encourage new growth, or to rid forests of combustible litter. Bushmen and campers lit fires on the hottest, driest days; rabbit shooters and motorists chucked smoldering cigarette butts into the scrub. Sometimes, a policeman told the 1939 Victorian bushfire inquiry, people seemed to light fires for no other reason than "satisfaction in seeing a good blaze." All this in a country where summers are often one long fuse of "perfect fire days," needing only a spark and the right wind to make the whole landscape explode.
Bushfire brings destruction and death, but riveting drama, too: the individual struggle to flee the flames and the collective one to snuff them out. Dangerous as that fight is, it's also welcomed, Collins writes, as a venue for heroism, "a kind of ritual in which Australian manhood was formed and the ethos of mateship developed." It brings people together: "professors ... fighting side by side with citizens," prime ministers' wives serving tea to firefighters, towns united in grief. But until the 1950s, public action barely outlasted a blaze. There'd be hand-wringing, buck-passing, an inquiry or three. Causes would be identified, prevention urged. And then, "once the tragedies were forgotten, life moved on."
But as the disasters piled up—Black Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and two Ash Wednesdays mark the worst days in often weeks-long incinerations—attitudes began to change. Australians developed a "fire conscience," Collins writes. Bushfires stopped being seen as private bad luck and became a social responsibility. Yet if most people are now less likely to throw lit matches about, a criminal few are far more so. It's estimated that almost two-thirds of bushfires are maliciously lit, but "police are lucky to catch one in 200 arsonists, and then only the stupid ones." Even harder to prevent are lightning strikes, which caused the fires that hit Canberra—and destroyed Collins' bush shack—in 2003. Australians must accept that fire is inevitable, he writes. The burning question is, "how are we to live in a way that will fit in with the most fire-prone place on earth?"
There'd be no "epic" in Collins' title—and fewer buyers for his readable book—without its human stories: of the postmistress who stays put till the fire's at the door, then telegrams her bosses that if the worst happens, "you will find the keys of the office and safe strapped to my wrist"; the man driving his family through blazing bush who stops to pick up three others—a delay that costs all of their lives; the scorched and blinded youth who whispers, "I'm dying for a smoke." Collins carefully memorializes dozens of people in this way. But you don't need to know he's a former religious broadcaster, or that his 1995 book God's Earth was about religion and ecology, to see that Collins' deepest sympathies are with the nonhuman world. For him the biggest victims of bushfire are not people but "plants, animals and the landscape." His real heroes are not firefighters but conservationists. And his villains are not fires or arsonists but people who interfere with nature.
Worst are those who burn the bush in order to save it. "Hazard reduction" burning is done, with widely varying diligence, to remove woodland litter and reduce future fires' intensity. Collins argues that it's almost as damaging as arson, making forests more vulnerable to fire by upsetting moisture balance and promoting flammable undergrowth. "Natural forests," he writes, "are best left alone"; shielded from fire for long enough, they will become resistant to it. Experts are divided on this issue and their arguments are reignited by every big bushfire, so it's unlikely Collins will convert fire policy makers.
For them, the top priority is people and property; for him it's the environment. "There are profound spiritual values embedded in our relationship with nature," he writes. Man should "withdraw and practice humility and allow nature to look after itself." That means accepting fire, adapting to it, not building homes in the bush unless we're prepared to lose them. Collins suggests bushfires are nature "taking revenge," urges a separation between nature's realm and people's, and, in a peculiar coda, links fire to divine truth, the Holy Spirit and the Last Judgment. Many readers will be gripped by the human interest of his book; only the converted will go with him through the eco-church door.
- Elizabeth Keenan
- A history of bushfire in Australia finds spiritual smoke signals entwined with the ecological ones
