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Preface

TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION

Firestick History

Australian history is almost always picturesque; indeed, it is so curious and strange, that it is itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer, and so it pushes the other novelties into second and third place. It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies.

—MARK TWAIN, Following the Equator (1897)

SOMETIME—or rather at several critical junctures—in the saga of Australia, the island continent opted for fire. A sequence of environmental events made fire possible as soils deteriorated, aridity became seasonal and drought common, ancestral rainforest broke up into a suite of tough, woody weeds, and storm tracks hurled fierce winds from interior deserts. Fires kindled and spread, and they interacted with the emergent biota in often extraordinary ways. Fire acquired a signatory rhythm and power that indelibly identified it with the bush it shaped. And then Homo arrived.

Humans brought chronic fire, inextinguishable fire; they were a uniquely fire creature for whom fire was a universal tool. They all—Aborigines, Europeans, Australians—applied it universally in every conceivable landscape and for every conceivable purpose. They exploited fire to extract from an often forbidding environment the critical elements of their existence. Their fires reinforced tendencies already encoded in the natural environment. The ability to tolerate fire evolved into a preference for it; a biotic preference for fire became a near addiction; Australia’s natural history moved irreversibly toward fire-proneness. Bushfire became inexpungable, compelling, pervasive.

The relationships mediated by anthropogenic fire were reciprocal: they restructured natural fire regimes even as they remade human societies. Anthropogenic fire shaped Australian geography and informed Australian history. It penetrated the Australian consciousness in special ways. In return, Australians have profoundly reworked the historical geography of fire. To celebrate their bicentenary Australians even encircled their continent with a ring of bonfires.

AN ENVIRONMENTAL EPIC pleads for an epic style. Instead I offer a cautious alternative. In studying the Aborigines of Arnhemland, Rhys Jones coined the expression “fire-stick farmers” to describe their relationship to their land. Through their skillful manipulation of fire, Aborigines fashioned an analogue of farming, a means by which to massage the indigenous environment into serving their particular needs. By analogy, I propose a kind of firestick history, an alternative genre in which fire is both a means and an end.

What follows is not merely a history of fires, fire regimes, and fire practices—all fascinating in their own way. Rather, this fire history proposes, in addition, to use fire as a means of historical understanding. By studying fire one can extract information from the historical record that is otherwise inaccessible or overlooked, much as burning often flushes infertile biotas with nutrients and cooking renders palatable many otherwise inedible foodstuffs. Fire can reconfigure historical landscapes and remake raw materials into humanly usable history. Thus, fire history introduces new data into Australian history; it provides new means by which to explore historical events; and, like fire—which integrates innumerable environmental conditions into a coherent flame—it offers a synthesis. In the end, it describes as few phenomena can the interplay between humans and landscape, which is to say it illuminates the character of each.

Burning Bush is thus several histories for several audiences. Like an ellipse, it has two foci—one in fire history and the other in Australian history. Likewise it has two national audiences, Australian and American, and two sets of data, one from the natural sciences and one from sources more traditional to historical scholarship. They combine into inherently unstable compounds, at times bonding like epoxy and on other occasions becoming as volatile as nitroglycerin, ready to explode with the first stumble. Though it ranges widely through the scientific literature, this examination is not science. Rather, it seeks to use fire to elicit new insights from existing scholarship and archives, and to establish a context for understanding the global status of Australian fire. Free-burning fire is a catalyst, an accelerant, a magnifier, and its history inevitably an exaggeration. That is especially true in Australia, and pyrophilia can infect historians as it has so much of Australian life. Obsession can replace narrative, recalling Gaston Bachelard’s belief that fire-induced reverie renders impossible the rational study of fire. Herman Melville warned: “Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man!” It’s a risk worth taking.

In many ways, Australian fire history recapitulates the history of fire on all the vegetated continents. Its special character becomes apparent only through careful comparisons. That, at least, is my justification for the running contrast with North America and for the occasional contrasts with Britain and Greater Gondwana. However much Australians might lament their isolation, the tyranny of distance that segregates them physically and psychologically from cultural developments elsewhere, there is no such quarantine for fire. Australian fire history is an indispensable chapter in a global epic that began when early hominids captured combustion and changed forever the human and natural history of the planet.

THIS BOOK BEGAN many years ago when I decided that I would study in a serious way the cultural history of fire on Earth. I had just completed a fire history of the United States, started a general textbook on fire management, and was seriously researching a history of Antarctica. A symposium on Antarctic geoscience took me to Adelaide in 1982, from which I visited N. P. Cheney at the CSIRO Division of Forest Research and introduced my scheme to him. A National Science Foundation grant (Geography) paid for a nine-week tour of Australian archives and landscape in 1986. A conference on Australian science at the University of Melbourne in May 1988 brought me back for a few more weeks of miscellaneous library research. The breakthrough came when an Arizona State University Faculty Grant-in-Aid and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1988–89) combined to give me the time to write the book. To all of these institutional sponsors, I am deeply grateful.

What made my time in Australia so productive were the Australians who hosted me. Very special thanks go to Phil Cheney, who never hesitated to make available to me whatever resources he could, not least of which was to organize an ad hoc fire-study tour of Australia. Despite his deep attachment to Alan McArthur, he never pressured me to write the story along any ideological track, believing that untrammeled scholarship would best serve McArthur’s memory. He is an exceptional fire scientist—and a good friend. I hope the outcome merits his trust.

Others who contributed include Margaret Saville, Erika Leslie, Chris Trevitt, Colin Pierrehumbert, David Packham, Athol Hodgson, J. Barry Johnston, Noel Kemp, John Smart, Gordon Styles, Mark Dawson, Marcia Tommerup, A. B. Mount, D. R. Douglas, Athol Meyer, Wilfred Crane, Fred Kerr, Geoffrey Brown, Ross Smith, R. R. Richmond, Andrew Bond, Ross Hamwood, Bob Barchard, R. H. Burke, Neil Burrows, Jim Hickman, N. J. deMestre, Graham Medhurst, Neil Price, Ron Hooper, R. W. Home, Ian Knight, John Baxter, Peter Hutchins, R. W. Condon, and Andrew Wilson. From Oxford, I need to thank Miss Jasmine Howse and Michael Williams. Special thanks go to Harry Luke, who took me into his house for several days of delightful conversation, and to Jim Gould, a fellow North American (and to his children, Jane and Toby), who helped with housing and travel while I resided with them in Canberra. In addition, Roger Underwood, Roger Good, A. Malcolm Gill, and the unfailing Phil Cheney not only assisted while I traveled in Australia but read critically all or portions of the manuscript, a burden much greater than any of us anticipated. They spared me many errors, though even they could not save me from myself and a “poetic license” that, for all their goodwill, must have set their teeth on edge. While they certainly do not agree with everything I have written, I could have written nothing without their help. My debt to other Australian scientists and scholars on whom I have relied through the published record is obvious. Thanks, mates.

Special thanks go also to Bill Strachan for his encouragement, editorial strategy, and skill at piloting around the shoals of corporate publishing.

And of course I could never have undertaken this project without the support of my family. To Sonja, Lydia, and Molly—who gave me the time and, more important, the reason to continue—thanks.