The Tree In Changing Light (7 page)

T
HE FIRE
gate was open and the country ablaze. Australian trees were packed with volatile oils and the harsh, wind-blown summers desiccated crowns and roots. Sailors coming up the east coast observed the ridges hazed in smoky blue light and incessant twinkling fires at night.

The British tradition of fire was to shut that gate and keep it locked. But a celebration of bonfires seemed to be always taking place. It was perfectly exasperating. The people of the land were figures in a charcoaled landscape carrying firesticks and moving through the bush seemingly intent on wilful pyromania. Such use of fire was derided at best as profligacy, at worst as carelessness. There were better stewards of the country coming in, or at least so they claimed.

With Aborigines denied their land the bush grew back to announce the wisdom of the burn. Trees thickened almost impenetrably between Sydney and the Blue Mountains within twenty-five years of settlement. Within another generation it was forgotten how naturally inviting to grazing the south-east countryside had been to the British eye, with
its few great trees per acre (each one charred up the trunk) and native grasses flourishing under the soft pads of the kangaroo. The incessant cultivation of the country by fire over perhaps sixty thousand years was denied, underrated. But as herds of sheep and rough bark huts multiplied the word bushfire entered the vocabulary of Australian English as a cry of alarm. Conflagrations of immense destruction began—nothing like those creeping, scurrying, licking fires of the indigenous fire-farmers in their regularly burnt-over country now changed and thickened up.

A well-grown forest unburnt for years was an explosion waiting to happen. Three centimetres of leaf-litter was equivalent to one centimetre of refined gasoline lying on the forest floor. The more securely the fire gate was locked the more dangerous things were. Fire descended on farms, roads, towns and cities with a raging red tongue. ‘Once torched, the burning bush resembled a spiral nebula, its fuels and fires like paired arms locked into an accelerating vortex.'

Settlers learned the rough art of burning off, getting rid of the fuel in the cooler months before it turned lethal, but it wasn't until the second half the twentieth century that the science of Australian fire developed.

Fire needed a guiding hand to open the fire gate and let fire back through.

 

Little in the story of the fire scientist Phil Cheney's early years suggests fire in his future except one day a column of smoke appeared behind the family house at Newhaven, on Phillip Island, Victoria. This was in the early 1950s.

The grassfire burnt into a scrubby area farther back and Phil watched from the beach as a group of locals put it out. ‘It scared the hell out of me,' he recalls. The cause of the fire was unknown at the time, as far as Phil knew, but recently he discovered—around fifty years after the event—that he'd ‘copped the blame'.

Now that Phil Cheney is Chief Bushfire Research Scientist at the CSIRO in Canberra the story feels like a reversal of cause and effect. Surely the man who knows as much about bushfires as anyone living in this country of fires must have fire embedded in his psyche?

‘I don't think so,' smiles Phil, eyes narrowed to slits as if from peering perpetually through smoke. ‘No more than anyone else in the Australia of the time, at least.'

He recalls smoking out rabbits and bees, and once lighting an old banksia and the tree burning out of control as he bucketed water from the swamp, and then giving it away—standing back and watching the burning tree blazing all alone, isolated from the bush all around in a fiery display.

‘It worried me as a kid,' he says.

Water seemed more likely than fire as an element to mark Phil Cheney's direction. His father was a fisherman, and from an early age Phil went out in the 'couta boats. His father was a 'couta fisherman—this was done by trolling hand lines from a twenty-five-foot open boat. As a summer job Phil moved onto cray and shark boats. ‘This was real
Wake in Fright
stuff in the fifties,' he says. ‘The boats were often a floating arsenal with .303s for shooting sharks or dolphins that were “scarring” the fish, and shotguns for shooting sea birds, sometimes for cray bait but mostly to relieve the boredom between
shooting longlines or setting cray pots.'

In fourth year at Wonthaggi High, Phil was given a blue-covered careers booklet, ‘Taylor's Diary'. A Forestry Scholarship caught his eye for no special reason except he wanted to work outdoors and didn't want to go fishing, or go teaching, either, that almost inevitable career path for capable students from country high schools such as Wonthaggi. There was no particular love of trees, but a youthful hike across the Victorian Alps gave him a taste for bush life and forestry work was outdoors, he noted.

A couple of years later Phil matriculated from Yallourn High School (where the science teaching was better) and was working the cray boats in the summer vacation before university started. He was at sea on a trawler when his Forestry Scholarship interview came up, didn't know about the letter, but no matter, the Reader in Forestry at Melbourne University, John Chinner, drove down to Phillip Island, came down to the dock and sought him out. He was interviewed at the boat.

‘I think they were short of candidates,' says Phil dryly.

Unpretentious, understated, practical hands-on philosophies in the Australian bush-worker tradition permeated the forester profession when Phil Cheney entered it. Scholarship holders were expected to work in the field when they weren't studying, ten weeks every summer. At the Australian Forestry School in Canberra, where Phil went in the early 1960s, his first job was working with Ron Grose, whose research focussed on the fire-dependent life cycle of
Eucalyptus delegatensis
, the Alpine ash, and ways to harness it in forestry. The Alpine ash is a large hardwood of the upland regions of Tasmania, eastern Victoria, and south-eastern New South
Wales. It is closely related to the Mountain ash (
E. regnans
), the tallest hardwood in the world.

Australia's eucalypts are adapted to fire but respond to fires of many different sorts, depending on the species (there are over six hundred species of eucalypt). Mountain ash is extremely fire-vulnerable but at the same time fire-reliant. The tree burns to destruction but seeds prolifically after fire with the result that forests of
regnans
are evenly aged. ‘The fluffy ash accepts the falling seed, buries it, encases it in an environment full of mineralised biochemicals and temporarily purged of antagonistic microorganisms.'

Grose's research showed that cut forests wouldn't regenerate unless the slash left after felling was burnt beforehand. In this environment Phil Cheney received his fieldwork initiation—on hands and knees in a charred seedbed taking measurements, soil temperatures, and readings in weather stations. The forester as tree adventurer was a streak in both men.

‘One day,' says Cheney, ‘Ron and I were taking turns in cutting the top off this tree at twenty metres above the ground (the diameter was pretty big at this height). I got to a point when the tree started to crack and split down the stem. I had visions of being squashed flat against the tree by the safety harness so I came down. We waited hoping the wind would blow it off but it stayed there. If I recall correctly we tossed a coin to see who would go up and finish it off. Ron won so up he went (I'm sure he would have gone up if I'd won). Being a relatively short and thick spar it made a quick vibration that shook Ron violently—fortunately the split did not go any further.'

For many years forestry students lit fires on Bruce Ridge, on the slopes of Black Mountain overlooking the older inner suburbs of Canberra. This was their fire-lighting exercise patch and there they had the freedom to learn about fire and the responsibilty drummed into them—as fuel smouldered at the end of the day—to stay overnight and guard the fire until they knew it was dead. ‘The most reliable way to ensure that fuel is dead-out,' says Phil, ‘is to feel it with bare hands.'

Such practical philosophies, derived from common sense experience, were reinforced from the lessons hammered home by Alan McArthur, the first full-time professional fire scientist in Australia and the man, now legendary, who became Phil Cheney's professional mentor in fire science (and Phil, after McArthur's death, his successor and advocate).

McArthur as lecturer in fire control ran the fire exercises for the students on Bruce Ridge and must have seen fire smouldering in Phil Cheney vocationally speaking. At the point Phil graduated and finished serving his three year bond it was somehow water again in Phil's mind, except he was without a work offer in the specialty he'd chosen, water catchment research. He was in fact in Sydney with his friend Wilf Crane looking for a yacht in which the two intended sailing around the world. But it wasn't to happen. Phil found himself press-ganged into forestry from a boat dock for the second time in his life—this time by Alan McArthur. He became his assistant.

 

It is obvious to anyone with long experience of fire—like McArthur and now Cheney—that the fire gate can't be held
shut in Australia until too late. It has to be opened to let fire through before fire comes and reduces the gate to ash and goes on raging elsewhere. A succinct principle to hang on the gate: those who fail to use fire to fight fire will be destroyed by fire. Conditions for catastrophic fire come right about every five years in the fire crescent reaching past Adelaide, Melbourne, to Sydney and through the thickly forested Dividing Range areas of the hinterland and across into the expansive grasslands of the Riverina and western plains.

McArthur it seemed had fire in his psyche, a fire-lover's excitement over the phenomena of the blaze. It extended to herding fire like a stockman and running it down until it came, exhausted, to a stop. ‘It can be done,' he said, ‘and as long as you work systematically you can wear it down and beat it in the end.' His primary motivation was to make firefighting safer and pursuing that aim he was very strong on prescribed burning. Phil Cheney took up that crusade.

Anyone with a box of matches or a cigarette butt—or even a farm implement such as a rotary slasher on a hot day making sparks over rocky ground—can start a fire. ‘Where a fire starts,' says Phil, ‘is very much a matter of chance. With extreme weather conditions, how a fire starts is frequently unusual and often bizarre. Once ignited, however, the direction the fire will travel and the area it will burn are reasonably predictable.'

This is the point at which fire science research meets the situation of ordinary people caught unprepared or in the wrong place at the wrong time and speaks to firefighting units charged with fire control. Indeed, perhaps no area of Australian science speaks more directly into the most frightening and archetypal moments of our experience. The
essence of fire control, Phil emphasises, is the local land-holder and the community bushfire brigade. ‘In a severe fire season, grass fires must be attacked very soon after they start and while they are small. In a country like Australia this is done most efficiently by the landholders themselves. A fully professional fire service would be prohibitively expensive and could not, in any case, get to most fires as quickly as local people … Forest fires are more complicated and one has to consider more variables. One also has to have experience to put the importance of the critical variable for each particular situation into the right context. To the layman, what might seem important in one situation may not be so important in another.'

Fire science as developed by McArthur, Cheney and their colleagues spreads the net wide. It includes experimental fires at the height of the fire season, in both grassland and eucalypt forests; intensely detailed studies of Australia's worst fires' history (Black Friday 1939, Hobart 1967, and Ash Wednesday 1983 setting the benchmarks); and comprehensive studies of how fuel loads affect fire intensity. Phil Cheney's office issues a stream of technical papers on aspects of working with fire ranging from the combustion characteristics of innumerable Australian fuels (grasses, trees, leaf-litter, even sugar cane) to matters such as whether it is better to wear fireproof protective clothing or light cotton clothing when fighting a blaze (emphatic answer: the latter). Fire-danger rating tables first developed by McArthur have led to a circular slide rule (the CSIRO Fire Spread Meter) able to give readings within minutes in the field, allowing firefighters to predict rate and direction of spread, and now programs
that allow firefighters to predict and map several hours of spread pattern of a fire on their laptop computers in a few minutes.

Getting years of research across to people in a few minutes is a skill few scientists have, or perhaps even need, whereas in fire science it is a matter of life or death.

‘These days it is becoming more and more difficult for volunteers and landholders to get the experience. Farmers no longer use fire to clear their land and even stubble burning is becoming less common. The main users of fire in southern Australia have been forestry and their influence is diminishing under economic rationalisation and the trend towards plantations rather than regenerated native forest.