This response is part of the Ongoing Debate:Bushfires and Logging
I am a retired professional forester of 33 years. In my retirement I write about land management issues on my web site as I travel around Australia full-time.
During my stay in Victoria, I managed to visit a number of forest areas. I have written a series of three blogs about the Victorian forests and bushfires, see:
- Living within a forest in a fire environment
- A charred landscape
- 70 years of bushfires – have the lessons learnt been ignored?
While my stories are not exactly on the topic you raise, you can see we have a fire problem in Australia that is not being addressed. And it has nothing to do with climate change. Nor is logging a major contributing factor since very small areas are available for harvesting each year. It is about the decisions in the 1990s across most states, but particularly in NSW and Victoria to lock up millions of hectares of forest into national parks and manage them by benign neglect and allow the fuel levels to build up.
Prior to national parks, these areas were either State forest or vacant crown land that was actively managed by foresters or graziers. While there were large fire disasters, the pattern of large destructive fires that now occur began after these land changes. Governments and senior bureaucrats are avoiding accountability for massive carnage in the forests, loss of life and houses destroyed. Instead, the Emergency Services agencies are being rewarded with lots of additional funding and big planes without anything being done to prevent these large fires.
I also wrote about the Fraser Island fire late last year that burnt over half the island and led to the mass evacuation of thousands of tourists.
The fire started in mild conditions and nothing was done about it for two weeks. When the strong northerlies arrived, the shit hit the fan and panicked bureaucrats brought in 17 planes but to no avail. For two weeks they water bombed the fire and the only way it was put out was by rain.
To underline the absurdity of current management, 12 fire tankers were sent over to the island during the blaze. They were not 4wd and could only cruise up and down the beach literally doing nothing and wasting tax payers funds. It is farcical and contemptuous and yet the State governments get away with it time and time again.
Fraser Island was managed by forestry and logged until 1992. After forestry started regular prescribed burns and managed fire breaks in the 1960s, there were few large fires. Since 1992, under national parks management, there have been a veritable plethora of large fires.
When forestry managed the island, they had about 60 workers living on the island. Today, the parks are woefully under-resourced with limited staff who visit the island to work, they don’t live and breathe the area they are supposed to manage. This is despite record tourists visiting the island and a major dingo attack problem.
See further: www.robertonfray.com/category/forestry