Patricia Gill, Denmark Bulletin
Noongar cultural burning may offer historical cues for contemporary fire protection but these cannot be relied on to produce a fire resilient landscape. So said environmental historian Professor Andrea Gaynor at the Royal WA Historical Society Conference held earlier this month at the Riverside Club.
Prof. Gaynor said Noongar burning practices belonged to a mobile culture and were never intended to protect a sedentary society in a landscape which had been subjected to logging, farming and urban development.
However, it was important that Noongar people undertook cultural burning for their reasons, cultural practice and cultural revival.
“We, as settler people, shouldn’t think this is going to save us from bushfire,” Prof. Gaynor said.
“It’s not Noongar people’s responsibility to save the kind of development we have now from catastrophic bushfire risk.”
Prof. Gaynor’s speech – Can Denmark’s fire history help us for Denmark’s fire future? – finished with a yes and no result.
And all history needed to be taken in the context of the warmer and drier conditions of climate change.
“Learning from the past is never easy because the past never repeats itself,” she said.
Denmark, surrounded by forests to the north and west was one of the most fire vulnerable locations in WA. The February bushfires had demonstrated how quickly a fire could escalate in the region. This had occurred amid increasing controversy concerning the practice of prescribed burning.
Since the 1990s, the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, and its predecessors had aimed to achieve a fuel age of less than six years in State-controlled forests.
The 200,000ha a year regime had become controversial due to increased risk to fire sensitive species and ecosystems within the biodiversity.
Observations at King George Sound garrison in the early 19th century identify December to March as the burning period of the Menang people.
Climate, land use changes new challenges for fire management
Burning took place in the context of previously burnt land, in mosaics to reduce the risk of the fire getting out of control.
Burning was also used to maintain open grassy landscapes favourable to attracting game. An 1837 account of Captain Henry Bunbury’s party trekking from Perth to Vasse was of ‘a dismal country all black and bare’.
Prof. Gaynor said such accounts gave rise to the idea that Noongar people burned the country every two-three years.
Other accounts such as of Thomas Bannister’s journey in 1831 from Fremantle to King George Sound are of karri forest with ‘underbush’ so thick that ‘with the greatest difficulty we could get on’.
The overall pattern appears to be of intensive burning of the country every 2-3 years around campsites and the routes adjoining them and more extensive burning of open woodland with other areas burnt less often or not at all.
This was unlike what Captain Bunbury saw because he was riding along Noongar trails.
Prof. Gaynor said where Noongars had used fire to manage the native vegetation, the settlers often used fire to eradicate vegetation. Small trees were chopped down and larger ones ringbarked, all of which were burnt in the fire season which started in February.
The hazard was increased by logging which produced an even more flammable landscape. With the removal of logs, branches, bark and leaves were left behind and the break up of the canopy brought in more light so the understory grew.
Being drier and subject to wind, a logged landscape is more vulnerable to fire.
“Also the undergrowth will carry fire up into the canopy of the forest and become a disruptive fire,” Prof. Gaynor said.
In 1937 a severe fire swept through the Southern Forests, Denmark and the South West.
Denmark was saved by a wind change after the fire “licked” the residential and business parts of the town.
The fire did not follow a particularly hot or dry year but a cyclone which tore down the west coast.
“Historical accounts can play an important role of reminding people just how swift and savage a fire can be and how important it is we are all prepared for it,” Prof. Gaynor said.
Afterwards bushfïre brigades were established but these appeared to be focused on bushfires threatening farmland and letting fires in Crown land burn.
And the gradual development of prescribed burning based in the State forest was based partly on the belief that prior to European colonisation all the forest had been burnt every two or three years or so.
More than 50 per cent of State forest was burnt in prescribed fires from 1955-1960.
But in 1961 major fires in the South West all but destroyed the towns of Dwellingup and Karridale.
These were caused by dry lightning from thunderstorms produced by a tropical cyclone.
“History tells us to watch out for tropical cyclone events as well as from people burning off,” Prof. Gaynor said.
The 1961 fires included 76,000ha burned to the north of Denmark after several fires came together including some started by farmers burning off.
As the fire was initially in Crown land it was ignored until it posed a threat to farmland.
A Royal Commission was established to look into the events led by Geoffery Rodger who was scathing about the response to the Denmark fires.
The areas had a bad fire record over many years and practically no fire control was practised over large areas of undeveloped Crown land.
Even settled areas didn’t have effective fire control. All fires could have been prevented if they had been suppressed earlier.
In Denmark after 1961 more fire access tracks were created through northern forested areas.
The Royal Commission indicated a need for better communication and coordination, fire brigades were bolstered and existing unsafe practices of protective burning by farmers were discouraged.
Another recommendation was the practice of prescribed burning should be extended.
This article appeared in the Denmark Bulletin, 29 September 2022.
