Ian Osborne, Denmark Historical Society, Denmark Bulletin
As summer comes around again, our thoughts turn to the threat of bushfires.
Every foreign navigator who sailed the coast of Australia, from William Dampier and Abel Tasman to Captain Cook, and later those carrying the immigrants who would settle the new south land had noted the prevalence of fire along the continent’s edge.
Cook, after his first sighting of the coast, had written in his diary, ‘in the afternoon we saw smoke in several places by which we knew the country to be inhabited’.
It was, he said, ‘the Continent of Smoke’.
In Eucalyptus and the Ancient Kingdom of Fire, (Australian Geographic, November 3, 2021) Ashley Hay explains that ‘Europeans settlers’ in Australia brought with them the old thinking of Europe, where fires, like the land, had been domesticated.
Stories of fires were about hearths and warmth and controlled flames, whereas large fires were indicative of the Apocalypse, the end of the world.
To a Eurocentric mind, fire meant one thing: big, bad, destructive danger. To be avoided at all costs.
The idea that fire might be a positive thing for the land and its vegetation – a constructive, necessary thing – was inconceivable to the European colonists, and the thought that Australia’s Aboriginal peoples had sophisticated patterns of fire use to control vegetation and to keep the fires themselves in check, did not occur to them. A few groped towards an understanding.
Noting the coincidence of high rates of fire and the sparsely treed park-like country that the European arrivals had found running out to the Blue Mountains, the NSW Surveyor-General Major Thomas Mitchell commented that ‘fire, grass, kangaroos and human inhabitants seem dependent on each other for existence in Australia, for any one of these being wanting, the others could no longer continue’.
In truth our landscape and what it could produce had both been managed and shaped by fire. Australian Aborigines were the architects and stewards of a precise interdependence between eucalypts and fire. Archaeologists, scientists and historians would later call this practice ’firestick farming’.
We have now figured out the symbiotic relationship between eucalypts and fire, and we have learned that the vaunted gum trees of our ancient homeland are cunning.
Old Man Willow, dozing on the banks of the Withywindle in Bombadil’s back yard, was Christ-like in his compassion compared to these evil Antipodean bastards.
Most eucalypts need to burn at some stage during their seed-bearing life.
Some need heat to release their seeds, some need smoke, and most need ash to provide a clear, soft bed for their seedlings, free from any competing plants.
Les Murray said that eucalypts need to ‘shower sometimes in Hell’ because only by attempting mass suicide can their seeds crack and the forest canopy be opened for saplings to grow into.
Unwittingly, when they caused the annual burning of grass and young saplings to be discontinued, the colonists were priming the forests to explode.
Alas, for Denmark’s Group Settlers, an understanding of all this was still far off in the future and it was inevitable that a catastrophe – a blazing summer’s day when heat and wind would combine their small local burns into a fire that ignited, crowned, and accelerated across the top of the endless miles of forest – would come.
That day came on February 10, 1937, when an immense bushfire, driven by a decaying tropical cyclone, raged from Busselton to Denmark.
When Andre Bellanger, a settler at Nornalup, completed the rain register for the Commonwealth Meteorological Bureau at the end of 1936 he noted ‘Driest Spring recorded, and at the end of 1937 he wrote ‘Driest Summer on Record’. (Bernard J. A. Bellanger, Champagne and Tingle Trees, Denmark Historical Society, 1980.)
By Christmas 1936 the whole countryside was parched, small creeks were dry and major streams were greatly reduced.
Pastures were brown many weeks before usual and the bush was like dry tinder, just waiting to explode if a spark were supplied.
Eyewitnesses to the fire said that the flames travelling in the tops of the karri forest, hundreds of feet above the ground, were often well ahead of the fire on the ground.
As the fire roared overhead, sending huge columns of flame and dense black smoke high into the air and scattering burning leaves far and wide, the second set of flames, sometimes 250 yards or even further behind, raced through the tree-tops; then finally the third roared through the undergrowth made tinder dry by its two evil companions in the vanguard.
My Dad was a young man just turned 18 when the fire swept through the district, and he told me that he remembered that terrible day very well.
He had gone to town to play cricket.
When he left the farm in the morning there was no sign of the disaster that was to be his homecoming in the afternoon.
The cricket match was abandoned.
The town was darkened from the smoke, and it was difficult to see the road and dangerous because of the falling trees.
He finally made it home to find his father George and sister Mary exhausted, yet defiant and composed.
On their own, with no fire pumps or tanks, they had saved the house.
The front steps were burned, and the sheds and hay were an awful sight, still smouldering.
For miles around – and from our farm you could see for miles – there was nothing but thousands upon thousands of trees lighting the night sky and an endless crashing as limbs and giant trees fell in a blaze of embers and sparks bursting in every direction.
They couldn’t find the cows, but anyway there was no shed for milking.
Fortunately, they hadn’t lost any and were thankful for that and the sparing of a terrible death.
The West Australian newspaper of February 16, 1937, reported that the Denmark Road Board chairman, HS Thorne, estimated that the loss sustained in property, feed, stock and many other items supplemented by the cessation of production on many holdings, would amount to between £40,000 and £50,000.
This would be between $3.5 million and $4.4 million today.
Many farmers were left homeless and without clothing, and probably 90 per cent of them lost all their fencing, stock, fodder and plant.
They had to start again from where they had been 10 or 15 years before and were in desperate straits for years to come.
The Groupies were a tough and resilient lot.
In the aftermath of the Great War they had come to a fork in the road.
One path offered a meagre life of safety and stability; the other, while promising struggle, sacrifice, and hard work, led to a golden future in a new land, to a farm of their very own, and future prosperity for them and their children.
They chose the latter and it was only many years later that some of them, ‘broken by years, and wearied by the road’, had faltered at last.
One of my Dad’s favourite poems was ‘If-’ by Rudyard Kipling.
After the 1937 fire the Settlers were obliged to ‘watch the things they gave their life to, broken; and stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools’.
For those who decided to keep going, their heads would bow and their backs would have to bend; there was no time for crying, tomorrow they had to keep trying harder.
The Denmark Museum is located at 16 Mitchell Street and is open Tuesdays 2-4pm; Thursdays 10am-noon and 2-4pm; and Sundays 2-4pm.
This article appeared in the Denmark Bulletin, 7 December 2023.
