THE UNLEARNED COUNTRY

I ONCE sat with Fred Fletcher in Whites River Hut in the Kosciuszko National Park, listening to his stories of the years when he had leased the country to run sheep. As a young man in 1939 he had stood on the high crags and watched furnace winds drive flames up the western fall of the Main Range. Fred was one of many I spent time with, reconstructing the story and creating the first-ever map of the Black Friday fires in NSW. That map resurfaced recently when the great champion of climate inaction Bjørn Lomborg downloaded it and it was posted on the page of Craig Kelly MP, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Friends of Australian Coal Exports.

Mr Kelly was attempting to say that we shouldn’t see this season’s fires as unusual because big fires have happened before. 1939 was a good example,