CHANGING FACE OF FIRE
To a firefighter, whose fragile skin is protected only by a centimetre or two of heat-resistant fabric, a bushfire is a roaring, leaping beast of flame and fury. It is both unstoppable and unpredictable in its onslaught, a creature of pure physics. But to a firefighter facing that maelstrom in the fullness of its power, a bushfire takes on a living quality, like a dragon rampaging across a landscape, crushing all life and structures in its path.
To a home, built defiantly on land that has been cyclically scoured by fire long before even the Indigenous ancestors set foot on this continent, a bushfire is heat, flame, wind and embers. Atmospheric temperatures can reach 1,600°C, hot enough to melt concrete, glass and steel. The flames themselves are a mere 600°C at their tips, but still carry enough thermal clout to crack a glass window. That heat drives – and is driven by – wind. If the conditions are right, those winds can approach speeds normally associated with major tornadoes. But they pack an extra punch: tiny, red-hot embers that can slip through even the smallest, sub-millimetre-sized gaps to ignite the soft underbelly of a house.
To a nation that has expanded rapidly over the past few centuries in the thin strip of habitable territory between desert and ocean – a strip once lush with forest, grassland and scrub but now sprouting communities, power and telephone networks, homes and offices, roads and highways – a bushfire is a flaming spear hurled into the complex engine of modern civilisation. It disrupts everything with smoke, chaos, panic and tragic, expensive loss. It is a thing to be feared, and increasingly so with the climate change brought on by the combustion of fossil fuels.
But to a gnarled and warty old man banksia, its boughs heavy with woody seed pods, a bushfire is the necessary catalyst for reproduction. Heat and flame trigger the pursed-lipped seed pods to open and spit out their precious cargo. Those seeds land in a soft bed of nutrient-rich ash cleared of competitors, equipped with everything they need to grow and flourish.
For tens of thousands of years, humans and ecosystems on this unique continent have learnt to live with bushfire as a healthy and necessary feature of the landscape. But colonisation, and now climate change, have profoundly altered that relationship in ways that Australia is only just starting to come to grips with. As the planet warms and patterns of rainfall shift, the timing, frequency, distribution and intensity of bushfires are shifting too. Everyone from fire ecologists and pyrogeographers to town planners and engineers are working to understand how this changing relationship will impact all forms of life on this continent, and how we can prepare and adapt for it.
These responses have to be informed by data. To adapt, we need to understand how, when, where and why bushfires occur, property and infrastructure are affected, people are injured or killed, and ecosystems are damaged. The constantly shifting landscape of climate change – rising temperatures, worsening droughts and longer, more intense bushfire seasons – has added a new urgency to the scientific quest to help
