Burning Bush

A Fire History of Australia

Stephen J. Pyne

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780295998831
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

Pyne traces the impact of fire in Australia, from its influence on vegetation to its use by Aborigines and European settlers."Mr. Pyne, showing what a historian deeply schooled in environmental science can contribute to our awareness of nature and culture, has produced a provocative work that is a major contribution to the literature of environmental studies."—New York Times Book Review

BOOK III

The European

10

Entwining Fire

But as they have been passing from creation they [Aborigines] have performed their allotted task; and the fires of the dark child of the forest have cleared the soil, the hills and the valleys of the super-abundant scrub and timber that covered the country and presented a bar to its occupation.

—J. C. BYRNE, Twelve Years’ Wanderings in the British Colonies … (1848)

From what I have seen, in this country, of the effects of sodburning, I am more and more convinced, that … it forms a valuable part of British husbandry; and may become an instrument of real improvement, in places where it is not, at present, known; especially in bringing the WASTE LANDS of the Island into a proper course of cultivation.

—WILLIAM MARSHALL, The Rural Economy of the West of England (1796)

IN THE OPENING to The Tree of Man Patrick White sketches a stringybark Garden of Eden into which intrudes an unnamed “man.” This Australian Adam, amid an “immense” silence, strikes a tree several times with his axe, then builds a fire. “He sighed at last, because the lighting of his small fire had kindled in him the first warmth of content. Of being somewhere. That particular part of the bush had been made his by the entwining fire. It licked at and swallowed the loneliness.” ¹

The European settlement of Australia was a complex affair. It was both calculated and reckless. It began under one set of purposes and suppositions and propagated beyond any control or expectation. It was sometimes heroic and endlessly ironic. What began as a prison quickly swelled into a broad biotic invasion that utterly reconstructed the environment of the island continent. The haste of settlement was breathtaking, and everywhere accented with fire.

Fire catalyzed the violence of colonization and accelerated the rate of its biotic reactions. It was agent, expression, tool, and symbol. Between Aborigine and European, fire was both a point of contention and a medium of exchange. Between Australia and European, fire illuminated and obscured. It highlighted the coast and hid the interior. George Evans complained that it burned off “Marks in the Trees” cut by surveying parties. Mitchell lamented that it obscured distant landscapes in flame and smoke, blocked off the horizon, and so darkened the sky at night that it prevented him “from ascertaining our latitude.” Mostly, the fires were just there. Help or hindrance, they had to be accepted.²

The character of Australian fire is not easy to assess. Natural fire preceded both Aboriginal and European, and anthropogenic fire accompanied their every move. Eventually, for the European settlers, as for the Aborigines, there were two antithetical fires—the anthropogenic and the natural, the domesticated and the wild, the fire in the bush and the bushfire. The hearth fire echoed a familiar past. It linked immigrant with “Home,” not unlike those torches carried by colonists in the ancient world by which they transported the sacred fire of the mother city to new environs. The hearth fire could be distributed to the bush and help remake it into a usable land. To a large extent Europeans had exploited agricultural burning, ultimately derived from the hearth fire, to remake Europe.

The bushfire, however, pointed to an alien, threatening, often incomprehensible future. It lurked in the dense scrub and waving grasslands; it could appear suddenly and uncontrollably; it could sweep away in minutes a society painfully transplanted over years and decades. Fanned by desert winds from a forbidding interior, it represented everything terrible and inscrutable about the bush. Explorers and settlers confronted bushfire as a constant, unpredictable hazard. “The Mountains have been fired,” Evans wrote on his travels across the Great Dividing Range, and “had we been on them we could not have escaped.” At Frew’s waterhole John Stuart found “the plain burnt for ten miles.” They were fortunate to have escaped, Stuart wrote, for “nothing could have lived in such a fire, and had we been caught in it we must have perished.” Because they had prudently preburned around their campsite, King’s party felt unconcerned when Aborigines fired the countryside about them, and his men soon joined in, “for amusement,” increasing the “conflagration … so that the whole surface was a blaze.” Then came the surprise—a shift of wind, a pocket of heavy fuels, a burst of furious burning—as the fire stunned the explorers and sent them packing their tents and gear to the water’s edge. The line between controlled fire and wildfire was a fine one.³

The Australian bushfire was to fire what the eucalypt was to trees and the kangaroo to grazers. It had taken a separate evolution. Australia had progressed relentlessly toward status as a fire continent, increasing the importance of fire, while Europe had steadily expelled wildfire, pushing it out of the core and toward the perimeter. This contrast magnified the encounter between European and Australian fire. There was no single attitude toward fire, any more than there was any one set of fire practices. Rather, the interaction between a European legacy and an Australian environment was multiple; one practice often overlaid others, new practices were invented, curious (often incomplete) transfers occurred from Aborigine to European, and at least some Aboriginal practices persisted in selected environments. Lessons once learned had to be relearned. In the end the European bushman, like the Aborigine, became a nomad, a scleromorph—attacking with new tools the soil impoverishment, the aridity, and the fire that had shaped Australia and was equally shaping him. Like Patrick White’s Adamic archetype, the newcomers found themselves entwined with Australia by fire.

IT WAS ALL A PLANTED GARDEN

There was little doubt among European explorers and colonists that Australia was different from Britain. But the antipodes had their analogues. Some scenes resembled, with eerie fidelity, those from the home islands. At Botany Bay an excited Captain Cook journeyed into the “Country, which we found diversified with Woods, Lawns, and Marshes. The woods are free from underwood of every kind, and the trees are at such a distance from one another that the whole Country, or at least great part of it, might be Cultivated without being obliged to cut down a single tree.” The soils, “except in the Marshes,” produced a quantity of “good Grass.” The exploring party sighted a small animal “something like a Rabbit,” found the dung of an animal which, they determined, “could not be less than a Deer,” and discovered the “Track of a Dog, or some such like Animal.” The trees showed marks of cutting and bark-stripping. Ever eager for nature’s novelties, Banks added some curiosities such as “Loryquets” and “Cocatoos” and a tree that yielded gum “much like sanguis draconis.” But he also reported a small animal whose feet were “like those of a polecat or weesel,” quails “much resembling our English ones,” and sandy country that looked like “our Moors in England, as no trees grow upon it but every thing is coverd with a thin brush of plants about as high as the knees.” If many of the pieces seemed strange, the assembled puzzle looked uncannily familiar. The scene encouraged those who determined to remake Australia into the largest of the British Isles.⁴

Those impressions were not without substance. Britain had edged into a wet climate rather than a dry one—its climate deteriorated by becoming waterlogged rather than droughtridden. Yet much of its lands were covered with marginal or infertile soils, and it exhibited a history of anthropogenic changes from the earliest times. Britons had cleared, burned, hunted species to extinction, and introduced exotic flora and fauna with devastating consequences. The Pleistocene revolutionized Britain more thoroughly than it had Australia, and when that fantastic epoch concluded, its events exaggerated the fire consciousness of each island. In Britain, fire consciousness was lower than history supported, and in Australia, perhaps higher than circumstances warranted.

Climatic oscillations affected nearly all of Britain. Glacial episodes submerged most of the island under ice sheets; even the climate of the spared southern rim became periglacial under the influence of the ice sheets. Interglacials witnessed rising seas that severed land connections to the continent and flooded lowlands, principally those in the southeast. Although it is possible that pockets of settlement persevered throughout these cycles, so comprehensive was each shock wave of Pleistocene ice and ocean that most of the island had to be recolonized after every recession. Compared to Pleistocene Australia, the natural and human history of Pleistocene Britain was far more concentrated in time and space. The human occupation of Britain was more recent, and once begun—despite a permanent channel separating it from the continent—the islands were subjected to repeated, comprehensive invasions from Europe. The revolution was more profound because, from early times, it was agricultural.

There are records of Paleolithic hunters at scattered sites in the south of England that date back through several glaciations. But it appears that the last major episode, the Devensian glaciation (c. 18,000–15,000 years ago), effectively depopulated the island, and the modern history of human usage must date from the recovery that attended the receding ice and rising seas. Rapid climatic changes encouraged considerable erosion; glaciation scoured soil profiles; an upheaval in island flora and fauna followed. A succession of forest species reclaimed former ice fields and periglacial steppes. Elk, horse, reindeer, and red deer arrived along with human hunters, while lion, mammoth, and woolly rhinoceros vanished. Preferred sites included the banks of major rivers and lakes. Paleolithic settlers exploited the littoral. Everywhere they claimed caves.⁵

The real tremors of revolution arrived with the Mesolithic, roughly the period between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago. The climate ameliorated and stabilized; sea level reached its modern equilibrium (c. 7,500 years ago), achieving the final isolation of Britain from the European mainland; and an influx of primitive farmers and pastoralists broke the landscape like puncture wounds and abrasions, a source of spreading infection. By 5,500 years ago a mixed deciduous forest dominated by oak and elm replaced conifers and birches. But even as this biota matured, it was attacked by local land clearing and almost certainly subjected to broadcast burning. Clearing encouraged soil degeneration. On wet sites, lowland or upland both, deforestation led to peat; on drier sites, to heath and moor. Its trees had functioned like biotic pumps, draining the subsurface waters and venting them by transpiration to the air. Felling them affected Britain as destroying its windmills would Holland; the soils slowly flooded with excess water. Continued burning and grazing, moreover, prevented forest regeneration, so that sites once propelled into peat could not easily be restored without major climatic change or human intervention. Local sites enlarged, and through centuries of repeated clearing, burning, and grazing impauperate soils—leached and flooded—matured, spreading like some floral leprosy across extensive areas. It has been estimated that, through such means, as much as five-eighths of England and Wales experienced soil acidification and disrupted nutrient cycles.⁶

The economy of the Mesolithic was mixed and transitional. Hunting complemented herding, and foraging, agriculture. The case of the dog is a cameo of what occurred—first a competitor for wild game, then a domesticated partner for hunting, later an assistant to herd flocks. The flora shifted from dense woods to more sun-tolerant trees and to browse-rich understories that demanded light. The association between clearance and hunting is reinforced when Britain is compared to Ireland. There isolation prevented repopulation by major ungulates and Mesolithic records show little evidence of land clearing. For Britain a likely scenario is that sites once cleared were kept open as hunting grounds by broadcast burning.

From the Paleolithic to the Neolithic (c. 3,000 years ago) humans expanded their influence with relentless pressure, like a stone slowly sinking into paraffin. They roamed more widely and affected lands more intensely. Disturbers by nature, they thrived amid the climatic and biotic disruptions. When those disequilibrations acted in concert, they rewrote the landscape of Britain. The revision became a revolution, however, with the arrival of Neolithic peoples more heavily dependent on livestock and cereal cultivation. Britain crossed a threshold that set its biotic evolution on a nearly irreversible course. Blanket peat spread across highlands. The biotic future of Britain belonged with its humans; they determined what grew and what perished, what lands degenerated and what would be reclaimed.

For reasons not entirely understood, the advent of the Neolithic throughout northern Europe coincided with a dramatic decline in elm. The agencies involved are complicated, but the recession of the “high forest” symbolized by elm correlates with remarkable fidelity to the advent of an agricultural economy associated with aggressive land clearing. Farmers felled and burned forests, planted plots to cereals, then abandoned the sites to weeds and eventually to reforestation. In stratigraphic profiles, the catastrophic loss of elm pollen corresponds to thickening layers of charcoal. It was a classic slash-and-burn regime, now known by the Danish word landnam (“land taking”). (Ironically, the original English word for the process, swidden, which derives from the Old Norse svithinn [related to the verb “to singe”] has become a generic expression to describe this pattern of farming everywhere except at its linguistic point of origin.)⁷

Low population pressures kept a balance among the subbiotas. Long fallow times locally restored a semblance of the original forest, while continued burning and grazing pushed abandoned fields into grasses and browse. The peoples migrating across Europe from Asia Minor or Central Asia were, after all, trying to recreate the environments of origin for their cultigens and livestock, which meant the steppes and shrublands of Asia Minor. It is likely that they used fire accordingly. The clearings that dappled Britain were more a cameo of a pastoral landscape than a miniature of a landscape dedicated to arable cultivation. The Neolithic farmers and herders used the native trees to support an exotic flora of cereal crops and a parade of alien browsers. The trees they burned to create ash and promote sunlight; the understories they kept in preferred berries, forbs, and browse; elm and alder bark they exploited as cattle fodder.

The landnam phase in Britain lasted for centuries. It expanded Mesolithic precedents enormously, and it persisted through waves of new invaders—the Beaker peoples from the Rhine basin, the Celts, the Romans, the Angles and Saxons, the Vikings, and the Normans. None of the newcomers imposed a dramatically different regime. Rather, if warriors, they seized political control over existing practices or, if settlers, accentuated trends that were already operating. They expanded the realm of agriculture, accelerated land clearing, and introduced greater numbers of exotics, both as crops and cereals, livestock and faunal pests. A critical moment came with the gradual promotion of sheep over cattle because sheep could not be easily fed in the woods, as cattle and swine could; they required pastures, which meant greater deforestation and the cultivation of special pasture grasses, and they could not coexist with deer, which further prevented their agistment in forests. They demanded, too, the extirpation of predators, the substitution of the domesticated dog for the wild wolf. Since Britain lacked a wild equivalent for sheep, their wholesale introduction required a wholesale reconstruction of the British biota.

As the climate deteriorated, which for Britain meant an increase in moisture—the enlargement of oceanic over continental influences—these anthropogenic practices wove a tapestry of cultivated and degenerated landscapes. The arable lands became more intensively farmed and hedgerows encased the open fields. Wastelands served as seasonal pasturage, though in places like the Fens agriculturalists began converting waste to field. Elsewhere, particularly in the uplands, clearing, grazing, and firing initiated more blanket peat, the onset of empty moors. As farming became more sedentary, villages and towns were platted out. And, interestingly, nearly every people preserved some sacred groves or woods. With the consolidation of the Norman hegemony, the basic structure of the British landscape was complete. A final surge of reclamation by monasteries (the Cistercians, in particular) and a bustling peasantry even carried agriculture into lands previously shunned as barren.

There were modifications over the next few centuries. The Normans imposed an immense system of “forests,” which meant land subject to forest law and dedicated to the king’s hunting. At one point, forests officially enclosed nearly a quarter of England, but claims of this magnitude could not resist a growing population and the peasantry ...