Page 3977 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 17 November 2015
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You join a volunteer fire brigade to put fires out. If there are no fires people tend to drift away and we have a natural churn of volunteers anyway. So we have to keep the experience in the brigades. We have to keep the longer serving members motivated so that they can be with the newer members when the fires come. So recommendation 37 is that complacency is guarded against, given the extended period, 12 years, since we have had a major event.
Recommendation 38 looks at how the ACT might offer some leadership nationally on this issue. For those who have not seen it, there is a marvellous exhibition at the Tuggeranong Arts Centre. Mr Corbell opened it, which was good. As a volunteer himself, he understands. It tracks the history and the areas where the fires run.
When you look at the old Canberra Times maps and the headlines, it is the same story every time. Draw a dot in the centre of town, mark north-west on the map, and that is where the fire comes from. The runs are incredible. If you do the overlay they are always from the same sort of starting area and they always run to the heart of the city. We need to guard against that.
This is often the story around this country as well. In Sydney it is always about Hornsby, the royal national park at Ku-ring-gai, and Minto in the south. In the shire of Indigo in Victoria, it is always the same concerns, as is the case in places like the Dandenongs. In South Australia it is the same story. What happens in the Adelaide Hills if the fire makes a run?
We are the most fire-prone country in the world. Our environment is probably the most shaped by fire of any ecosystem in the world. The Indigenous people had a very strong regime of fire management, a tapestry effect. If you have not read it, I would refer members to Ian Gammage’s book The Biggest Estate on Earth. It shows quite clearly, by looking through historical records and comparing them, for instance, with the artistic work of Joseph Lycett, that the bush in the Australia of 200 years ago is not necessarily what we see and have today.
Because we changed the practices from about 1850 to the 1950s, there is an enormous spike in the number of significant fire events in Australia. It is only with the reintroduction of controlled burning, particularly in national parks but also in other fire-prone areas, from the late 1950s that we see a moderation of those effects.
It is interesting that as a country plagued by fire, affected by fire, we actually do not have a national bushfire museum. That is what recommendation 38 goes to. You can see the effects and the power of the exhibition at the Tuggeranong Arts Centre. We would appear not to learn that lesson. It happens again and again. It happens around Australia again and again.
One of the things that we as the nation’s capital do so well is the program with our students. It would be great if one day there was a national bushfire museum in the ACT that enabled us to help educate young people about the threat and dangers of fire—and the threat and danger of arson, in particular—and how to react, how to save yourself, how to prepare your home and how to live with fire in what is a fire environment.
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