Abstract
In January 1939 — Black Friday — bushfires savaged southeastern Australia. Perhaps 1.4 million hectares in Victoria were burned, some 71 lives were lost, and damages went beyond the capacity of the economic calculus of the day to assess. With the majority of the fires set by humans and nearly all of them beyond the capability of humans to contain, the Black Friday holocaust publicized a massive breakdown in rural fire practices. Bushfires were of course nothing alien to Victoria; its establishment as a crown colony in 1851 had been accompanied by a panorama of fires that exceeded those of 1939.1 But the bush was then lightly occupied by squatters and diggers. When Black Friday sent a smoke pall that blackened even the skies over Tasmania, the land had been occupied by Europeans for a century. A Royal Commission, headed by Judge Leonard E.B. Stretton, was called upon to survey the wreckage and recommend remedial measures.2
Two Fires
In the beginning was the fire;
Out of the death of fire, rock and waters;
And out of water and rock, the single spark
the Divine truth.
- Judith Wright, ‘The Two Fires’ (1955)
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Notes
Compilations of historic fires, including Black Thursday, can be found in J.C. Foley, A Study of Meteorological Conditions Associated with Bush and Grass Fires and Fire Protection Strategy in Australia, Bulletin No. 38, Bureau of Meteorology (Melbourne, 1947); R.H. Luke and A.G. McArthur, Bushfires in Australia (Canberra, 1978); Ted Foster, Bushfire (Sydney, 1976); and N.P. Cheney, ‘Bushfire Disasters in Australia, 1945–1975’, Australian Forestry, 39(4) (1976), 245–268.
Leonard E.B. Stretton, The Causes of and Measures Taken to Prevent the Bush Fires of January, 1939 and to Protect Life and Property, Report of Royal Commission (Melbourne, 1939).
My sense of the ‘American invasion’ comes from Richard White, “Combating Cultural Aggression”: Australian Opposition to Americanisation’, Meanjin, 39(3) (October 1980): Michael Dunn, op. cit. (n. 3); and Norman Bartlett, Australia and America Through 200 Years (Sydney, 1976).
For the floral history of Australia, see J.M.B. Smith, A History of Australasian Vegetation (Sydney, 1982); Evolution of the Flora and Fauna of Arid Australia, eds. W.R. Barker and P.J.M. Greenslade (Sydney, 1982); Ecological Biogeography of Australia, 3 vols., ed. A. Keast (The Hague, 1982); and Mary White, The Greening of Gondwana (Sydney, 1986).
The literature on Australian fire is vast. Useful compendia include A. Malcolm Gill and I.R. Noble, Bibliography of Fire Ecology in Australia (Sydney, 1986), and Fire and the Australian Biota, ed. A. Malcolm Gill (Canberra, 1981).
Sylvia Hallam, Fire and Hearth: A Study of Aboriginal Usage and European Usurpation in Southwestern Australia (Canberra, 1979), p. vii.
Phyllis Nicholson, ‘Fire and the Australian Aborigine - an enigma’, in Fire and the Australian Biota, ed. A. Malcolm Gill et al., p. 61.
Rhys Jones, ‘Fire-Stick Farming’, Australian Natural History, 16(1969), 224–228. For a critical reply, see D.R. Horton, ‘The Burning Question: Aborigines, Fire, and Australian Ecosystems’, Mankind, 13(3) (1982), 237–251. A useful summary of contemporary research is contained in articles by Julian Ford, Sylvia Hallam, and Henry T. Lewis in Fire Ecology and Management in Western Australian Ecosystems, ed. Julian Ford, WAIT Environmental Studies Group Report No. 14 (Perth, 1986).
E.H.F. Swain, ‘Rural Fires’, Australian Forestry Journal (March 15, 1927), p. 69.
A.M. Gill, ‘Post-settlement Fire History in Victorian Landscapes’, in Fire and the Australian Biota, pp. 77–98.
For the Australian as Bushman syndrome, see Richard White, Inventing Australia (Sydney, 1981); Francis Adams, The Australians: A Social Sketch (London, 1893); and Vance Palmer, The Legend of the Nineties (Melbourne, 1954).
The American fire literature, particularly scientific, is enormous. Entry can be gained through Stephen Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Princeton, 1982) and Introduction to Wildland Fire: Fire Management in the United States (New York, 1984), and H.A. Wright and A.W. Bailey, Fire Ecology in the United States and Canada (New York, 1982).
See G.C. Stocker and J.J. Mott, ‘Fire in the Tropical Forests and Woodlands of Northern Australia’, in Fire and the Australian Biota,pp. 427–442; Ecology of the Wet-Dry Tropics, Proceedings of the Ecological Society of Australia, vol. 13, ed. M.G. Ridpath and L.K. Corbett (Darwin, 1985); and Proceedings of the Tropical and Arid Fire Symposium, chair R.H. Luke (Darwin, 1971).
The best survey of the interior is contained in Management of Australia’s Rangelands op. cit. (n. 15). See also G.F. Griffin et al., ‘Wildfires in the Central Australian Rangelands, 1970–1980’, Journal of Environmental Management,17 (1983), 311–323. An account of the 1974–75 fire season is available in Luke and McArthur, Bushfires in Australian, pp. 339–344.
R.G. Vines, ‘A survey of forest fire danger in Victoria (1937–1969)’, Australian Forest Research, 4(2) (1969), p. 40. This should be compared with Cheney, op. cit. (n. 1).
The most accessible summary of fire weather is in Luke and McArthur, Bushfires in Australia. This can be supplemented by Proceedings of Fire Weather Services Conference,Adelaide, May 1985 (Melbourne, 1986). Most case studies of large fires include meteorological analyses.
Data from J.B. Johnston et al., Fire Protection and Fuel-Reduction Burning in Victoria. Report to the Minister of Forests by a Task Force of Ofcers of the Forests Commission Victoria (1982), p. 2.
See L.T. Carron, A History of Forestry in Australia (Canberra, 1985). Compare this to the American experience: Harold Steen, The U.S. Forest Service: A History (Seattle, 1976) and Henry Clepper, Professional Forestry in the United States (Baltimore, 1976). As an example of foresters as exporters of firefighting, see E.O. Shebbeare, ‘Fire Protection and Fire Control in India’, Third Imperial Forestry Conference, Canberra, 1927 (Canberra, 1928).
D.H. Hutchins, A Discussion of Australian Forestry… (Perth, 1916). The book is a voluminous and rambling, but fascinating, survey of Australian forestry and fire practices at the time.
Sketches of Lane-Poole and Kessell are contained in Athol Meyers, The Forester (Hobart, 1985). For Kessell’s early views, see his A Primer on Forestry (Perth, 1925).
G.J. Rodger, Report of the Royal Commission… Bush Fires of December 1960 and January, February and March 1961 in Western Australia(Perth, 1961).
Biographical material on McArthur is distressingly light. Basic facts are contained in ‘Obituary, Alan G. McArthur’, Australian Forestry, 41(1978), pp. 189–190. I have supplemented this outline by conversations with N.P. Cheney and R.H. Luke.
For the research outside forestry, see R.G. Vines, ‘Bushfire Research in CSIRO’, Search 6(3) (March 1975), pp. 74–79.
Basic biographical materials on Luke are available in ‘N.W. Jolly Medal, 1980 Award: Robert Henry Luke’, Australian Forestry 44(2) (1981). These have been supplemented by conversations between Luke and the author.
A reasonably complete survey of American fire policy and programmes is contained in Pyne, Fire in America; a new preface, updating the story, graces the paperback edition (1988). Shorter, more recent examinations include Pyne, ‘Fire Policy and Fire Research in the U.S. Forest Service’, Journal of Forest History 25(2) (April 1981), 64–77; ‘Vestal Fires and Virgin Lands: A Historical Perspective on Fire and Wilderness’, in Proceedings - Symposium and Workshop on Wilderness Fire, ed. James Lotan et al., U.S. Forest Service General Technical Report INT-182 (1985), p. 254–266; and ‘The Fire Next Time: Old Fire Problems and New Problem Fires’, Ninth Fire and Forest Meteorology Conference (American Meteorological Society, 1987), pp. 197–203.
For the context of early years, see Pyne, ‘Prelude to Sustained-Yield Forestry: The Origins of Systematic Fire Protection in the United States’, History of Sustained-Yield Forestry: A Symposium, ed. Harold K. Steen (Durham, North Carolina, 1984), pp. 68–78.
An abridged survey of the controversy is given in Pyne, ibid. A more detailed recounting can be found in Raymond Clar, California Government and Forestry, 2 vols. (Sacramento, 1959, 1969). Also useful are F.E. Olmstead, Light Burning in the California Forests (U.S. Forest Service, 1911) and Ashley Schiff, Fire and Water: Scientific Heresy in the U.S. Forest Service (Cambridge, Mass., 1962).
See Donald Bruce, ‘Light Burning: Report of the California Forestry Committee’, Journal of Forestry, 21 (February 1923),129–133.
William Greeley, ‘Better Methods of Fire Control’, Proceedings, Society of American Foresters, 6 (1911), 165.
In addition to the material in Pyne, Fire in America, see Ashley Schiff, op. cit. (n. 29). For a biographical profile of an early forester working in fire research, see Charles E. Hardy, ‘The Gisborne Era of Forest Fire Research’ (U.S. Forest Service, 1977).
Manning Clark, A Short History of Australia, 2nd rev. ed. (New American Library, 1980), p. 269.
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Pyne, S.J. (1991). Antipodal Fire. In: Home, R.W., Hohlstedt, S.G. (eds) International Science and National Scientific Identity. Australasian Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3786-7_12
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