Monday 14 March 2005
Presented by Michael Duffy
Western Australia has a unique approach to the burning off land. Rick Sneeuwjagt, from the WA Department of Conservation and Land Management, explains why.

Transcript
Michael Duffy: Lately I’ve become very interested in how Australians manage our national parks. Everyone knows the Aboriginal people once managed the landscape with fire, so what happens when they leave that landscape, or are taken from it, and put a fence around it? Well, many people say you need to manage the land with fire, and in some cases even logging. Now, I know this is controversial, but one thing I’ve picked up on is a certain amount of respect in the eastern states for what’s been going on in Western Australia for the past 40 years. The Department for Conservation and Land Management there is known as CALM and it looks after more than 23 million hectares of national parks and state forests. We’re joined now by CALM’s Fire Protection Branch manager, Rick Sneeuwjagt. Rick, welcome to the program.

Rick Sneeuwjagt: Yes, good afternoon, Michael.

Michael Duffy: So how does CALM use fire?

Rick Sneeuwjagt: Well, we use fire for two main purposes, really mainly to manage the biodiversity, or our plants and animals. As you said earlier, they have existed and adapted to fire in the past, whether that be from lightning fire or Aboriginal burning. And the second reason is to provide protection to the assets that are both within the national park and the adjoining lands, particularly the communities and the urban/rural interface.

Michael Duffy: Tell us a bit more, will you, about the ecological effects of this?

Rick Sneeuwjagt: I think most people will understand that our plants and animals have evolved in the presence of fire for many millions of years, and in fact many of our plants require it for their regeneration and for their health and vigour. At the same time, many of our animals, their habitats are reliant on the presence of fire to regenerate those habitats. There are some species that are favoured by frequent burning, others that do better in some absence of fire but ultimately need fire to regenerate and recuperate the habitat that declines—usually with age. So fire and biodiversity go hand-in-hand. In fact, we have a slogan that we believe is quite proper which is, ‘fire diversity promotes biodiversity’.

Michael Duffy: Do you know (and if you know, how do you know) how often you have to burn off different types of landscape?

Rick Sneeuwjagt: That’s a big question. It’s been the basis of a lot of the research in Western Australia. The research has been going on for at least 30 or 40 years, looking at the relationship between fire and different plants and animals. We know, for example, that prior to European settlement and in our dry forest, fires by Aboriginal burning and lightning occurred every two or three years. That might sound very remarkable to some people, but it does show that those sorts of frequencies are able to be tolerated by a vast majority of our plants and animals. The ones that can’t tolerate that sort of frequency will only occur in locations where fire is not likely to be a frequent visitor, and of course there would be bare areas, rocky outcrops, and some of our wetter gullies that would be too wet to burn in most years. So you’ve got a variety of responses to fire, depending on where the plant and animal is in the landscape.

Michael Duffy: And I understand Aborigines had the concept of hot and cool fires—there were different types of fires.

Rick Sneeuwjagt: Yes, I think Aboriginal use of fire is quite remarkable. They understood the role of fire very, very well. I believe there are many hundreds of reasons why they burned, but primarily it was to ensure that their hunting was going to be successful, and the way they did that was to burn regularly—patchy burns—if you burn regularly you will only end up with a patchy burn and that encourages the growth for the kangaroos and the larger mammals to graze, and of course it made it easier for them to hunt. They use hot fires in some cases to regenerate, and again, they understood that if you didn’t have fire in some areas, the bush would deteriorate and would become less productive.

Michael Duffy: And have you been able to draw information from Aboriginal people in developing your own approach?

Rick Sneeuwjagt: Yes, that’s a very important part of it. We do have a lot of biological research but it must go hand-in-hand with traditional knowledge, and there are programs throughout Australia whereby we’re trying to gather and obtain as much of the traditional knowledge of fire as is available. Unfortunately many of the elders are departing the scene and it’s a real urgent action that we need to give to ensure that information is not lost as people die off. It’s remarkable, the knowledge that these people have; knowing exactly what sort of fire, how often, and when to burn and when not to burn.

Michael Duffy: Would many of these people actually have burned off the land in their youth, do you think? Or would they have learnt it from their parents?

Rick Sneeuwjagt: I’m sure it must be like learning from their parents. It would be a whole hierarchy. The knowledge I have at the moment is that there are only certain people who were allowed to light up certain areas, so it became a hierarchical thing and not just anybody could light up, and there had to be a purpose beyond lighting. Again, you wouldn’t just light up. Some areas were protected because they were saved for lighting up at corroborees, for example, when traditional people met together. So if someone lit up an area that was designed to be there for a corroboree, well, then I think that would be against the tradition. So there are many intricacies that we have yet to learn about the role and the use of fire by Aboriginal people.

Michael Duffy: It sounds to me like you do a lot more burning than many other states. How long has Western Australia been doing it this way?

Rick Sneeuwjagt: Since about the late 50s, early 60s. We had our Ash Wednesday in 1961 when the vast majority of the south-west was burnt by horrendous fires and the town of Dwellingup was burnt out, and a number of other little settlements were burned A Royal Commission that was set up after then directed the land management agency (that was the Forest Department in those days) to do a lot more of the burning that they had started in the mid-50s but hadn’t spread widely enough. Since that time, burning has been of a fairly regular basis. In the 60s I think they were burning of the order of about 400,000 hectares per year. That has been diminished gradually over time to a more strategic level whereby currently our aim is to burn around about 6% or 7% of the landscape in any one year, which is about 200,000 hectares. We found in the last few years, because of drought, that we haven’t been able to achieve that, that we’re now getting a higher incidence of large wild-fires. So it’s confirming in my mind, and most people’s mind who has anything to do with it, that we must burn at least 6% or 7% of our state per year, which represents an average rotation of about 10 or 12 years, but some areas you would burn more frequently, others you would do less frequently.

Michael Duffy: Do you know (and this is a bit off to the side) but do you know if white farmers in the past ever did much burning off of this sort?

Rick Sneeuwjagt: Oh absolutely. I think many of the early pioneers saw the benefit of burning that they saw from the Aboriginal people, and particularly those that kept grazing animals saw the benefit of burning on a regular basis to maintain the green pick, and so that continued on into the 1800s. But then as things like the Bushfires Act and so on were enacted, then it became discouraged, and today’s farmer doesn’t burn nearly as much as his predecessors did. As a result, I think we are seeing larger fires, more damage, and more high intensity fires that weren’t so frequent 50–60 years ago.

Michael Duffy: Rick, whenever we talk about this sort of thing in Sydney or Melbourne we always worry about the public response. There’s desperate concern about getting the washing dirty from the smoke and people getting asthma. How have you dealt with that sort of thing?

Rick Sneeuwjagt: Well, we have the same pressure. It’s usually the…I find, and I’m sure it must be happening in other states, that most criticism occurs from people who don’t understand why burning is necessary, and that tends to be people that live in the suburbs and the areas where, obviously, there’s less bush. All they see is smoke and, of course, it does provide an inconvenience, and in some cases it affects some of their children’s asthma and so on and so forth. We’re very conscious of that, and one of the things we’ve had to do is to be very, very strategic about our burning. We have what’s called a smoke management program that works closely with the bureau’s forecast to ensure that we burn when conditions are favourable for smoke to disperse away from residential centres. We’ve not always been successful, and when we do end up clogging up Perth, for example, with some smoke, there is a large amount of criticism.

Michael Duffy: What sort of health effects do you get though? Are they really all that serious?

Rick Sneeuwjagt: Well, it’s a bit hard to know. We do know that if the smoke particles are high in levels (from world studies) that some health effects, respiratory effects, can occur. But it’s hard to know whether or not the occasional smoke from a prescribed burn does cause a significant health impact. Those studies are very difficult to do and I think it’s still open to question. For example, it’s quite interesting that in 2000, when Sydney was clogged out with smoke from wildfires for anything up to 12 days, the incidence of hospital admissions for respiratory ailments in fact stayed the same or declined slightly. So it’s really hard to pick. I think the point to make is that there will always be smoke, whether you have it from prescribed burns or wildfires, it’s just part of our environment. What we try to do is minimise the impact of that. If we don’t undertake burns, we will get smoke in large volumes, in high concentrations, for longer periods, as was evident in January this year when we had our largest fires for about 40 years just on the doorstep of Perth, and Perth was clogged up for at least three days, with very, very high particulate levels.

Michael Duffy: What about the death of wildlife? Is it the case that more wildlife dies in rare, intense bushfires than in a landscape that’s regularly burned?

Rick Sneeuwjagt: That’s definitely the case. We’ve done a lot of monitoring of that, and the patchy, low-intensity burns that are part and parcel of our—what we call our prescribed burns or others call hazard reduction burns—provide enough habitats and unburnt pockets and unburnt logs for most of the animals to survive. There will always be the occasional one that will be affected. However, the large, intense wildfire that can roar at 20 kilometres per hour and have flames 50 metres tall, they are extremely devastating to the wildlife, and it takes a long time for regeneration and repopulation to occur when an area is burned of large size. So it’s really not in the interest of the plants and animals for us to have lots of large, intense wildfires.

Michael Duffy: As far as I’m aware, most other states don’t burn off nearly as much land as you do in Western Australia. Do you think your way is best?

Rick Sneeuwjagt: I think the proof’s probably in the pudding. Since 1961, we’ve had very few large fires, and I mean really large fires. There are no losses of lives from forest fires; that’s one positive. I think our plants and animals at the numbers…if you do things like fox baiting, the numbers of those animals are high. We’ve done lots of studies, so really I think it is the best way to go. The problem with not burning and leaving areas long unburned is that you end up changing the structure. The forest gets…competition for nutrients and moisture means that the forest will decline and you’ll end up with insects and the natural enemies of the tress and the plants taking over, and you’ll end up with the collapse of a system, and that’s certainly what’s happened in the United States, and I know it’s happened in parts of Australia where forests in particular are declining in health and vigour as a result of lack of fire.

Michael Duffy: I guess, from what you’re saying, part of the problem seems to be that many white people still think of bushfires as unnatural, but you’re saying to us that, no, they’re actually quite natural and we should learn to live with them…regular ones, I mean.

Rick Sneeuwjagt: Yes, I’m afraid that is a common understanding or deception. Fire has been part of this environment since time immemorial, it’s just as natural as storm and hail and drought, and we’ve just got to live with it. We tend to want to live amongst the bush and have our pristine bush, but we’ve also got to understand that that bush needs fire and will have fire—no matter what we do, it will get fire. It might get fire of the wrong type, which is really what we’re trying to avoid. So it’s important that we understand that fire is a part of our natural environment and we actually, as visitors to the bush, should adapt to it rather than the other way round.

Michael Duffy: All right, look, we’ll leave it there. Thankyou very much, Rick Sneeuwjagt.

Guests on this program:
Rick Sneeuwjagt
Fire Protection Branch Manager, WA Department of Conservation and Land Management (CALM)

Presenter:
Michael Duffy

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