Aboriginals didn’t need a water bomber to save them from Government nurtured firestorms, by Viv Forbes.
Fires lit by Aboriginal men and women created the landscape of Australia. … Their fires created and maintained grasslands and open forests and extinguished all flora and fauna unable to cope with frequent burn-offs.
Early white explorers and settlers recorded the smoke and the blackened tree trunks. They admired the extensive grasslands, either treeless or with well-spaced trees, and no tangled undergrowth of dead grass, brambles, branches and weeds.
Early explorers who ventured inland were amazed to find extensive grasslands and open woodland. Their reports attracted settlers to these grassy open forests and treeless plains with mobs of cattle and sheep.
Despite modern folklore tales about Aboriginal fire management skills, anyone reading diaries from early explorers such as Abel Tasman (1642) and Captain Cook (1770) soon learned that Aboriginals lit fires at any time, for many reasons, and never tried to put them out.
If threatened by fires lit by enemies, the most frequent response was to light their own protective fires (now called backburning). Firelighting was deliberate, and sometimes governed by rules, but there was no central plan. There were no firefighters, no 4WD tankers, no water bombers, no dozers. But Aboriginal fire “management” worked brilliantly. Because of the high frequency of small fires, fire intensity was low and fires could be lit safely even in summer. Any fire lit would soon run into country burnt one or two years earlier and then would run out of fuel and self-extinguish.
Early squatters quickly learned to manage fire to protect their assets, grasslands and grazing animals.
Graziers need to protect herds and flocks, homesteads, haystacks, yards, fences and neighbours, as well as maintain grasslands by killing woody weeds and encouraging new grass. So their fire management was refined. They soon learned to pick the right season, day, time of day, place, wind and weather before lighting a fire. …
We from the government, and we’re here to help:
Today we have replaced decentralised fire management with government-nurtured firestorms.
First governments created fire hazards called national parks, where fire sticks, matches, graziers and foresters were locked out and access roads were abandoned or padlocked. And green-loving urbanites built houses beside them and planted trees in their yards. The open forests and grasslands were invaded by eucalypt regrowth, woody weeds, tangled undergrowth, dry grass, logs, dead leaves, twigs, bark and litter — all perfect fuel for a wildfire holocaust. …
Into this maelstrom they send the brave volunteers. With insufficient tracks, insufficient nearby water, uncleared tracks, insufficient fuel reduction burning and bush right up to towns and houses, disasters are guaranteed.
A bureaucracy led by progressive Greens:
Central management and control of burn-off policy has failed. Too often the people in charge did not understand bushfire history and science and were too influenced by green ideology.
It’s carbon dioxide causing the bushfires, they say:
Extinction Rebellion in Adelaide. Picture: Mike Burton.
Picture: George Manos
Boy are they going to regret this when they figure out they’re not Saving The Planet, just the banksters and socialists.
Someone someday is going to do a very interesting study on the power of suggestion on gregarious hominids. Could industrial Marxists convince university educated young men and women to strip naked in public and paint their bodies while forecasting the end of the world if people don’t buy their products? Isn’t education supposed to protect them from that? We got the kids out of the mines and factories and they grew up to be advertising banners for big government instead.
