Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  Tommy also reckons that DDT and Dieldren used by farmers are doing a lot of damage to the wildlife, specially birds. ‘You don’t hear the birdsong like you used to and some species I haven’t seen around for a few years,’he’d say when we were out and about.

  He’d make me climb up a tree and look into a bird’s nest. ‘How many eggs?’he’d shout up at me. Most often it’d only be one, sometimes two. ‘Should be three.’ Once when we found a little, cracked egg on the ground, Tommy held it up ever so gently to the light, ‘See that, Mole,’ he said, ‘the shell’s so thin it’s almost soft, shouldn’t be like that. It’s pesticides doing that.’

  You couldn’t prove any of this, of course, and anyway nobody would have listened to Tommy. They think DDT is one of the great inventions of mankind and don’t care if all the birds go and the little bush animals as well, as long as the lucerne, tobacco and fruit isn’t eaten by pests.

  Tommy said when he was a kid, it was the Chinese mostly who grew the tobacco and vegetables and they used herbs for pesticides and the birds were okay and so was the tobacco.

  ‘Only thing that’s different now is the pesticides, so it stands to reason that’s to blame.’

  Now let me tell you just a little about eucalyptus trees and how they came about in Australia and no other place in the world. First thing to know is that during the last 730,000 years Australia has been through eight major climatic changes from glacial, which is real cold, to interglacial, which is warm. Each time it’s returned to warm, two types of trees returned, rainforest and sclerophyll (hard leaves), each fighting the other for dominance. Both managed to hang on until about 130,000 years ago when the sclerophyll won the battle and took over as the dominant species, forcing the rainforest into wet gullies and into some of the more tropical rainfall areas.

  There’s one thing to be said for being in prison, Tommy gets to read stuff brought in by John Crowe that he’d never normally have a chance to read. He may not know a whole lot about some things, but when it comes to the Australian bush he is a walking encyclopaedia. He can make it interesting too, so you don’t get bored. Like for instance the human hair. He was talking to me about early times when Australia was drifting away, having broken off the main crust of what was the earth at that time.

  ‘Think about this, Mole, Australia broke away from Antarctica and drifted north at the rate of the growth of a human hair!’

  That’s not the sort of thing you hear every day. ‘So what stopped it so it’s where it is?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing, it’s still doing the same.’ Next time you need a haircut, just remember the amount the barber cuts off is how far Australia has moved since the last time you had your hair cut.

  ‘Then, as Australia drifted further and further north, undergoing prolonged periods of drought,’ Tommy explained, ‘only the tough and the opportunistic trees and bushes could make a go of it and the toughest of all these hard-leafed trees were the eucalyptus.’

  Remember when he took me out that first time and went crook when I didn’t know the name of a gum tree? At the time I supposed I was pretty dumb, but I reckoned there’d maybe be, you know, half a dozen types and he’d teach me their names. Well, it isn’t like that, there’s over six hundred species, all of which evolved and adapted brilliantly to the particular terrain they happened to find themselves in.

  Tommy lets you have bits of information, never too much at one time, so over a long period you remember all the bits because it’s like only one thing to remember at a time. I recall we were sitting beside a creek near an old mining camp near Woolshed called Hopeless Dig. There’d been a bit of a bushfire in a small stand of gum but the rains had come and Tommy pointed to the canopy of a Scribbly Gum, how it was green with new leaves.

  ‘This fire’s come through only three days ago and already the new leaf is out, there’s been almost no rain, but enough to get them going. If the same amount of rain had fallen but there’d been no fire, the tree would still be sitting tight. That’s the eucalyptus for you, the great opportunist. You see, way back in the dawn of history they couldn’t beat fire so they decided to co-operate with it, to make fire a part of their personal survival technique. They took fire head-on and won, so that they are no longer scared of the flames. Clever, eh?’

  ‘Just them, I mean only the eucalyptus?’

  ‘Some other trees and plants do a bit of this as well, but the old eucalyptus has elevated nutrient scavenging and hoarding to an art form no other genus can begin to match. In fact most species of eucalyptus are not only fire-co-operative and adapted but also fire-dependent. Fire is what makes them what they are and even keeps them alive.’

  Tommy doesn’t speak like this when he’s normal, only when he’s explaining things in nature, then he uses words like ‘fire co-operative’, ‘genus’and ‘fire dependent’. I think he likes the language of the books and wants to get things right.

  Everyone knows that Australia has the most impoverished soil in the world. It’s stuff you learn in geography at school. But lots of people don’t know that this is because we’ve experienced almost no volcanic upheaval. Volcanic eruptions serve a purpose, they recycle the soil and make it rich again. Put this absence of volcanic activity together with the wet periods and the dry, the cold and the hot, and most of the nutrients in the soil got used up or washed away long ago and the soil became impoverished.

  Tommy was explaining all this to me when he said, ‘Now this is the clever part, this is where fire and the eucalyptus come in. When fire burns natural fuel, like dried bush and undergrowth, twigs, bark, seed capsules and the like, they release nutrients which would otherwise be locked away in the unused fuel material.’ ‘How come, locked away?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, these nutrients are stored in dead wood, which is like stockpiling fertiliser in a farmer’s shed. It’s no bloody good there, you’ve got to take it out of the shed and spread it around, see. Fire does that, unlocks the wood shed and the nutrients are in the ash. If there wasn’t any fire to recycle these precious nutrients, the supply already in the soil would eventually be used up and we’d become one great big desert. We’ve got enough of that anyway, being the driest land on earth.’

  Tommy then explains how the eucalyptus has become the supreme opportunist and has found a way to grab a hold of these nutrients not only for immediate use so that they can recover from the big burn or live through the next drought, but also to store them for later use in prolonged drought periods.

  Talk about survival, how’s this? Say for instance a wildfire, which is a fire that’s started with lightning and is out of control, kills or severely weakens a patch of old-growth eucalyptus forest. Immediately after the fire passes, the seeds rain down from the scorched crowns onto the burnt forest floor below.

  Once we’re walking along in the forest when Tommy bends down and picks up this little gum pod. You know, the ones you see lying around and don’t even bother to notice.

  ‘See this, Mole, empty.’

  ‘What’s empty?’

  ‘This gum capsule.’

  ‘It’s a seed, isn’t it?’

  ‘Nah, it’s a fireproof container, only it’s called a capsule. Your actual seeds are stored in its little fire-resistant chambers. I reckon this one come down in the 1952 fire.’ He pointed to several trees not as big as the others, ‘Could be those came from one of these. Almost certain; if there’d been a fire through here since ’52, then this capsule wouldn’t be lying around . . .’

  He hands me the little capsule and I realise that it’s hard as cement, which is what Tommy means about them being fireproof.

  ‘That’s the amazing part, son, the capsules grow high enough up in the forest canopy so the seeds inside them aren’t scorched by the radiant heat from the bushfire passing underneath. The heat generated is sufficient to open them after the fire has passed to allow the seed to rain down onto the newly burnt forest floor. Here’s
the extra smart bit, the warmth of the soil from the spent fire will stimulate the germination of the seed and seedlings will rapidly push their roots down through the nutrient-rich ash.’

  Tommy reaches out and breaks off a eucalyptus leaf and rubs it into a little ball in his hand. I think he’s going to ask me to smell it, like we’ve all done a thousand times, but he doesn’t. He makes me touch the wet spot that’s left in the centre of his hand. ‘Feel that, it’s oily, ain’t it?’ I nod and he says, ‘The eucalyptus species is even designed to attract fire, the highly inflammable oils in the leaves is just one example.’ He points to all the dry twigs and things that are nearly always found under a eucalyptus tree. ‘See that, that’s the tree laying its own fire. It’s called litter-fall and it’s mostly fibrous bark the tree’s been dropping on purpose. Those are the dried twigs and leaves the tree has got rid of so it doesn’t need to feed the leaves in a drought. Mate, you couldn’t lay a better fire if you tried, it’s perfect for quick combustion. When the flame hits, it will create a highintensity fire that will quickly clear the forest floor and allows the seeds to germinate.’

  ‘You mean it’s made its own kindling and is just waiting for someone to come along and light it?’

  Tommy grins, ‘Well, these days not somebody but something, usually lightning.’

  Talk about well thought out! Then there’s the way the seedlings store these nutrients for when times get really tough.

  ‘The eucalyptus seedlings have a root system which has these little bulbs called lignotubers, which are tiny storage tanks for nutrients that they don’t need right away. When a drought comes along, they stop growing and use only enough nutrients to stay passive.’

  ‘How do they know there’s a drought coming?’ I ask and then realise what a bloody stupid question that is.

  ‘Because the bloody rains don’t come!’ Tommy can’t believe his ears.

  We walk on and he’s silent for a while because he expects better from me, I suppose. But he’s spent too much time in a prison cell studying up and I know he’s not going to let it hang in the air like that. Tommy’s got to tell this stuff to someone and the only someone he has is me. Eventually he says, like there hasn’t been nearly twenty minutes of no-speak going on, ‘When the drought is over and the rains come and conditions become right for growth again, the tree has enough nutrient reserves in its storage tanks to blast off. The clever thing is that they can acquire far more nutrients than they need for normal growth and store the surplus, if necessary, for years.’ ‘What about the grown-up tree?’

  ‘Mature-growth eucalyptus! Trees don’t grow up, people do! Yeah, well, the mature tree can do the same and also has a rapid recovery system, known as epicormic buds, which are buds waiting to happen on a thin stalk found at the axil of every eucalyptus leaf.’ He tears off a small branch and shows me these hard little knobs. ‘If the going gets tough, like in a severe drought, the tree drains the nutrients in a percentage of its leaves to store them for use later. At the same time, this tiny little bud just sits tight and hangs on waiting for when times are good again and there’s a bit of rain. Then they sprout and produce new leaves at a very rapid rate.’

  After a drought when the rains came and we’d go into the bush, Tommy would say if you watched carefully enough you could actually see the eucalyptus growing. Which is a bit of an exaggeration but they sure can get a new canopy of leaves going in a hurry. One week there’s nothing, then a fall of rain, and the next weekend the bush is green as anything and you wouldn’t know there’d been a drought.

  So that’s the sort of thing I learned when I was with Tommy and afterwards studied up a bit myself. The point is that a bushfire is a natural happening and is the reason why Australia is the way it is and so very different to other countries. It’s also why the early navigators called Australia ‘the burning shore’.

  When you’re fighting a bushfire, you’re fighting something that knows what it’s doing and is very good at its job and has had 130,000 years of practice with the trees actually on its side. You have to pit your brains and your skill against nature, and nature is no dummy, with a whole heap of tricks up her sleeve that you don’t know about.

  When the Aboriginal people came, some say around forty-five thousand years ago, some say long before that, they learned to use fire for themselves. They were hunters and gatherers and used fire rather than ploughs to live off the land. This is sometimes known as firestick farming.

  Even though the continent was subject to a high natural-fire frequency due to lightning strikes, the Aborigines increased this natural phenomenon to create more of the natural woodland so they could hunt and forage more easily in the clearings under the trees. By the time us white people arrived, they’d done such a good job that some say they were actually managing the land with lots of small fires. In doing this, they prevented the huge build-up of dry fuel that, if left alone, would lead to conflagrations such as would have happened in prehistoric times, where the whole continent was consumed in one great roaring flame and people and animals couldn’t have survived on it.

  Firestick farming was such a part of the Aboriginal way of life that it became a duty, a custom, to clean up the country. They thought land that was unburnt was poorly managed and that when it was covered with litter, it was dirty and disgraced the tribe to whom it belonged. Unburnt or dirty land had to be cleansed with their firesticks or it would harbour evil spirits.

  Of course, when we came along and brought sheep and cattle and general farming, we changed everything and now Australians see a bushfire as a terrible thing that must be prevented at all costs. The funny thing is, by no longer managing fire like the Aborigines did, we have now returned to unmanageable fires. Some people think that’s what nature intended and that’s the way things ought to be. However, the Aboriginal way of fire-farming has been going so long that a great many Australian mammals are very dependent on it and at least seventeen species of mammal have become extinct because we’ve chased the Aboriginals off vast stretches of woodland.

  What’s more, the build-up of debris under native trees now allows the large unmanageable fires to start, like the great fires of 1939 and 1952 here in Victoria. When the Aborigines were chased from the good land and firestick farming stopped, the undermanaged woodland forests caused huge fires to start again. While these fires may not have harmed the eucalyptus all that much, they reduced a diverse and comparatively rich environment to an unstable, oversimplified and often plague-species-ridden system that was useless for anything even the wildlife.

  So now we’ve got people we call bushfire fighters to stop fires, which is like a contradiction of terms when you think about it. People like Tommy and John Crowe and me are fighting nature to the death and Tommy reckons nature will win in the end as the soil can’t take the punishment it’s getting because there’s not sufficient managed fires to keep our ecosystem going.

  He says that fire is vital to many native animal species that depend on the landscapes, which routine fire replenishes with food. Kangaroos, wallabies and wombats prefer the nutritious new growth that springs up following a decent sort of burn. Tammar wallabies need the dense scrub for shelter and green foliage for food. These thickets degenerate over several years and need fire to regenerate them. Koalas need fire to bring out the young eucalyptus leaves they need to feed on and there’s lots of little mammals like the rat kangaroo that can only be perpetuated through some process of burning taking place in their natural habitat.

  Then there’s termites that live in the cavities carved by fire in big old eucalyptus trees and which are essential as food supply for birds, rodents and reptiles. Tommy was showing me how, after a fire, the bark is sort of loosened and this is when the termites can get in under it. ‘Termites are good things, Mole.’

  ‘No they ain’t, they eat people’s houses!’ Sometimes you can’t let him get away with things.

  ‘Yeah, but that’s civilis
ation for you. Did you know that the weight of the termite population that lives under the Australian soil is greater than the weight of all the creatures that walk upon the surface of our land?’

  I wanted to shout out that was the biggest heap of bullshit I’d ever heard. I think he must have read that in Ripley’s Believe it or Not! I looked to see if he was pulling my leg but he was busy digging away at the termites, exposing them under the bark.

  Now, I’m not saying this is true, it could be another story like the fish. You remember the fish that appeared in a ditch they dug in Borneo when it wasn’t anywhere near a river. But if it is true, that’s a humungous lot of termites living under our feet.

  ‘That’s why the Australian desert is the richest desert ecosystem in the world,’ he suddenly continues. ‘It’s because the termites are the only things that can eat the tough spinifex grass, which is pure cellulose. They come out of their mounds at night to feed and the small reptiles, like the many varieties of lizards and goannas, are dependent on them for food. They come after the termites and the bigger reptiles and birds eat the little reptiles and so on, which is how the whole desert food chain begins.’

  There could be something to this theory, which is a bit more understandable than the fish. Remember how we couldn’t tell anyone at school about the fish from nowhere for fear of them making us Maloneys a laughing stock?

  Well, that’s enough lecturing. It’s just that I thought you’d like to know some of those things, about fire in particular. The way fire is essential to us goes on and on and you begin to understand that fire on our landscape means life, not death, even though we have come to fear it, even more than floods or any other form of natural disaster and always equate it with, you know, destroying things. This summer is not looking good, the spring rains haven’t arrived and here it is early January and temperatures have already risen above one hundred degrees most days and it’s getting hotter. The worst part is that the winds have been coming from the north, which dries out the north-western slopes of the hillsides and that’s real bad news if a fire starts in the valley. Tommy says that in the January 1939 fire seventy-one people died in Victoria.