FIRE HUGE IN IMAGINATION AS THE WORLD”
The Australian bush was far from completed when the first humans arrived, and its antipodean qualities only partially confirmed. It shared ancestral origins with other Gondwana flora. Its biotas and subbiotas had analogues elsewhere. Other Gondwanic shields had leached soils, some on a massive scale. Seasonal drought afflicted every continent and most islands. The Sahara and the Kalahari deserts in Africa, the Atacama in South America, the Thar in India—all developed on Gondwana cratons in roughly the same latitudes as Australia’s Red Centre. Excluding only the ice sheets, free-burning fire was universal. Everywhere fire performed similar functions and obeyed the same laws of physics. In Mediterranean terrains fire was routine, sometimes explosive.
Yet the landscape of Old Australia was different, too. It contained some unique elements, combined in unique ways, and animated by fire into a unique presence. The universality of Eucalyptus is a striking phenomenon. Other lands had evergreen scleromorphs that dominated a biota, many such genera of ancient tropical or subtropical origins and all inured to fire. But nowhere else did one genus dominate across nearly all the wooded environments of a continent. In Australia gums define the character of the bush from tropical savanna to Mediterranean shrubland to mountain forest. Eucalypts tyrannize the entire spectrum of wooded lands, excepting only the mulga mélange. It is as though, in North America, chamise (Adenostoma) grew not only as a shrub but as a tree, as though it were supreme not only in Southern California but in the Everglades and the Rocky Mountains and along the watercourses of the High Plains, as though forests of pine, spruce, fir, oak, and hickory were all banished or shrunk into vestigial relicts and replaced by species of chamise. While the variety within the Eucalyptus alliance is staggering, there remains a commonality of history and behavior that has indelibly equated the bush with the eucalypt and stamped that bush with a distinctive monotony. When the explorer John Oxley despaired that “one tree, one soil, one water, and one description of bird, fish, or animal prevails alike for ten miles and for one hundred,” he was hardly accurate, but Australia did show a remarkable singularity for which its singular addiction to fire is partly accountable.9
The pieces that made up the bush came together in a unique context. Australia combined unusual size with extraordinary isolation. Until humans arrived, there were few exchanges with other lands. Australia imported little and exported less. Environmental stresses acted wholly on indigenous materials. Particularly in the southeast, winds, soils, precipitation, and biotic reserves concentrated the bush into a dense, volatile mosaic boiled down into a distillate by periodic fire. By Pleistocene times—as climatic and biotic disturbances became more violent and routine—Homo arrived with flickering firesticks to impose a complex economy of hunting, foraging, and gathering. For this task fire was an indispensable and universal tool. Initially it affected those landscapes that were especially susceptible to anthropogenic fire, then spread like an oil slick into every niche it could find.
In the process fire became more than a phenomenon: it asserted a presence. In Australia fire had a relentless intensity and a continental scale. It was pervasive, persistent, singular. It magnified, telescoped, and simplified the bush. Fire had touched other continents, but it branded Australia. The contrast with New Guinea, once joined to Australia across the Sahul plain, is instructive. Here soils were remade or freshened by volcanism; the climate was spared aridity, except in a few sites that were seasonally dry; and fire loads were vastly reduced, almost wholly anthropogenic. The environment resisted fire. Only constant attention by swidden agriculturalists and hunters, only on sites prepared by humans into slash or prairie, could fire persist. The island overflowed with cornucopic diversity—a continental flora in miniature; a fifth of known human languages. By contrast, Australian fires burned over long periods and large areas, anthropogenic and natural ignition complemented each other, and once installed fire became inexpungable.10
The greater the commitment to fire, however, the greater the difficulty of removing it. Pyrophilia had its perils. Fire could become a kind of biotic addiction, seemingly relieved only by more fire. It opened Old Australia to fire-hardy species and denied it to others. It imposed a special character on the bush, and committed it to a special vulnerability. Any change in the frequency, intensity, or timing of fire would ramify throughout the continent. Species that shaped Australian fire would be, in turn, shaped by it. If humans used fire to reorder the bush, it was equally true that the bush, through fire, would reorder human society. What it granted as power, fire also took away as weakness. Fire, for humans, meant both access and danger.
Those conditions that made fire so universally powerful also placed it beyond total human control. Bushfires could burn independently of any human will or act. If fire was a universal solvent, bushfire was also a brooding, ineffable, sometimes fatal presence that from time to time could burst forth with terrifying effect, a psychological as much as a physical presence, a nightmare out of a Gondwana Dreamtime.
When, with the dreams of Egremont, a strange
And momently approaching roar began
To mingle, and insinuate through them more
And more of its own import—till a Fire
Huge in imagination as the world
Was their sole theme: then, as arising wild,
His spirit fled before its visioned fear …
—CHARLES HARPUR, “The Bush Fire”
BOOK II
The Aborigine
5
Flaming Front
To clear the forest’s dark impervious maze
The half-starv’d Indian [Aborigine] lights a hasty blaze
Then lifts the Torch, and rushing o’er the Strand
High o’er his head he waves the flaming Brand
From Bush to Bush with rapid steps he flies
Till the whole forest blazes to the skies …
—THOMAS MUIR, “The Telegraph: Consolatory Epistle” (c. 1790s)
Our cots we fence with firing
and slumber when we can
To keep the wolves and tigers from us
in Van Diemen’s Land.
—ANONYMOUS BUSH BALLAD, “Van Diemen’s Land”
THE REVOLUTION THAT SHOOK Pleistocene Australia was part of a global reformation. The world ocean rose and fell. Ice sheets on the scale of continents formed and disintegrated. Climates reversed from glacial to interglacial and back to glacial again in rapid order as though the Earth were being swept by slow-moving planetary storms. A massive wave of extinctions—the most comprehensive since the great Cretaceous extermination—visited the world biota. It was within this context, within the biotic center of the Pleistocene, that the genus Homo emerged. With the arrival of humans, the eccentric, the protective isolation of Old Australia broke down. Well before humans brought other, allied species to the island continent,
