with Asia). The other fragment, Laurasia, became North America, Greenland, and Eurasia. Isolated from the collective evolutionary drama of the other continents by thousands of miles of sea-water and by an extreme southern location, Australia and its plants and animals went their own way for many millions of years. As Pyne explains, the eucalyptus in particular evolved to take advantage of dry, nutrient-poor soils, and in the process acquired an array of armament that also made it unusually adept at navigating the challenge of frequent fires. As the tree became more and more abundant in the Australian landscape, so too did fire—and other species were forced to adjust themselves to more frequent burning or gradually decline in numbers.
Into this eucalyptus landscape eventually came human beings, the ancestors of today’s Aborigines, and with them they brought another source of ignition: the firesticks that served as their tool for bringing flame to new locations as they moved from site to site. Fire became both a means of survival and an almost religious symbol of a way of life, so intimately woven into aboriginal culture that the two became inseparable. Aborigines and eucalyptuses in effect worked together to make Australia one of the premier firescapes of the planet. When European explorers and settlers finally arrived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it took some time for them to appreciate the peculiar fire ecology in which they suddenly found themselves. Not until later would their efforts to contain the threat of fire enjoy even temporary success, and even today the burning bush remains a perennial challenge on the vast island continent. This is the story Stephen Pyne tells in these pages.
Burning Bush is among the most satisfying volumes in the Cycle of Fire series. Tight in focus, well bounded in its geographical frame, and following a clear narrative trajectory from aboriginal times to the present, it offers a wealth of information about Australia at the same time that it tells a compelling story. The tale is of strange plants and animals in a distant exotic place, and American readers can be forgiven for imagining that this history has little to do with them. But then again, for all the apparent differences, there remain many parallels between Australia and the United States: a long history of aboriginal burning, an extended period in which European settlers were forced to recognize the special challenge of fire in an alien landscape, and the more recent, “enlightened” managerial efforts to put fire permanently in its place. In both nations, the seductive dream of the twentieth century was a tamed landscape in which fire would no longer pose such a dread threat to the people who feared its perennial return. In both nations too, the twentieth century has seen dramatic struggles over the extent to which fire should be permitted as a necessary component of the natural ecosystem, a powerful symbol of all that is most wild in back country and bush. Australia’s fire history, in other words, has much to teach Americans and others who read this remarkable book. Who knows? It may even cause a few Californians to pause a moment before planting more eucalyptuses in their front yards …
Preface
TO THE 1998 PAPERBACK EDITION
WHEN I WROTE Fire in America, I embedded in its structure the naive belief that I would, in coming years, be able to rewrite all or portions of the text, and that the steady accumulation of new documents would provide the basis for further insights. Both assumptions failed. Perhaps the second was the more fundamental. Steadily, but quickly after contemplating Antarctica and composing The Ice, I recognized that I would learn more about American fire history by comparing it with other lands than by plumbing ever deeper into American archives. I needed to move out in order to move down. Australia was an obvious—and fortunate—choice.
The inquiry began even as Fire in America was published in 1982. An Antarctic earth science symposium in Adelaide brought me to Australia, and I tweaked the travel to include a stop-over in Canberra where I met Phil Cheney, then hiring staff for Project Aquarius, an expansive fire research program, and explored the possibilities of future research. For several years I tried the Fulbright Fellowship program without success. In 1986, with The Ice written but not yet published, I succeeded in landing a small grant from the Geography Program of the National Science Foundation. The Defense Nuclear Agency, for which I had written a study of historic fires and their relevance to the nuclear winter question, contributed some further (by their standards) pocket change in return for a report on Australia’s relevance to nuclear winter research. All in all, the money was enough to spirit me to Australia for nine weeks of intensive library work and geographic reconnaissance.
The Australian fire community was lavish in its tolerance and bottomless in its courtesies. I spent four weeks in Canberra, mostly gorging on the CSIRO Division of Forest Research library and National Bushfire Research Unit collections. Then I embarked on a five-week study tour that took me into and around Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide, Perth, Darwin, and Brisbane. Here I learned the art of blitzkrieg scholarship. It was smokechasing reincarnated. Find the records. Size up the resources. Hotspot; control; mop up; move on. Open access to photocopy machines made it possible to collect reams of documents for later, more thorough examination. As critical masses were reached, I would ship the piles back home. I still possess four canvas Australia Post bulk mailers, now converted into duffel bags. I probably left more than one host counting his silverware.
When I returned I took up my new academic post at Arizona State University West, then housed on the grounds of an abandoned grade school about five blocks from where I had grown up in Phoenix. A good job, but a new campus understaffed by junior faculty with a temporary library whose holdings could barely fill a single-axle trailer was not the place to find the blocks of time I needed to write. Eventually a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities gave that time to me.
Almost simultaneously an invitation to participate in a symposium on Australian science, part of the country’s 1988 bicentennary celebration, brought me to Melbourne for a week. I gathered up scores of used books, collected more documents, and returned by way of Canberra for another week-long round of research. Then I wrote. About a third of the way through the manuscript, I received a MacArthur Fellowship. My meditation over that event produced the Cycle of Fire scheme.
Burning Bush thus began independently of the Cycle. It was a comparative study, the first of what I vaguely hoped would be several, and only secondarily found a habitat in the Cycle. That it existed made the Cycle plausible, however. With Burning Bush, Fire in America, and The Ice, I had at least half the imagined ensemble. Studying Australia also confirmed my intuition that comparative studies, eventually global studies, were the surest way to advance fire history. I learned more about America by studying Australia than I ever could have otherwise. Had I doubled the documentation that went into Fire in America (which by then I had), I could not have more proportionally advanced my interpretation of what that experience meant. I would like to believe that the Australian fire community would agree.
From the onset I had imagined the book as copublished in Australia and America. A few months before publication, however, Australia revised its copyright laws—went protectionist—and made it impossible to bring out an Australian edition until a new (paperback) edition appeared in America. That took another year and a half. Meanwhile, what I thought would be doubly exotic for American readers—fire and Australia—proved too often doubly arcane. A promised review in Newsweek was blown off the pages by the Gulf War’s January 1991 air offensive. By the time Allen & Unwin issued an Australian edition, I was in Sweden on a three-month Fulbright Fellowship, and had the otherworldly experience of chatting by telephone with Australian radio interviewers about mallee fires and Ash Wednesday while sitting in a kitchen chair in a Swedish apartment amid a gray dawn not far from the Arctic Circle. It was hard to focus.
So like the rest of the Cycle, Burning Bush needed a context if it was to survive. In return, it contributed the story of a most remarkable continent and a fire history that, while in some respects like North America’s, differs in ways that make clear that fire regimes are human artifacts, or rather human
