like statuary, pastures, and parks. The Australian Alternative was essential to any sense of completeness the Cycle might wish to claim. Besides, the book was an ecstasy to write. The long, long hours of labor in libraries and over smudged photocopies blew away like smoke with each gust of insight. The book was my grateful thanks to Australian colleagues.
As always there are second thoughts. The lengthy chapter on British fire history proved unnecessary in the light of subsequent developments; Vestal Fire repositioned that story squarely in Europe. So also some of the speculations about early hominids and fire have been made (or will be made) superfluous. That I had already written on many of these themes in Burning Bush ensured an unavoidable degree of repetition in later volumes of the Cycle. Stubbornly, I prefer to consider them as welds, not redundancies.
Some scientific critics were irritated that I had not committed more firmly to ecological explanations, that when pressed to decide which fire phenomena were true I morphed facts into metaphors. That, of course, was my intention. Ecological science is far too unstable to serve as a foundation for history. Rather it furnishes convenient scaffoldings to be erected, torn down, and reassembled on the hard pilings of philosophy and art. The rest will be swept away in the next storm of discovery and paradigm shifts.
But that critique raises the larger question of sources. Little of the material in Burning Bush is original in the sense of having been milled from archival ore. Almost all had been published in some form or other, officially or informally. I gathered every scrap I could find. I dumped scientific and technical studies into the common stew. What I can claim is to have given that mass a new shape, to have informed it with a historical schema, if not a true narrative. That challenge was both literary and conceptual.
The literary problem was how to trace a narrative line that, like an ellipse, had two foci, one in nature and one in culture. Burning Bush forced me to bring into consciousness what I had done intuitively before. I had to think through how to animate nature without anthropomorphizing it. I had to handle the scientific literature as something between a data set and an archive of historical documents. I had to structure the text so that I could move between natural and cultural history, slip through literary cracks, without dichotomizing them or sinking into a formal dialectic. Like orbiting moonlets that help shape planetary rings, packets of hard data within the text helped shepherd the narrative.
The intellectual impasse was to find a way around the Aborigine-European dichotomy that blocks nearly all Australian studies. When I visited a pine plantation suffering from boron deficiency and learned about the peculiar status of Australian soils and the adaptations of Eucalyptus to them, I had my breakthrough. I would begin with the eucalypt and end with the New Australian and leave the standard dichotomy sandwiched like so much lettuce and tomato between them. The book’s structure unfolded instantly at that point.
It is my hope that the core story will continue to be relevant. The great Sydney fires of 1994 argue that bushfires will persist and that the terms of the debate over appropriate fire practices will revive with each drought, each flame bent by a southern burster, every endless discourse about what it means to be an Australian. It’s a marvelous story. The world needs to hear more of it.
STEVE PYNE
Glendale, Arizona
Preface
TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION
Firestick History
Australian history is almost always picturesque; indeed, it is so curious and strange, that it is itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer, and so it pushes the other novelties into second and third place. It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies.
—MARK TWAIN, Following the Equator (1897)
SOMETIME—or rather at several critical junctures—in the saga of Australia, the island continent opted for fire. A sequence of environmental events made fire possible as soils deteriorated, aridity became seasonal and drought common, ancestral rainforest broke up into a suite of tough, woody weeds, and storm tracks hurled fierce winds from interior deserts. Fires kindled and spread, and they interacted with the emergent biota in often extraordinary ways. Fire acquired a signatory rhythm and power that indelibly identified it with the bush it shaped. And then Homo arrived.
Humans brought chronic fire, inextinguishable fire; they were a uniquely fire creature for whom fire was a universal tool. They all—Aborigines, Europeans, Australians—applied it universally in every conceivable landscape and for every conceivable purpose. They exploited fire to extract from an often forbidding environment the critical elements of their existence. Their fires reinforced tendencies already encoded in the natural environment. The ability to tolerate fire evolved into a preference for it; a biotic preference for fire became a near addiction; Australia’s natural history moved irreversibly toward fire-proneness. Bushfire became inexpungable, compelling, pervasive.
The relationships mediated by anthropogenic fire were reciprocal: they restructured natural fire regimes even as they remade human societies. Anthropogenic fire shaped Australian geography and informed Australian history. It penetrated the Australian consciousness in special ways. In return, Australians have profoundly reworked the historical geography of fire. To celebrate their bicentenary Australians even encircled their continent with a ring of bonfires.
AN ENVIRONMENTAL EPIC pleads for an epic style. Instead I offer a cautious alternative. In studying the Aborigines of Arnhemland, Rhys Jones coined the expression “fire-stick farmers” to describe their relationship to their land. Through their skillful manipulation of fire, Aborigines fashioned an analogue of farming, a means by which to massage the indigenous environment into serving their particular needs. By analogy, I propose a kind of firestick history, an alternative genre in which fire is both a means and an end.
What follows is not merely a history of fires, fire regimes, and fire practices—all fascinating in their own way. Rather, this fire history proposes, in addition, to use fire as a means of historical understanding. By studying fire one can extract information from the historical record that is otherwise inaccessible or overlooked, much as burning often flushes infertile biotas with nutrients and cooking renders palatable many otherwise inedible foodstuffs. Fire can reconfigure historical landscapes and remake raw materials into humanly usable history. Thus, fire history introduces new data into Australian history; it provides new means by which to explore historical events; and, like fire—which integrates innumerable environmental conditions into a coherent flame—it offers a synthesis. In the end, it describes as few phenomena can the interplay between humans and landscape, which is to say it illuminates the character of each.
Burning Bush is thus several histories for several audiences. Like an ellipse, it has two foci—one in fire history and the other in Australian history. Likewise it has two national audiences, Australian and American, and two sets of data, one from the natural sciences and one from sources more traditional to historical scholarship. They combine into inherently unstable compounds, at times bonding like epoxy and on other occasions becoming as volatile as nitroglycerin, ready to explode with the first stumble. Though it ranges widely through the scientific literature, this examination is not science. Rather, it seeks to use fire to elicit new insights from existing scholarship and archives, and to establish a context for understanding the global status of Australian fire. Free-burning fire is a catalyst, an accelerant, a magnifier, and its history inevitably an exaggeration. That is especially true in Australia, and pyrophilia can infect historians as it has so much of Australian life. Obsession can replace narrative, recalling Gaston Bachelard’s belief that fire-induced reverie renders impossible the rational study of fire. Herman Melville warned: “Look
