a risk worth taking.
In many ways, Australian fire history recapitulates the history of fire on all the vegetated continents. Its special character becomes apparent only through careful comparisons. That, at least, is my justification for the running contrast with North America and for the occasional contrasts with Britain and Greater Gondwana. However much Australians might lament their isolation, the tyranny of distance that segregates them physically and psychologically from cultural developments elsewhere, there is no such quarantine for fire. Australian fire history is an indispensable chapter in a global epic that began when early hominids captured combustion and changed forever the human and natural history of the planet.
THIS BOOK BEGAN many years ago when I decided that I would study in a serious way the cultural history of fire on Earth. I had just completed a fire history of the United States, started a general textbook on fire management, and was seriously researching a history of Antarctica. A symposium on Antarctic geoscience took me to Adelaide in 1982, from which I visited N. P. Cheney at the CSIRO Division of Forest Research and introduced my scheme to him. A National Science Foundation grant (Geography) paid for a nine-week tour of Australian archives and landscape in 1986. A conference on Australian science at the University of Melbourne in May 1988 brought me back for a few more weeks of miscellaneous library research. The breakthrough came when an Arizona State University Faculty Grant-in-Aid and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1988–89) combined to give me the time to write the book. To all of these institutional sponsors, I am deeply grateful.
What made my time in Australia so productive were the Australians who hosted me. Very special thanks go to Phil Cheney, who never hesitated to make available to me whatever resources he could, not least of which was to organize an ad hoc fire-study tour of Australia. Despite his deep attachment to Alan McArthur, he never pressured me to write the story along any ideological track, believing that untrammeled scholarship would best serve McArthur’s memory. He is an exceptional fire scientist—and a good friend. I hope the outcome merits his trust.
Others who contributed include Margaret Saville, Erika Leslie, Chris Trevitt, Colin Pierrehumbert, David Packham, Athol Hodgson, J. Barry Johnston, Noel Kemp, John Smart, Gordon Styles, Mark Dawson, Marcia Tommerup, A. B. Mount, D. R. Douglas, Athol Meyer, Wilfred Crane, Fred Kerr, Geoffrey Brown, Ross Smith, R. R. Richmond, Andrew Bond, Ross Hamwood, Bob Barchard, R. H. Burke, Neil Burrows, Jim Hickman, N. J. deMestre, Graham Medhurst, Neil Price, Ron Hooper, R. W. Home, Ian Knight, John Baxter, Peter Hutchins, R. W. Condon, and Andrew Wilson. From Oxford, I need to thank Miss Jasmine Howse and Michael Williams. Special thanks go to Harry Luke, who took me into his house for several days of delightful conversation, and to Jim Gould, a fellow North American (and to his children, Jane and Toby), who helped with housing and travel while I resided with them in Canberra. In addition, Roger Underwood, Roger Good, A. Malcolm Gill, and the unfailing Phil Cheney not only assisted while I traveled in Australia but read critically all or portions of the manuscript, a burden much greater than any of us anticipated. They spared me many errors, though even they could not save me from myself and a “poetic license” that, for all their goodwill, must have set their teeth on edge. While they certainly do not agree with everything I have written, I could have written nothing without their help. My debt to other Australian scientists and scholars on whom I have relied through the published record is obvious. Thanks, mates.
Special thanks go also to Bill Strachan for his encouragement, editorial strategy, and skill at piloting around the shoals of corporate publishing.
And of course I could never have undertaken this project without the support of my family. To Sonja, Lydia, and Molly—who gave me the time and, more important, the reason to continue—thanks.
BURNING BUSH
There an angel of the Lord appeared to him [Moses] in fire flaming out of a bush. As he looked on, he was surprised to see that the bush, though on fire, was not consumed.
—EXODUS 3:2
And the sun sank again on the grand Australian bush—the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the weird, and of much that is different from things in other lands.
—HENRY LAWSON, “The Bush Undertaker”
Prologue
Dust to Dust
… Flood, fire, and cyclone in successive motionComplete the work the pioneers beganOf shifting all the soil into the ocean.
—JAMES MCAULEY, “The True Discovery of Australia”
GONDWANA GENESIS
In the beginning—even 250 million years ago—all lands were one. Then they began to break apart. Great rifts appeared that opened and closed uncertainly over a period of tens of millions of years, and when the final tear ceased, Pangaea had become two continents. One, Laurasia, drifted north. The other, now known as Gondwana, moved south.
Over the coming eons the continental masses migrated, fractured, grew, and reoriented themselves. They massed mountains to their flanks, fresh lands swelled out of submerged basins, volcanic eruptions piled new rock onto old crust. Laurasia broke cautiously into Old World and New, Eurasia and North America. Gondwana was more prolific. As it fissioned, it spawned continents, subcontinents, and microcontinents. New island arcs broke through Gondwana’s peripheral oceans as colossal plates of crust grated, subducted, melted, and bubbled upward into chains of fiery volcanoes. Greater Australia, which included Papua New Guinea and Tasmania, moved northeast into an empty Pacific. By 80–60 million years ago, with the opening of the Tasman Sea, Australia segregated from New Zealand, the last of its Gondwana affiliates. In its travels it had rotated nearly 90 degrees, and it had rafted northward at roughly six or seven centimeters per year until it rammed into the submerged Pacific margins of Asia and helped raise the Sunda arc, punctuated by the towering mountains of New Guinea.
Australia’s geology preserved a Gondwana core, a continental craton, in the enormous plateau that sprawled over the western and central thirds of the continent. Its odyssey, however, had raised mountains along its eastern flanks—the Flinders Range, the Tasmanian Alps, and the Great Dividing Range, a plateau eroded into dramatic escarpments. Continental warping had raised basins and bulged crust into domed, long-wasted mountains in the center. Associated with the eastern uplift, too, were local outpourings of volcanics, largely Tertiary in age, occasionally sputtering into the Holocene.
But overall the post-Gondwana history of Australia was one of geologic quiescence. Australian tectonics were muted; mountains were relatively low in elevation; the principal periods of vigorous activity were old and circumscribed. Australia became the most level of continents. Small rises in sea level resulted in massive incursions of ocean, while small recessions exposed vast regions of land with catastrophic suddenness. The geologic story of Australia required geologic time to record—the minuscule migration of the craton, the relentless leaching and the implacable erosion of its surface. The rejuvenation proposed by the first failed to match the degradation of the second.1
Where rainfall remained plentiful, deep weathering became the norm. Soils edged into acidity and deteriorated in those physical properties vital to groundwater. Laterization bound phosphorus to iron and aluminum complexes, chemically
