Bushfire in Western Australia’s southern forests
I had an insight, many years ago, into a fascinating perspective on The Great Bushfire Debate. Well, maybe not so much an insight, as the grasping of a Great Truth.
Before recounting this story, a word about The Great Bushfire Debate. This is, of course, nothing so polite as a “debate”, but is the prolonged warfare about the best way to prevent big nasty bushfires in Western Australia’s southwest eucalypt forests. Manning the trenches on one side of no-man’s land are the academics and environmentalists who are opposed to fuel reduction burning and want to see it shut down or curtailed. They believe the burning is leading to the destruction of the forest’s biodiversity, and they promote in its place a fire control system that has never worked anywhere in the world. Over in the opposing trenches are the firefighters and forest managers who promote fuel reduction burning (as part of an overall strategic approach to minimising bushfire damage) and are responsible for carrying it out. They see no alarming decline in biodiversity attributable to periodic burning, and they know from long experience that without planned fuel reduction, control of big nasty bushfires in the forest is impossible.
The great advantages enjoyed by the anti-burners is that they are not threatened by bushfires, are never required to fight fires and nor can they ever be held accountable for the outcomes of the policies they promote. They have, as the saying goes, no skin in the game.
The battle has been fought for over 50 years now. Like the situation on the Western Front in the 1914-18 War, there are occasional shifts in the position of the frontline trenches as one side or the other gains temporary control of the government. As I write (in 2024) a sort of stalemate has been reached: fuel reduction burning is going on but is so constrained by political and bureaucratic rules and regulations, that it only just achieves an effective level.
As a forester, land manager and firefighter, I have been caught up in The Great Bushfire Debate for my entire professional life. I am totally aware of the views of those who want to shut down the burning program in southwest forests, and I totally reject them. They are based neither on good science nor on real-world experience. Indeed, some of their ideas are downright laughable, such as the assertion that burning is not needed because long-unburnt forests become non-flammable. This absurd and dangerous notion flies in the face of the observations and experience of every forest firefighter across history.
A mild-intensity fuel reduction burn in the wandoo forest: the trees are unaffected, and the flora and fauna rapidly recover.
My position is based on a lifetime of studying the environmental impacts of fuel reduction burning, and finding nothing to worry about, and on personal experience as a firefighter, where I invariably found bushfires were easier, cheaper and safer to control in light fuels than in heavy fuels.
All of which brings me back to my “insight”, or my grasping of a Great Truth in relation to bushfire management in eucalypt forests. It came from an unexpected angle, and it was a long time ago.
Back in the day
It was the spring of 1968, and I had not long been appointed DFO (District Manager) at Pemberton in the lower south-west of WA. This meant that I was responsible for bushfire management for most of the beautiful and valuable karri forest. My boss was the Regional Forester Steve Quain, a man who taught me almost everything I knew about forests and bushfires. One day Steve phoned up from his office in Manjimup and said he would be down on Monday, and he wanted me to accompany him on “a mission from Head Office”. The Conservator of Forests, Steve told me, had received an important letter from a resident in the Northcliffe district in the southern reaches of my jurisdiction, and he (the Conservator) instructed Steve and me to go down there, meet with the resident, and listen to his concerns.
The Regional Forester Steve Quain: my boss when I was DFO Pemberton in 1968
When Steve arrived at Pemberton that day, he had a rather quizzical expression. "You'll learn something today, son" he said mysteriously.
He also showed me the letter that had been written to the Conservator. It was hand-written in beautiful copperplate script, possibly with one of those old pens with a nib, with immaculate spelling and grammar. It was only a page long, but the writer had packed into it about nine allegations of mismanagement by the Forests Department, especially in relation to bushfire control. It was signed with a flourish by a Mr. Stanley Lancelot Mottram, Esq.
"This guy must be Northcliffe aristocracy" I thought.
Steve and I drove down to Northcliffe, out along the Boorara Road and over the East Branch of the Gardner River. "This is the place, pull in here" said Steve. He pointed to what I thought was an old cowshed, crouching under a dripping peppermint tree amidst a sea of kikuyu grass and a paddock of huge, dead, ringbarked karri trees. It was a scene typical of the old Northcliffe group settlement farms of the 1960s; at that time, in agricultural terms, they were not far advanced up the evolutionary scale from virgin bush.
Ring-barked karri trees on the Boorara Road, 1968
From the door of the hut under the dripping peppermint tree emerged a bent old bushman. Although it was a chilly day and drizzling, he was wearing a tattered blue singlet, ragged trousers held up with binder twine, and had bare feet. He was snaggle-toothed and bushy-browed, but his eyes sparkled with enthusiasm.
"G'day, Steve!" he cried. "G'day Bub!" cried Steve in reply.
I could see as they shook hands warmly that they were old mates. Steve introduced me. "Meet Stanley Lancelot Mottram" he said, "known as 'Bub' and the last of the south coast bushmen".
Bub welcomed me and invited us in for a cup of tea. His hut was a single unlined room with walls and roof of corrugated iron, measuring about three metres by five. It had an earth-floor. At one end was a wire-framed bed with blankets that looked like they had been sewn together from sugar bags. At the other end was an open fireplace, and into this he had inserted the end of a long, dry jarrah log that went out through a hole in the wall. This he nudged up a few centimetres, using a crowbar that he kept handy for the purpose, and got a good blaze going under the billy. It was a scene from one of Jolliffe’s Saltbush Bill drawings.
After some lengthy and entertaining reminiscing about cattle rustling, fishing trips to the coast, and past football matches (Steve had once been a star player for the Northcliffe Football team, and Bub had been a great supporter), we got down to business. Bub did not mince his words (and here I pause to remind readers that all of this took place nearly 60 years ago).
"The trouble with you forestry blokes", he told us," is that you don't do enough burning. Nothing has been burnt around here or down to the coast for years, and there is going to be a disaster".
The young Bub Mottram (in about the 1930s) with pack horse and dog – roaming the karri forest
In earlier days, Bub explained, by which he meant the 1930s and 1940s, before there had been any foresters around to discourage him, he had put himself in charge of burning for nearly all of the unoccupied bushland between the farms on the Boorara Road, the Gardner River to the west, the Deeside Road to the east, and the ocean to the south, an area of many thousands of hectares, mostly prime karri forest. Bub’s forest management program was done in the full knowledge and with the absolute approval of the settlers of the district. He also worked in with the families like the Muirs and the Brockmans, who for decades had run cattle on their coastal leases south of the karri forest.
Bub would roam far and wide through the bush on horseback, accompanied only by his pack horse and cattle dog, or occasionally by another famous bushman of the day, Charlie Burns,who worked for the Brockmans as a stockman. He would camp, hunt roos, and round up (or eat) stray cattle … but most of all, he would light up the bush whenever it was a good burning day and wherever there was something to burn. Because the bush was always "young and fresh" (as Bub described it) the fires didn't get away or develop into fierce blazes. This year's burn would trickle into last year's or the burn of the year before. Because new fires were always being lit, no fire became intense. On the right day in mid-summer, a fire would trickle around in the karri forest, Bub said, even in an area that was burned two or three years previously.
Down on the coast, beyond the karri forest, herds of cattle grazed the pastoral leases over summer. The Mottrams (including Bub) and their fellow-cattlemen lit up the country as often as it would burn. In grassy areas, this was as frequently as every year or every two years. The cattle (as did the kangaroos) liked to graze the fresh, nutritive native grasses that came away after a burn, and this also helped to keep the area “clean”, as Bub put it, meaning free from the risk of an intense bushfire.
The cattlemen’s approach, Bub explained, had been inherited from that of the Noongars who had lived in this country for thousands of years, and would burn it regularly, so as to regenerate the grasses and encourage flocks of kangaroos, on which they thrived.
Bub Mottram outside his bush camp down on the coast near Fish Creek
Bub also fully understood another basic bushfire principle: the more burning you did, the easier and safer it was. And the corollary: the less burning that was done, the harder it was, and the greater risk of something going wrong.
Bub advocated a complete return to this approach. "Burn, Steve, burn!" he admonished. "The bush loves it, and you'll never need to worry about big fires. Just get a team of bushmen on horses and equip them with matches and away they'll go! But if you leave it to nature, you’ll have a screaming bushfire on your hands”. He gesticulated with bony hands and repeated “Burn, Steve, burn!”
Steve said that Bub's system met with his complete approval. But then he mentioned a few things that impacted on the way we did our job, like the legal demands of the Bush Fires Act, the fact that we were employed by the government, that we were not free agents, but were always answerable for what we did. We had to worry about where the smoke ended up, Steve said, and to consider the risk of legal repercussions if anything went wrong. There were, Steve said, about nineteen constraints these days that get in the way of an effective burning program. In short, Steve gently pointed out, the world that Bub was describing had passed many years before and would never return.
My unspoken thought was that I had been listening to a voice from the past.
It was a convivial and enjoyable meeting that day in Bub’s camp under the dripping peppermint tree. Bub was a rough old bushman, but he was articulate and humorous, and he enjoyed the discussion enormously. But eventually, after we had thanked him for his interest and hospitality, and commended him for his concerns, we made our way home.
The denouement
Steve and I understood the dire warning Bub had raised. We were both gravely concerned about the bushfire threat in the karri forest in 1968. Steve had worked at Northcliffe and Shannon River when he was a young forester and had been involved in the big fires in the 1950s. I had been a firefighter in the Crowea Fire of 1961 which started from a lightning strike just south of Pemberton and ended up running into the sea near Windy Harbour. We both believed fervently in the need for fuel reduction burning. We understood that without effective fuel reduction, we would always be at the mercy of big, nasty and unstoppable bushfires.
But, back then, it was one thing to want to do more burning, but another to get it done. Our knowledge about fire behaviour, fire ecology and burning technology in karri forests was still elementary. Anyone can walk or ride a horse, as Bub Mottram did, through forests that had been mildly burned a year or two ago, but the long-unburnt karri forest is almost impenetrable. As a young forester I had run assessment lines through karri bush in the Northcliffe area that had not seen fire for 30 or more years, and the dry leaves, twigs and bark were more than knee-deep. For someone lighting a prescribed burn on foot in this bush, it was a deathtrap.
The story of our meeting with Bub Mottram had a tragic postscript. A few months later, in March 1969, everything that Bub predicted came to pass. A bushfire started on a farm in the Boorara area and took off with a searing nor'wester behind it. This became the infamous Boorara Fire. It was (until February 2015) the biggest and nastiest fire in the karri forest since settlement. The fire swept through farmland, took out Bub's shack on the way, and then devastated thousands of hectares of beautiful forest all the way across the Shannon, eventually running into some burnt country near Crystal Springs. Most of this forest had not seen fire since Bub had last conducted his one-man fuel reduction burning program in the 1940s, and it was burned to a crisp.
I made inquiries and found that Bub had survived the fire. Although he had seemed to me to be an old man when I met him with Steve Quain that day, I understand he lived on for several more years before dying, aged perhaps in his 80s. He had never married, preferring his solitary rambles and camp life in the bush.
The wheel turns
Eventually we got on top of the bushfire challenge in the karri country. In the years between about 1975 and 1995 we had in place a highly successful fuel reduction burning program across the whole of the southern forests. During this time, big damaging karri fires became a thing of distant memory.
But the political wheel turned, and somehow the wrong people (by which I mean those whose ideas about bushfires were not governed by practical experience) took control of the government and the agencies. For nearly fifteen years, after about 1998, almost no fuel reduction burning was done in the karri forest. To nobody’s surprise this culminated in ghastly fires in 2014 and 2015, the near-burning of the town of Northcliffe and the decimation of the beautiful regrowth karri forests at Dombakup.
Bushfire threatening the town of Northcliffe
The current situation is an unhappy one. The Parks and Wildlife officers have their hearts in the right place, but are starved for resources, hamstrung by constraints and constantly harassed by the environmentalists and academics who oppose fuel reduction burning. Agency staff receive only luke-warm support from their Minister and none at all from their local MP. As another summer approaches, the karri forest region is a ticking bomb. All it needs is a dry spring, a few hot days in mid-summer, a nor’wester, and a lightning storm setting fires in heavy fuels. The result will be an unstoppable inferno and it will wreak horrible damage. The Minister and the media will blame climate change. But bushmen, fire scientists, foresters and farmers will know otherwise: preventative medicine was not administered; preventable damage and heartbreak could not be prevented.
I often think of Stanley Lancelot 'Bub' Mottram. He was a memorable character, maybe the last of the old-school bushmen in that part of the world. In a long and interesting life, he had been a farmer, he had droved cattle to the coast and lived there for months on fish and kangaroo. He had explored on foot and horseback (with box of matches handy) and knew intimately great swathes of the southern forests and their hinterland. Like so many bushmen of his generation he was well-spoken, articulate and had a well-established set of values, a positive philosophy of life and a gentle sense of humour. He was not professionally educated, but he had an intuitive understanding of bushfire science. He was a keen observer of nature and had a lifetime of experience to guide his passionate view that the judicious and frequent inoculation of the karri forest with mild fire would prevent the horrors of a wildfire epidemic, and (in itself) would do no harm.
I also remember Steve Quain with respect and affection. Both Bub and Steve would be turning in their graves if they could see the situation down that way today. If I shut my eyes I can see them both, chuckling over some reminiscence in Bub’s old camp on the Boorara Road, and I can hear Bub’s voice as he implores “Burn, Steve, burn!”
His was a voice of the wisdom of the bush, and it spoke a Great Truth, but it was a voice from the past.
Bub Mottram and mates: The one-man, one-dog and two-horse team in charge of bushfire prevention south of Northcliffe, back in the day.
Acknowledgement
I thank Beverley Thiele of the Northcliffe Pioneer Museum who provided me with the wonderful photographs of Bub Mottram used in this story.
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