Fire country

Every fire-adapted country has a day people remember by name, and Adelaide’s is Ash Wednesday, 1983 — a savage, drought-fed firestorm out of the Adelaide Hills that still shapes how the city thinks about flame: an intruder, a calamity visited from outside the green world. That reflex is nearly backwards. Fire is not a visitor here. It is a resident, as much a part of the deal as the winter rain and the killing-dry summer, and most of what grows around Adelaide has spent millions of years learning to turn it to account.

Watch a Mount Lofty forest a few weeks after a burn and the dominant impression is a slightly indecent hurry to get on with living. Eucalypts carry strands of dormant buds tucked deep beneath their insulating bark, shielded from heat that would kill an ordinary tree, and once the canopy is gone they wake almost in unison, fuzzing a blackened trunk green within weeks (Burrows 2013). Many of the same trees, and plenty of shrubs besides, keep a second account underground — a lignotuber, a bud-and-starch-packed woody swelling ready to throw up a whole new stem if everything above the soil is lost (Burrows 2013). Others do more than tolerate the flames: banksias and hakeas seal their seed inside cones only a fire’s heat will crack, and a whole guild of smaller plants keep their seed dormant until it tastes the chemistry of smoke, then germinate in a rush across the ash (Auld 2020).

None of this was lost on the people who managed this ground for tens of thousands of years before 1836, using cool, patchwork burning to keep the country open and to spend, in small change, the fuel that would otherwise feed a killing summer fire — a practice the archaeologist Rhys Jones named “fire-stick farming” in 1969 (Jones 1969). When that burning stopped, the fuel did not vanish; it banked, year on year, across a range front now dense with houses woven into flammable bush — the bind Mount Lofty land managers still wrestle with, where the dial that cuts bushfire risk and the dial that keeps fire-dependent bushland healthy turn out to be the same dial (Bardsley et al. 2015). On 14 May 2021, in the south Adelaide Park Lands at Tuthangga, that old knowledge came back into practice: a small, deliberate Kaurna cultural burn, Kaurna Kardla Parranthi, walked through the dry grass with the state environment department, the City of Adelaide and Green Adelaide (Green Adelaide 2021). Too much fire wrecks even fire-built bushland; too little merely loads the gun. This country is still working out, hillside by hillside, where between those two errors the right answer lies.