Read Online The Tree In Changing Light by Roger McDonald - Free Book Online

exercises for the students on Bruce Ridge and must have seen fire smouldering in Phil Cheney vocationally speaking. At the point Phil graduated and finished serving his three year bond it was somehow water again in Phil’s mind, except he was without a work offer in the specialty he’d chosen, water catchment research. He was in fact in Sydney with his friend Wilf Crane looking for a yacht in which the two intended sailing around the world. But it wasn’t to happen. Phil found himself press-ganged into forestry from a boat dock for the second time in his life—this time by Alan McArthur. He became his assistant.
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    It is obvious to anyone with long experience of fire—like McArthur and now Cheney—that the fire gate can’t be heldshut in Australia until too late. It has to be opened to let fire through before fire comes and reduces the gate to ash and goes on raging elsewhere. A succinct principle to hang on the gate: those who fail to use fire to fight fire will be destroyed by fire. Conditions for catastrophic fire come right about every five years in the fire crescent reaching past Adelaide, Melbourne, to Sydney and through the thickly forested Dividing Range areas of the hinterland and across into the expansive grasslands of the Riverina and western plains.
    McArthur it seemed had fire in his psyche, a fire-lover’s excitement over the phenomena of the blaze. It extended to herding fire like a stockman and running it down until it came, exhausted, to a stop. ‘It can be done,’ he said, ‘and as long as you work systematically you can wear it down and beat it in the end.’ His primary motivation was to make firefighting safer and pursuing that aim he was very strong on prescribed burning. Phil Cheney took up that crusade.
    Anyone with a box of matches or a cigarette butt—or even a farm implement such as a rotary slasher on a hot day making sparks over rocky ground—can start a fire. ‘Where a fire starts,’ says Phil, ‘is very much a matter of chance. With extreme weather conditions, how a fire starts is frequently unusual and often bizarre. Once ignited, however, the direction the fire will travel and the area it will burn are reasonably predictable.’
    This is the point at which fire science research meets the situation of ordinary people caught unprepared or in the wrong place at the wrong time and speaks to firefighting units charged with fire control. Indeed, perhaps no area of Australian science speaks more directly into the most frightening and archetypal moments of our experience. Theessence of fire control, Phil emphasises, is the local land-holder and the community bushfire brigade. ‘In a severe fire season, grass fires must be attacked very soon after they start and while they are small. In a country like Australia this is done most efficiently by the landholders themselves. A fully professional fire service would be prohibitively expensive and could not, in any case, get to most fires as quickly as local people … Forest fires are more complicated and one has to consider more variables. One also has to have experience to put the importance of the critical variable for each particular situation into the right context. To the layman, what might seem important in one situation may not be so important in another.’
    Fire science as developed by McArthur, Cheney and their colleagues spreads the net wide. It includes experimental fires at the height of the fire season, in both grassland and eucalypt forests; intensely detailed studies of Australia’s worst fires’ history (Black Friday 1939, Hobart 1967, and Ash Wednesday 1983 setting the benchmarks); and comprehensive studies of how fuel loads affect fire intensity. Phil Cheney’s office issues a stream of technical papers on aspects of working with fire ranging from the combustion characteristics of innumerable Australian fuels (grasses, trees, leaf-litter, even