I still call Australia home and refuge, Natural disasters in Australi, Fire

Fire: Australia experiences a range of 'natural disasters' including bushfires, floods, severe storms, earthquakes and landslides. These events cause great financial hardship for individuals and communities, and can result in loss of life, which has become part of Australian folklore.

However, these events are also considered both part of the natural cycle of weather patterns in Australia as well as being affected by human factors such as overstocking, vegetation loss, dams, groundwater and irrigation schemes. These patterns are recognised by terms such as a 100-year drought - a drought of severity that is only seen once in a hundred years. Fire can often follow drought, and drought can be followed by flood. Severe fires followed by drought can also contribute to soil erosion.

The experience of natural disaster has come to be seen as part of the Australian national character as described in the poem 'My Country' by Dorothea McKellar (1904).

I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror - the wide brown land for me!

Fire

Bushfires are different from controlled burning. Indigenous communities have used fire as a hunting and farming tool to assist with regeneration. Indigenous Australians used controlled burning and fire management to encourage the growth of new plants and to prevent the growth of long grass which contributes to the tinder or fuel for bushfires.

Fire management also allowed animals to escape, although some were lost to hunters. Eucalypts, for example, require occasional burns to regenerate. Fire stick farming used over tens of thousands of years created the fertile grazing plains west of the Blue Mountains. Long periods of dry, hot weather and natural vegetation that burns easily makes Australia particularly vulnerable to bushfire.

Australian bushfires can be particularly severe as eucalyptus trees contain large amounts of oil which can burn very fast and very hot. Other human management factors which have contributed to the severity of bushfires include high fuel loads, a change from fire prevention to fire fighting measures and not building adequate buffer zones to protect built assets (Nairn Inquiry, 2003). As Australians learn to understand more about bushfires, bushfire prevention strategies are being adopted.

The 1967 Tasmanian fires

In 1967 southern Australian was experiencing drought conditions. On 7 February, 264,270 hectares were burnt in southern Tasmania in just five hours. Of the 110 fires burning that morning, the worst was the Hobart fire. The fire made its way over Mt Wellington and encroached on the city's western suburbs. Sixty-two people died, and 1,400 homes and other buildings were destroyed. At the time, it was the largest loss of life and property in Australia from fire on any single day in Australia's history.

The Ash Wednesday bushfires, 1983

In the summer of 1983, conditions in Victoria and South Australia contributed to extremely high ignition levels. Drought conditions with a heatwave with temperatures of 43 degrees Celsius meant that forests were highly combustible. On Wednesday 16 February (now known as 'Ash Wednesday'), around 180 bushfires were burning across both states, the largest of them starting in Victoria. Of significance was that out of the Ash Wednesday fires Victorian rescue teams were reorganised to better fight future fires, through improved radio networks, single command centres and linkages between established rural and city firefighters.

Volunteer crew of MLO 10 from the ACT Bushfire Service patrolling the Mount Franklin containment line, Brindabella Ranges, on the night of 11/12 January 2003. Photo by David Tunbridge. Image courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

Canberra, 2003

In mid-January 2003, extreme weather conditions led to multiple outbreaks of fire in Namadgi National Park to the south of Canberra. Strong winds pushed the fires into forested areas adjoining Canberra and on the afternoon of Saturday 18 January, firestorms fanned by high winds hit Canberra suburbs. Thousands of hectares of forest and park lands were burnt out.