Dear Editor,- The Herald Sun of the 1/09/2025 had an article by Alex White writing of the lack of the bushfire preparedness and of the public’s seemingly casual approach to the coming fire season in which the writer predicts will be the ‘worst bushfire season in years’.
I agree with this, but it is unfair to blame the people as other than tidy up their own property there is nothing they can do about the main threat.
The deeper forest that are under the direct control of the Minister and his Deputy who apparently delegate the responsibility of the fire in the forest to the chief fire officer who at the present time is doing nothing to reduce the dangerous fuel loads.
At the present time, there is, among people who understand the bush and fire, a grave concern about the approaching fire season which government seems to be ignoring.
A ‘bad fire day’ will come either next year of the years after, and come it will.
Eucalypts in particular are quick growing and in so are continually shedding bark and leaves, hundreds and hundreds of tons of it. This with the ever-growing scrub is the fuel for the next big fire.
The gullible public are appeased by Prof Lindemeyer who preaches that fire can and should be excluded from the forests. What a joke on his followers, because under present management bushfire is inevitable, the ingredients are there: ever increasing fuel loads, a coming extreme weather day and ignition either by lightning, arson or accident.
Unless urgent action is taken to reduce these fuel loads then history will repeat itself with fires similar to those of 2019/20.
At the present time nothing practical is being done to safeguard these forests against wildfire other than the construction of these narrow fire breaks which are useless, as we all know that fires ‘spot’ miles ahead of the fire front.
The chief fire officer also blames ‘climate change for fire occurrence and severity’. Does a few degrees of climate change affect a fire of thousands of degrees of temperature?
Fire scientist and expert Professor Kevin Tolhurst, sadly now deceased, speaking in the Bairnsdale Advertiser of 15/8/2023 stated “We should be going in and burning those flammable areas as often as we can to break up the landscape similar to the manner of Aboriginal burning”.
It is ironic that the only way of saving our forests from wildfire is by using the ‘right fire’ or ‘fuel reduction burning’ to remove the heavy fuel loads. Fuel reduction burning takes a lot of experience, something the chief fire officer apparently does not have nor does he take advice from people who do.
Incidentally, I believe it was the chief fire officer’s recommendations to the Department resulting in Tolhurst’s policies being superseded and adopting the ‘Safer Together’ policy which have been a complete failure which can be seen by the 2019/20 fires at Sarsfield and Mallacoota.
We are well behind the eight ball regarding fuel reduction burning – it has been ignored by governments for far too long.
I cast no aspersion against the chief fire officer in any way, only that his working life experience does not equip him for the task he has been given and that he should seek advice from experienced bush people, who do understand the bush and all its ‘needs and moods’, or we face the consequences.
Yours etc.,
John Mulligan, Bairnsdale.
