A former firefighter turned fire scientist will challenge long-held assumptions about bushfire management during a free public forum in Lakes Entrance on Saturday, August 15, tackling a question many locals have long asked: does broadscale planned burning actually keep communities safer?
Adjunct Associate Professor Dr Philip Zylstra, of Curtin University, will present at the Mechanics Hall, drawing on decades of field experience and academic research to unpack the latest science on planned burning.
Dr Zylstra began his career as a remote-area firefighter before turning to fire behaviour research. He says that unique combination of practical and scientific experience led him to a stark conclusion.
“It gives a really short-term benefit with a long-term cost,” Dr Zylstra said.
His research focuses on how forest structure drives fire behaviour. By studying the history of past fires across south-eastern Australia, he identified a consistent pattern.
“What I’ve studied is past fires and where they’ve gone — where they’ve gone big and where they’ve stopped,” he said.
“Consistently across those forest types, what we see is that all the fires happen in the regrowth from the last fire. They stop when they get to the old-growth forests.”
Dr Zylstra noted that this pattern is clearly visible in regional fire histories.
“Even in the Snowy River area, if we look at fire histories, bushfires were really rare until we started this program of prescribed burning,” he said.
“It’s only since repeated prescribed burns that we’ve got this dense regrowth and these big bushfires coming through more and more now.”
The findings are particularly relevant to East Gippsland, where state management agencies plan to burn 428,575 hectares across 260 planned burns between 2025 and 2028 under the Joint Fuel Management Program (JFMP). Earlier this year, 14 leading Australian scientists signed an open letter raising concerns about the ecological basis for large-scale planned burning in the region.
A spokesperson for the Goongerah Environment Centre (GECO) said East Gippsland residents deserve direct access to the research shaping national debate.
“More than 80 per cent of East Gippsland is public land — state forests, national parks and coastal reserves — and virtually all of it retains native vegetation cover,” the spokesperson said.
“People here live with planned burns every year. They smell the smoke, they see the aftermath, and they have a right to hear what the science actually says about whether this is making them safer.”
In addition to Dr Zylstra’s keynote, the afternoon will feature a presentation from the Gippsland Environment Group on local forest monitoring, a screening of the documentary Forest Country by filmmaker Lewi Haskins, and an interactive panel Q&A.
