"Fuel loads were the problem. Fuel loads and human folly. It was many generations before the white man learned to imitate the firestick’s effect by burning off small patches of land. Sir Thomas Mitchell, New South Wales’s Surveyor-General in the 1830s and 1840s, illustrated the change when he wrote that without the ‘natives to burn the grass’, thick forests of young trees had sprung up ‘where, formerly, a man might gallop without impediment and see whole miles before him’. Those thick young forests, rather than being thinned by small, periodic burn-offs, grew even denser and more tangled. Leaves, branches and dead trunks compacted into a dry, incendiary carpet on the forest floor as lantana wound itself through the impenetrable undergrowth. Long hot summers baked every trace of moisture from the scrub, which intermittently exploded in vast apocalyptic firestorms."
from John Birmingham's award-winning Leviathan: The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney, Random House Australia.2000
Methinks Australia and parts of the USA have long had a similar problem. Political blame games are never going to solve it, neither here nor there, sadly.
HRHSpence wrote: