For the second year in a row, the CFA funded a bunch of East Gippsland women to attend the ‘community’ conference, Living with Bushfire http://federation.edu.au/industry-and-community/engagement/fire-conference (October 9-10 2015). For this I sincerely thank them. We learn at these conferences and we meet people. We also help to make up the numbers of ‘community’ because, on the whole, these conferences haven’t yet moved too far beyond departmental officials and CFA personnel talking to each other.

This conference was hard on the heels of an escaped DELWP ‘fuel reduction’ burn in the Lancefield area which had the locals spitting chips. I can’t imagine that the officers of the Victorian Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning welcomed the timing. They’d been excoriated all week on every media platform; the underside of a cool rock might have been more appealing.

The rules of civility applied, however, and East Gippsland is a safe distance from the fires that destroyed several houses, sheds and fencing last week. Thus, while DELWP officers faced a number of questions on the topic of prescribed burning as fuel reduction, they were politely phrased. In any case, none of the officials had any intention of telling us anything that hadn’t been approved by government.

By contrast, Wayne Thorpe’s welcome to country did the job from the lectern. It wasn’t clear whether Wayne had specifically been invited but a government-auspiced conference cannot begin without the blessing of the traditional owners. Wayne’s country includes Churchill, where we sat in a Federation University auditorium far from the forests, so he stepped up for the blessing. His words were welcome to those of us who attended last year. The dinner speaker in 2014 was Bill Gammage who rambled on about Aboriginal burning practices, sounding more like a man with an opinion than the author of his celebrated book, The Greatest Estate on Earth. Bill admitted that he hadn’t consulted traditional owners in the development of his thesis that the landscapes of Australia were the result of traditional management practices of Aboriginal people. This may be true but where it gets sticky is his assertion that every part of Australia was subject to a burning regime, leading him to conclude that the open, park-like forest landscapes observed by some early explorers were the result of burning. This has fed very nicely into the propaganda of the timber industry which insists that clearfelling is just the modern version of Aboriginal use of fire and that large-scale fuel reduction burns in the middle of the bush are a continuation of their management practices.

Not so, said Wayne. It was the native birds and animals who did the work of keeping the forests ‘clean’. He blames the land tenure rules, which required white settlers to clear their land to maintain their right to ownership, for the initial destruction of forests and declared it a myth that Aboriginal people had been burning since the Dreamtime. Much of the original forests of Gippsland wouldn’t have burned and this would not have been the regime of Aboriginal land management in the region.

In the era of highly mechanised logging, wet forests have been so changed – even-aged and each successive (re)generation drier – that sadly they burn all too well. http://soln.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/effects-of-logging-on-fire-regimes-in-moist-forests.pdf

Wayne set the subtext for the conference, but other speakers stuck to their scripts. Each used powerpoint presentations and I believe that these will be available soon via the conference web page. In brief, here are the topics discussed (By definition, these are the sessions I attended – there were choices to make – and I’ll stick with those I found interesting).

Day One
– Kevin Tolhurst – fire behaviour. Kevin has numerous publications for you to check
– DELWP spokesperson – in the absence of listed speaker, Chief Fire Officer Alan Goodwin, someone whose name I missed told us how devastated the department was by the escaped burn and reminded us that ‘planned burning always has some risks but only 2% escape’. He proudly reminded us that DELWP has doubled its burning over the years in an attempt to reach its 5% annual target. The review of the target by the Inspector General for Emergency Management (IGEM) proposed a shift to a risk management approach but one got a feeling that to DELWP this just means continuing to burn large swathes but closer to communities (to protect them). I hope I am wrong. In any case, the Minister Lisa Neville has yet to announce that they will be adopting this approach and thus its business as usual at DELWP.
– Steven McGibbney – fire weather and climate change. Steve is a meteorologist and claims to have little knowledge about climate change. Nonetheless he was able to show us graph after graph where the lines went up – temperature – and down – rainfall. Of great interest was an unexpected shift in the Indian Ocean dipole (http://higginsstormchasing.com/elnino-au-oct2015-hsc-update/) which may turn the current El Nino into a super El Nino, with dire implications for increased fire danger this summer (and spring).
– Peter West – Peter was the main organiser of this conference but, in his day job, is DELWP’s Manager of Strategic Fire Planning for East Central district. He talked about the things that are taken into account (usually) when scheduling a planned burn. He said that the Barwon-Otway district is closest to adopting the risk management approach.
– Greg McCarthy, fire ecology and landscape risk planner, told us that Victoria is ‘cutting edge’ in incorporating biological knowledge into its fuel reduction burn planning. Translated, this means ‘if we know about them, we’ll take them into account’. Sadly, there are few pre and post burning surveys so mostly we do not know what is there and what is lost.
– Jenny Nelson is a biologist who works in the threatened fauna program at the Arthur Rylah Research Institute. She talked about efforts being made to conserve the threatened leadbeater’s possum which has lost 98% of its habitat (old growth forest in the Central Highlands) due to fire and logging.
– Steve Leonard, a research fellow at Latrobe University, is looking at how biota survive fire in Victoria’s foothills, an extensive complex of vegetation types. A major hindrance to his work is the lack of data about rare and threatened species.
– Fred Cahir is an Associate Professor in Aboriginal Studies at Federation University (Ballarat campus). His work is based on an examination of the nineteenth century literature to glean an understanding of how Aboriginal people used fire in Victoria. His work has yet to be seen by traditional owners but he is seeking this scrutiny. He warned us to be wary of Gammage’s claims as his work did not touch on Victoria.

Day two
This was the day that community people and non-scientists were scheduled. Sadly, these were squashed into a couple of hours of the afternoon and choices had to be made. As a presenter, my decision was made for me. Meanwhile, the morning focused on officials and experts.
– Euan Ferguson, Chief Officer of the Country Fire Authority, talked about the CFA’s role in bushfires. ‘The only reason we exist is because of the community’ and the most important person is the person on the frontline. Perhaps his best news was the availability of aircraft to fight fires and the reduction in aircraft response time from 40 minutes to 15.
– Justin Leonard from the Bushfire Centre for Cooperative Research at CSIRO is an expert in the design of buildings to withstand fire and he presented interesting statistics on the location of people who died when their properties burned. When his presentation is available it is one to look out for. I believe that I will feel safe staying in my house when the next fire comes after its survival in the last bushfire and clues that my site now follows some of his advice. See https://open.abc.net.au/explore/78217 for an account of my house’s survival.
– Steve Pascoe was a standout presenter. His viewpoint was shaped by his work as an emergency management volunteer and consultant and his family’s survival in the 2009 fires which destroyed 80% of the homes in his town of Strathewen, including his. Steve believes that communities need to be prepared to look after themselves in emergencies and that governments need to listen to them about their real needs. Half an hour was too short so I have asked him if he will come and talk to us about the recovery process of his remarkably resilient community and the lessons it provides for us. Of course, this is in the hands of others as well as me.
– Anne Leadbeater worked with the Kinglake community after the 2009 fires and her work is intensely relevant to our community. She has agreed to come with Steve and share her knowledge of supporting and empowering communities to lead their own recovery. She’s a hero – http://www.smh.com.au/national/after-fear-hope–a-town-on-the-road-back-to-life-20090214-87pr.html
– Deb Foskey, Helen Sheil, Suzanne Davies and Annie Pearce tried to fit into our 6 minute segments our vast learning from our community work in Tubbut, Buchan and Bruthen and developing relationships with DELWP, CFA and other bodies. We were funded by Regional Development Victoria to work with these and other communities in our Resilient Communities project. Sadly, the people we wanted to hear us – representatives of those organisations – were very thin on the ground by this time, Saturday afternoon. For more info about our project, have a look at http://www.egnnh.net.au/community-resilience.html
– Jeanette Cook, ex-principal of Middle Kinglake Primary School, talked about the measures she used to assist children returning to school after fire destroyed their school in February 2009. Her school always had a strong emphasis on student democracy and the children shaped the programs which helped them through this difficult time.
– Josh Whittaker was the final speaker of the day. We were back to the experts talking about community, in this case, the involvement of volunteers outside the usual organisations in disasters. Examples are Blaze-aid and other groups which make it their business to provide practical help in the wake of community crises. There are benefits and challenges to the traditional organisations which Josh hopes to assist with.

Did I mention the food?
The Living with Bushfire conference added kilos to our weight. Each delicious morning tea and lunch was served on groaning tables and our knowledge that the uneaten food would go to landfill forced us to eat more than wisdom dictated.
The pre-dinner snacks on Friday ill-prepared us for the fabulous meal we were served at the university’s bistro where we heard Don Watson talk about his award-winning book The Bush. We were all sated and tired by the time he spoke; some of us had consumed a little alcohol as well, including our speaker, whose somewhat rambling speech was enlivened by his wit. I had an opportunity to ask a question I have always wanted to ask, how the encircling of Parliament House by log trucks and loggers had influenced Paul Keating who then legislated for the continued destruction of native forests through the Regional Forest Agreements process. Not so, said Watson, once Keating donned his suit he was prepared for anything.
Next year, let’s have a breakfast speaker when we are all more awake (including the speaker). It would assist with networking if we were forced to sit outside our usual arrangements and meet new people too.
As a postscript, all four of us Resilient Communities presenters received a copy of The Bush for our efforts. Yippee!

Living with Bushfire 2016
Yarra Ranges Shire Council is going to organise next year’s conference. http://www.yarraranges.vic.gov.au/Lists/Events/Living-with-Bushfire-Conference
We were pleased to hear that community will be front and centre as that is my major criticism of this and last year’s conference. It is troubling when key people who should be listening leave minutes after they have told us what they think and hardly conducive to the dialogue that we need if we are truly going to create more resilient communities.