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Care and catastrophe: fire and the Australian bush.

Article Excerpt
Born and raised in a northern seaside suburb of Brisbane in the 1940s and 1950s, I was a child of both the city and the bush. In those far-gone simpler days, the bush pressed hard on the sprawling outskirts of the city and wilderness was never far away. Not only did the bush almost swallow some suburbs, but the vast sand islands that guard Moreton Bay were unspoiled paradises of forest, swamp, flowering heath, giant sandhills, and seemingly endless surf and still water beaches. Abundant wildlife delighted our senses from the kookaburra's first cheerful morning chortle until the wail of the curlew lamented the passing light. Vast flocks of lorikeets darkened the morning sky and wallabies were often disturbed from their repose in the noontide shade.

This environment shaped my life, my view of the world, and my passions for evermore, and I cannot view the endless urban sprawl--traffic and concrete-rimmed beaches of today's south-east Queensland--without an aching heart. It is a pain that could more easily be accommodated if it were possible to accept that the devastation stopped with the suburbs--that in the bush that still abutted the city in places, and sent twining fingers into the suburbs, or remained as islands within them, the heart of nature still beat in a vital way. Alas it does not. The condition of the bush is an environmental catastrophe complementing the total destruction of the natural world that the suburbs represent, and it is a disaster that has afflicted most of the bush throughout the south-east of Queensland. The greatest irony of all is that it is a catastrophe arising indirectly out of the concern of rising urban populations for the fate of the remaining bushland. Care and catastrophe seem to have become inextricably intertwined in the fate of much of the bush of eastern and southern Australia.

Fire and the bush are mingled in my childhood memories. In days of summer when harsh dry leaves crackled under tough bare feet, smoke and the smell of burning eucalyptus filled the air. It was not a matter for concern or alarm. Fires crept at random through the landscape. We played in the bush, following the fires with interest, reacting...

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