Real Climate Records

Arsonists

In an average Australian summer about 400,000 hectares are Burnt by bushfires, and regularly in all States and Territories there are bushfires more dreadful than the usual ones.

The worst were these: In NSW in 1957 and 1968 the Blue Mountains suffered, and several lives were lost.

In Victoria in 1926 widespread parts of the State were devastated, and 31 lives were lost.

In 1932 in the Grampians nine lives were lost.

In 1939, again in Victoria, the State suffered its worst fires on record with the loss of 71 lives; according to the Royal Commissioner, Judge L. E. B. Stretton, separate fires had “joined forces in a devastating confluence of flame on Friday the 13th of January … it appeared that the whole State was alight”.

In 1943 and 1944 another 51 people died in Victorian bushfires. In 1969 bushfires killed 18 more people and in 1977 they killed another five.

In South Australia in 1954-55 bushfires in the Mount Lofty Ranges killed five people, and Tasmania’s worst bushfire in 1966-67 killed 62 people. In addition to these shockingly lethal

fires, there have been many almost as destructive, although not lethal — the Zeehan fire in Tasmania in 1981, the fire

in the Adelaide Hills in 1980, and the fire which swept across the border from Victoria into coastal NSW early this month.

Only days before this Mount Macedon in Victoria was attacked by fire, and it emerged later, and incredibly, that 119 bushfires had been lit deliberately in Victoria alone in the past seven months.

Generally, according to the Victorian Government, about 18 per cent of all fires are lit deliberately, and the Minister for Police and Emergency Services, Mr Mathews, has spoken of harsher penalties for such arson.

At present, the Country Fire Authority Act prescribes a $4,000 fine or two years’ jail or both , for people convicted of lighting a fire in the open on a total-fire-ban day.

This matter of bushfire arson might be one for the Australian Law Reform Commission,

because it affects justice and public safety in all States and Territories.

Here in the ACT, especially during this week as the sky has softened with smoke and dust, we have smelt and sensed the meaning of Australian bushfires. Occasionally they lap the outskirts of our city, as they did on Mount Ainslie three weeks ago, or they proceed at will through remote parts of the Territory such as the Gudgenby Nature Reserve, as they did last month.

Three years ago they blackened the land of Sutton, Gundaroo and Hall. Perhaps in Canberra we have a special duty to insist that the Federal Government now does something quite historic to measure and meet our bushfire inheritance.