Melbourne, Thursday 2 February 1939

[Mr. Gowans] You can I think take it that we have had certain evidence as to the increase of the severity of fire in Australia since the advent of the white man and since the increase of settlement...
In regard to the first matter mentioned by you, that is whether fires were more serious in the blackman's time or less serious then than in the whiteman's time, that has been gone into rather thoroughly, and we have reached the conclusion that fires in the blackman's country were very small in comparison with those in our day.

Fires were less frequent in those days than they are now. [From charcoal analysis in peat] it is quite evident that fires today occur frequently and that they were very infrequent before the white man's settlement came. The fires before the Whiteman's settlement were not of the intensity nor did they occur so frequently as they have done since the white man settled the country.

The whole of the ash group is more susceptible to fire than is any other eucalypt in Australia.

[Mr. Gowans] I want to go on now to discuss the use of fire as a measure of fire protection [is it] both desirable and feasible to clean up the forests for the purpose of fire prevention?
That is the great question of controlled burning.

The thickening up of our forests is entirely due to fire and the exclusion of fire will render them less susceptible to fire because it will get rid of an enormous amount of inflammable material.

[The Commissioner] If by leaving it in its natural state it may at first get very thickly grown with scrub and covered with litter in places, how long do you think it would take to get back into a reasonable safe condition from the point of view of inflammability or fodder for bush fires?
That would depend entirely on the species and the condition to which it had been brought by repeated fires.

I know there are many factors and that the question is much too general and perhaps not well conceived, but do you know our forests in Victoria at all?
Only very little. The Rubicon forest is the only one that I know at all well, and I spent only a matter of three weeks there.

Taking that forest, if fire were excluded from that area, how long do you think it would take to become a clean forest?
I cannot answer you. We have not done it yet in Australia.

I mean could you say in any period of years?
The answer is that we have not done it yet in Australia. Fires have always come in before we have been able to reach that position where the wattles have disappeared.

We have gone very seriously into this question of control burning and we regard it as a pis aller - that is to say we regard it as only to be resorted to in extreme cases, continuous control burning will result in complete denudation.

Over the border in NSW the people who live here in the country beyond our mountain range are cattle people, and they are the kind of people who tell me that the best grass seed that they can sow is a box of wax matches.

[Mr. Barber] Did you give an estimate as to the length of time that it would take for the forest to come back to its natural state, taking a forest that has been burnt over fairly often? Would you estimate that 10 to 15 years would be sufficient?
Do you mean 15 years for the restoration of virgin conditions?

It has been put by witnesses in this Commission that 15 years would be sufficient?
No, it would be a very long period of time before we could expect to get back anything like the forest which was here originally in the matter of ground cover and openings. I do not know whether it is 100 years or how long it is.

Read more about the Black Friday bushfires in the Aftermath Section