8 September

Such a fascinating story that has very deep meanings if you unpack it. Our eucalypts are now fuelling catastrophic fires globally, including here. Eucalyptus got to be like this because of thousands of years of Aboriginal management, they used fire as their main method of engineering the landscape. This led to a favouring of species like the eucalyptus who need fire to regenerate. BUT (and it’s a huge but), Aborigines knew this, which is why they engineered the land to have these trees only sparsely. The ‘bush’ we sentimentalise and bushwalk and 4WD through is the disastrous mess we made of that managed landscape. We let it grow wild, and the eucalyptus went feral. That’s why the landscape explodes in massive fires, because we don’t live in it, we don’t manage it. We don’t have a clue how to even if we wanted to. So we have this binary culture that ether clears the lot for logging or grazing, with bulldozers and other heavy equipment, or fences it all off as ‘pristine nature’ in national parks. Both are an abomination. It’s a madonna-whore complex, for landscape.