Burning Bush. Stephen J. Pyne

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      TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION

      Firestick History

      Australian history is almost always picturesque; indeed, it is so curious and strange, that it is itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer, and so it pushes the other novelties into second and third place. It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies.

      —MARK TWAIN, Following the Equator (1897)

      SOMETIME—or rather at several critical junctures—in the saga of Australia, the island continent opted for fire. A sequence of environmental events made fire possible as soils deteriorated, aridity became seasonal and drought common, ancestral rainforest broke up into a suite of tough, woody weeds, and storm tracks hurled fierce winds from interior deserts. Fires kindled and spread, and they interacted with the emergent biota in often extraordinary ways. Fire acquired a signatory rhythm and power that indelibly identified it with the bush it shaped. And then Homo arrived.

      Humans brought chronic fire, inextinguishable fire; they were a uniquely fire creature for whom fire was a universal tool. They all—Aborigines, Europeans, Australians—applied it universally in every conceivable landscape and for every conceivable purpose. They exploited fire to extract from an often forbidding environment the critical elements of their existence. Their fires reinforced tendencies already encoded in the natural environment. The ability to tolerate fire evolved into a preference for it; a biotic preference for fire became a near addiction; Australia’s natural history moved irreversibly toward fire-proneness. Bushfire became inexpungable, compelling, pervasive.

      The relationships mediated by anthropogenic fire were reciprocal: they restructured natural fire regimes even as they remade human societies. Anthropogenic fire shaped Australian geography and informed Australian history. It penetrated the Australian consciousness in special ways. In return, Australians have profoundly reworked the historical geography of fire. To celebrate their bicentenary Australians even encircled their continent with a ring of bonfires.

      AN ENVIRONMENTAL EPIC pleads for an epic style. Instead I offer a cautious alternative. In studying the Aborigines of Arnhemland, Rhys Jones coined the expression “fire-stick farmers” to describe their relationship to their land. Through their skillful manipulation of fire, Aborigines fashioned an analogue of farming, a means by which to massage the indigenous environment into serving their particular needs. By analogy, I propose a kind of firestick history, an alternative genre in which fire is both a means and an end.

      What follows is not merely a history of fires, fire regimes, and fire practices—all fascinating in their own way. Rather, this fire history proposes, in addition, to use fire as a means of historical understanding. By studying fire one can extract information from the historical record that is otherwise inaccessible or overlooked, much as burning often flushes infertile biotas with nutrients and cooking renders palatable many otherwise inedible foodstuffs. Fire can reconfigure historical landscapes and remake raw materials into humanly usable history. Thus, fire history introduces new data into Australian history; it provides new means by which to explore historical events; and, like fire—which integrates innumerable environmental conditions into a coherent flame—it offers a synthesis. In the end, it describes as few phenomena can the interplay between humans and landscape, which is to say it illuminates the character of each.

      Burning Bush is thus several histories for several audiences. Like an ellipse, it has two foci—one in fire history and the other in Australian history. Likewise it has two national audiences, Australian and American, and two sets of data, one from the natural sciences and one from sources more traditional to historical scholarship. They combine into inherently unstable compounds, at times bonding like epoxy and on other occasions becoming as volatile as nitroglycerin, ready to explode with the first stumble. Though it ranges widely through the scientific literature, this examination is not science. Rather, it seeks to use fire to elicit new insights from existing scholarship and archives, and to establish a context for understanding the global status of Australian fire. Free-burning fire is a catalyst, an accelerant, a magnifier, and its history inevitably an exaggeration. That is especially true in Australia, and pyrophilia can infect historians as it has so much of Australian life. Obsession can replace narrative, recalling Gaston Bachelard’s belief that fire-induced reverie renders impossible the rational study of fire. Herman Melville warned: “Look СКАЧАТЬ