Pre Colonial Forests & Fire – Part 4.

The significance of lightning.

The number of bush and grass fires started by lightning varies across Australia, but in the remote mountains of eastern Victoria, they are very frequent – maybe several hundred in a dry summer season. (see: Gippsland Zig – Zag).

But interestingly, the early explorers, and even the 1939 Stretton Royal Commission, makes very little reference to bushfires caused by lightning.

Arguably, before European settlement, indigenous communities had little capacity, or need, to extinguish fires started by lightning, or indeed many of the fires that they had lit themselves.

These fires would have been let to burn where topography, fuels and weather took them. And they could have remained smouldering and burning for months.

Professor Brian Egloff from the University of Canberra suggests –

that there is a likelihood that at least some, if not the majority, of the ignitions attributed to Aboriginal agency were caused by lightning strikes.

It’s also fascinating to ponder how the pattern and extent of deliberately lit indigenous burning may have intersected and overlapped with “natural” fires caused by lightning.

And while there are a few points of evidence, the bigger question of how all these fires translated into a complex mosaic of fuel structures and forest ages across the wider landscape of Victoria remains largely speculative.

Reconstructing and understanding pre-colonial forest landscapes is a bit like being given a few random pieces of an epic jigsaw puzzle but without having the picture on the cover of the box as a guide. And maybe a few too many people try to interpret and guess the gaps in between.