Shallow Fire Literacy Hinders Robust Fire Policy: Black Saturday and Prescribed Burning Debates

The 2009 Black Saturday bushfires were Australia’s worst bushfire disaster and sparked an intense political debate including a lengthy and contested Royal Commission. One policy measure discussed following the disaster was the level of prescribed burning conducted in Victoria, which dominated hyperbolic public discourse and the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission. Environmental groups and some ecologists cautioned against proposals for a hectare-based target, while many foresters and lobby groups advocated for it and pointed to the success of targets in the jarrah forests of South-Western Australia. Understandings of Indigenous burning practices were drawn upon or dismissed during the debate over the need for more burning, though only as rhetorical flourishes rather than detailed considerations. Following the Royal Commission, Victoria adopted a state-wide target for 5 per cent of public land to be annually burned from 2010 to 2014, though this was recently abandoned in favour of a ‘risk-based’ strategy. In this chapter I argue the post-Black Saturday discussion of prescribed burning largely failed to consider the nuances of this land management technique; it was interpreted largely as a front for culture wars rather than on its own terms. This stemmed from a lack of fire literacy. The term ‘fuel’ flattened diversity of fire ecology; different techniques and philosophies of prescribed burning were generally left unrecognised in the debate. Shallow fire literacy thus hindered an effective response to this disaster.