Torrey Orton
May 18, 2009
Eucalyptus, burned but living, sprout fast into a coat of woolly greenery that transforms them from scarred skeletons to fuzzy entanglements in a few months. The effect looks like this:
(Photo by Auscape_JLR08503)
Australia is a terrifyingly regenerative place. Its nature is perhaps the only continental one adapted to repeated, but intermittent ravages of flood, fire and drought. Fire is on my mind, though drought is more persistently (daily) with me as we sink into our 8th year of declining rainfall in Melbourne. So far we’re down by another half from last year and water storage is at 27% of capacity (down 4 percentage points from this time last year).
The fire on my mind - the Victorian Black Saturday fires of February 7th, ’09 - moved us to revisit sites we have walked and skied over two decades till the day. We went to see what was left, carrying a map (see below) which showed everything we knew closely and well had been scorched, including 173 people in various towns in its path. We went to see and to support surviving local business which was under-used almost to the point of going under, though alive.
There was nothing we had not seen before in other bushfire sites (e.g. -Victorian Alps 2003) but this was 50-80kms from our front door. One thing about fires is how wilful they are. Along the same stretch of road, say a couple of kilometres, in wooded hills there were patches where the trees were black from bottom to top, not a leaf in sight. These we knew would be standing there as bleached skeletons for decades. No regrowth from them. A model for the imagery of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Then there were patches, separated by a slight decrease in blackening, of closely burned trees with scorched leaves on the tops already sprouting first shoots low down the trunk or from the roots at the base depending on the degree of intensity of the burn. Some of these will regrow from top to bottom; others part way up; others not at all.
Then a third burn almost touched little but the ground level stubble and leaf droppings.
The sick/sad impact on us of the complete burns was not moderated by the regrowth areas until a day later. But even on the first trip through there were those signs of comeback. A wondrous thing.
Here’s what happened broad scale (see KilmoreEast-Murrindindi map) on Saturday Feb. 7th, ‘09. These fires burned about 100,000 hectares on the day. A month later the picture looked like this: “The total area burnt from the four fires so far is 302,875 hectares” (Melbourne HeraldSun March 1,’09). For comparison 8700 acres burned at Santa Barbara CA recently (May 9-12, ’09). The air temperature on the day here was 46C (116 F) with a northerly wind gusting to 80+ kms/hr. The effect in Melbourne was to burn the exposed leaves of plants in our yards. Within two months many of them were having a surge of new growth as if it were spring. Others died. That was just sunstroke.
My first sight of woolly green recovery – above Lorne, Victoria in October ’83 after the Ash Wednesday fires - was an experience slightly HP Lovecraftian in look. I was ten years in the country already but had never seen a mid-growth forest regeneration. Or, maybe like many arrivals in new places, I hadn’t noticed. Lovecraft was an American gothic writer of the early 20th century, prone to alieninvasion fantasies, some of which he placed in Australia. You may see how the first photo above is weird.
These forests are treed with species that must burn to live in the long term and come to life after burning. The closest deciduous equivalents I’ve seen are northern forests coming into green in a few weeks in spring, sprouting all over it seems, though still mainly on the outer growing branches. Another, more similar, event is the sprouting of new leaf bearing twigs all over elms which have been so drought struck they are nearly leafless mid-summer. First rains of fall or late summer bring a sudden rush in an otherwise wholly unnatural way for such species. Apart from that, no green woolly similars.
From my first step in Oz I loved the land because of its difference from my home in Massachusetts. Gums along the Geelong Road in ’71 were something special highlighted by the flatness and light. I commend them to those with a landscape orientation, especially to the delicacies of visual difference which characterise all of Australia. Woolly green rehabilitations are one of them.
Below are two steps in a series of regeneration pictures taken in another Australian location six years ago. Nick Gleitzman did the work, the only sequence of its sort I found (though having found his I didn’t try hard!).They are done at the same time of day over about 10 time chunks in the year after the fires. The first image below is 5 days after the fires.
And then, with a watering and passage of time (98 days in this instance) we get this where we can see the wondrous mix of survival regrowth and never-to-be-seen again dead remnants of bushes and trees.
Gleitzman’s originals in three different settings from the same 2002 fires can be found at http://www.omnivision.com.au/fire/regen_b.htm. This last photo also shows a field of woolly green regeneration, but in a drier part of the country so there’s much space between each tree.
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