Epic Fail: Edited

 

This is a 'prescribed burn', the name of which would almost be amusing if the results weren't so tragic. Prescribed for what? Against what? Fear. This is a hot burn, carried out in summer - the 'prescribed' antidote for a collective fear that has taken hold of many, maybe the majority, of Australians. The expression of this fear is a type of psychological transference, not onto an individual, but onto the bush we claim to love so much. Fear of nature, fear of the wild, fear of chaos, fear of death. The antidote to being burnt in a wildfire is to burn the hell out of the country. 'Baby' and 'bathwater' spring to mind*.

Edit: In view of a reader's comments re the veracity of content, I have substituted the photo of burnt kangaroos on Kangaroo Island (as a result of wildfire) with this screen shot of a video posted on the Prescribed Burns? Facebook page by Nancy Jones on the 26 January 2021. This karda has had its back right foot burnt off. I have included Nancy's comments to provide context and validate the photo. I have also provided a link to the page so you can check the 2 videos for yourself - the screenshot is poor quality: 

'It appears Mersea forest was ignited last week and was the unattributed cause of the smoke warnings last week. The ignition was not listed on the site. So while fire fighters were dealing with lightening fires they were igniting this. I went today to see the damage. Found two injured giant lizards. One had a foot burned off. The other was having a hard time moving. This is not right . And to disguise it by putting up it was not being ignited when it was gives me great concern about why was it covered up?'

The PB? group has since ascertained that this fire was in fact a reignition by DBCA and we have email proof of that below. The author of the email was Michael Chan from DBCA:

Below is a map of the Walpole Wilderness. I Photoshopped it to better represent the truth. The tiny areas circled in green are the ONLY areas in this BIODIVERSITY HOTSPOT, WORLD HERITAGE WILDERNESS that are protected from prescribed burning. That means the areas in orange can, and are, being burnt. Some of these include 6000 year old peat. This is irreplaceable. But the department responsible has continued to light fires in pockets of these peat grounds during summer. They edge burn around the perimeter, then drop incendiary fire bombs into the centre. If they find a pocket unburnt, they burn that too, which is counter to best practice where burning is carried out in a mosaic pattern (as Aboriginal people did) to maintain habitat and provide places for wildlife to escape. This department is intent on burning as much of the vegetation in some of these blocks as they can. FaBWA has email proof from the department themselves that they are lighting fires in summer, since 17 November to be precise. (Edit: See video of 2 injured kardas (racehorse goannas) - one with a back leg burnt off - limping along a bush track. There is no food for them to eat so they will probably, mercifully, die). 

Edit: One reader thought that the chart above was misleading, so I have provided the original below. Make up your own mind about the visual message this is sending, and whether the original map is actually the one misrepresenting the reality of the situation i.e. marking the areas in red seems to suggest these are the only areas being burnt, when in FACT, the remainder can, and IS being systematically burnt. And we have evidence of that too. THIS IS WILDERNESS FFS!!!!!! 

A WILDERNESS BIODIVERSITY HOTSPOT.

And if you think I am using red deliberately, you'd be right.

If you think there is a note of impassioned frustration in my words you are correct. I am outraged. It's why I offered my graphic design services free to the recently formed FaBWA group (Fire & Biodiversity WA). This is madness. While we continue to argue about climate change policy in this stupid country, our forests and animals are burning and, because of the added effects of climate change, they are unlikely to return.

Our 'leaders' have failed us. Australia is one of the most vulnerable continents in a world facing radical climate change. We can't hold global warming to 1.5 degrees, which is already having a devastating effect. We are now looking at 2 degrees warming which will have catastrophic outcomes. This is what we are facing - this WILL be our future. 

Laura Tingle of the ABC's 7.30 report did a 5 minute interview with Dr Will Steffen - he's REALLY worried about this, and everyone else should be too.

'LAURA TINGLE: Finally, what would Australia look like with temperatures that were 3-degrees higher than they are now?

WILL STEFFEN: A 3-degree world is a pretty frightening one when you actually start looking at it in any detail.

Extreme heat would be beyond anything we're experiencing now. A lot of what we call "extreme heat" - between 35 and 40 - might be considered a cool day during a summer with a 3-degree temperature rise.

The Great Barrier Reef would be gone.

Forests would probably burn as soon as they grow back. In fact, we probably wouldn't have many forests - they would be converted to savannahs or grasslands.

The drought - the drying trend we're experiencing in the south-west and the south-east in our major agricultural zones - is very likely to be much more severe and that means we may become a food importer rather than exporter. It'll be really tough to grow the food that we need.

When you think about it, this is a world where you can actually plausibly say a collapse scenario could not be ruled out. This is going to be a really, really tough world just to live in, let alone survive in any sort of reasonable sense'.

Photo credits:

Bart Lebbing, FaBWA

Video screenshot taken from one of 2 videos posted by Nancy Jones on 26 January, 2021 on Prescribed Burns? Facebook page

Screen shot from a pdf of an email written by Michael Chan of DBCA to Karyn O'Connor in response to her queries about ongoing fires in the Walpole Wilderness over summer. Full pdf of exchange available on request.

Map - unsure of source, could be WAFA - WA Forest Alliance or DBCA. I have Photoshopped the top one to show that 95% of this wilderness hotspot has been approved for prescribed burns.

* 'Throwing the baby out with the bathwater' - when counter-productive actions deliver an undesired outcome.

Twerk-free Zone

 

I caught the last few entries to Triple J's Hottest 100 for 2020. Once I'd fought my way through the soft porn over-populated with eye-bogglingly large arses, tits and twerking*, grinding pelvises - I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the top 5 were quite musical, and I think - all great Australian songs. 

At number 4 this is my favourite - 'Cherub' by Ball Park Music. I have no idea what it is about. This 5 minutes of escapism tips its baseball cap to 60s, bent sliding guitar noted, psychadelic music. Played over a nature themed video complete with flowers and butterflies I find it rather soothing. 

And not a human in sight. Perfect.

* For the uninitiated, and according to Wikipedia, twerking 'is a type of dance that came out of the bounce music scene of New Orleans in the late 1980s. Individually-performed, chiefly but not exclusively by women, dancers move by throwing or thrusting their hips back or shaking their buttocks, often in a low squatting stance' which, as far as I'm concerned, cancels out 200 years of struggle for women's rights. Why, oh why, do women continue to disempower themselves, and the rest of us, by continuing to perform for men and base their sense of worth on how attractive they are to them? Well I know why. I just wish they wouldn't.

Bruce's Rant

 

The rant below is by a guy called Bruce Walker who survived the Wytaliba fires in 2019. I am very entrenched and busy doing work with a local group calling for an enquiry into 'prescribed burns' (also called hazard reduction burns here by Bruce) I thought I would share this as it's topical.

Bruce Walker, Wytaliba Fire Survivior (12 November 2019)

Bruce Walker... “Hi everyone, my name is bruce walker, you might remember me from ABC TV yesterday, i'm one of the survivors of the wytaliba fires of last friday 8th november 2019.

responding to this well informed fuckwit here - Anthony G

so mate - first up, i've been an RFS volunteer for close to 20 years, and am part of the highly regarded Wytaliba RFS - one of the most respected and hardened crews on the northern tablelands and beyond. our crew number over 50 and include decorated vets of ash wednesday and many other national distaster catastrophic level fires.

regarding hazzard reduction. let me fill you in.

for my time here, we used to do managed hazzard reduction whenever it was viable in winter.

however - sadly, the moment gina and rupert* went halves and purchased the LNP wholesale, we saw a MASSIVE increase in wholesale industrial logging across the nation.

tell me, anthony - do you garden? do you use MULCH?

compare a mulched garden to a non-mulched garden. you'll see a near instant difference. if you're not schooled on how soil works, try standing all day in the sun with no hat on. what happens?

that's right, anthony. your head gets fucking hot.

that's what's happened to the planet. now. as anyone who's dabbled in, you know... physics, will spell out better than i can - an increase of just one degree is quite significant.

another neato thing physics talks about is the water cycle, anthony.

you see, part of the water cycle is this cool thing called "transpiration"

it's part 4 of this essential way in which trees send up moisture to meet clouds, creating low pressure troughs which draw rainfall inland.

in fact, it's physically impossible to get rain on the lee side of a mountain, without trees doing this very thing. impossible. ask the residents of the atacama desert in chile - who haven't had rain for one THOUSAND years. why? no fucking trees, anthony.

so anyway, back to the greens enacting a ban on burnoffs - that time we elected them to majority government and they had the final say.

when was that again, anthony? i'll wait.

nah. lets move on, since we ALL know this was never a thing . ever.

so anyway - here in wytaliba, we used to have an incredibly green lush valley - right up until industrial loggers finally broke in to compartments to our north. right about this time, there was a near instant and significant drop to our vital streamflow.

this happened again after each and every highland logging operation - and with LNP slashing and burning every national park in sight, well... you know, lets' not go there. climate change is a hoax, right?

so wholesale burn quotas came in with LNP too. this... well.. i just want to pause here and say "wow" because this did indeed make us say wow.

in recent years, we've seen hazzard reduction burns take place completely surrounding our once green, lush valley. so much so, that after the last july burn - of an area once supplying most of our water - well... 27 years of no burn had left a healthy and regenerating semi-arid rainforest. now it's simply arid nothing.

despite this burn and 3 more last year, we got the following result - fires flared up in this dry mulchless wasteland and burned for 6 weeks, destroying 2 more former rainforest areas, leaving them also tinder dry and unable to transpire - hasn't actually rained a drop since then. weird. almost like cause and effect took place.

clouds pass over, for sure. they get rain on the tablelands even - but - as physics reminds us, when air drops, it warms, expands, and rather than raining, sucks even more moisture from trees and soil.

oh well.

i mean, this is normal for australia, isn't it? watching 200 or more year old trees slowly wither and die right in front of you. that's normal. happens all the time. rivers dry up too, even though ours is home to platypi - who aren't known for travelling much - and hasn't dried up in probably 100,000 years minimum.

until last summer, and it's been bone dry since august.

this has never happened in my entire 25 or so years here. no local elders remember such a thing. wow.

now, we all know about the bees nest and kingsgate fires and the hundreds more around the state. my crew and many other heroic RFS volunteers have been fighting them for months on end.

yet another backburn actually got lit up about a month ago, on our south side, just half an hour before high southerly winds were due. the responsible paid agency, then ran out of paid hours, packed up and left it to spot onto our property and threaten 80 homes.

we're like the mujahideen of firefighting though, so we got it after about 10 days nonstop hectic battle.

this... brings us up to date, andrew. we've got bare, blacked out dust for 50km in all directions. right up to the actual eaves of half the homes here.

which is why, friday's hellstorm caught all of us by surprise, andrew.

a mushroom cloud went up at 3pm, 20 or so km away. within 30 minutes, high winds turned that into a 20km long front - strangely, this front was on ground burnt black as recently as 3 weeks ago - crown fires too, since every tree was literally a giant matchstick with dead leaves and nothing else.

this then switched to 80km/h southerlies and rained hell on 3500 acres of already blacked out ground.

well... you can't say we didn't prep or do hazzard reduction redneck style, can you andrew? or can you?

curiously, within 1 hour we'd lost 20 homes, a school, a fireshed, and a contrete fucking bridge - meaning only 2 outside units even got in to help.

falling trees in the hundreds blocked the old grafton road, so no one could even help neighbours.

by dawn, of 80 homes in our community, 52 were lost, 2 dead (one a sex party voter, the other aplotical - this one is for you, barnaby fucking joyce) we had many injured, thousands of local animals died, and.. it' looks like a warzone here. which it did almost before, except we had homes.

so, Anthony and ALL you fucking armchair experts out there, tell me. how again, was this the greens** fault?

thanks. looking forward to your well thought out response.

bruce walker, wytaliba RFS member and survivor".

Bruce Deliversrants Walker

* 'Gina & Rupert' refers to multi-billionare iron ore magnate Gina Reinhardt, and 'Rupert' is Rupert Murdoch, powerful owner of right-wing media in the US and Australia.

** The 'greens' for international readers refers to 'The Greens' - an Australian political party who are calling for action on climate change and have always advocated for the environment. It's who I vote for EVERY election.

Photo: ABC News article 'NSW bushfires: Inside the community that's now a ghost town after blazes ripped out its heart', Paige Cockburn. 

Happy Invasion Day

The circus rolls on with this insensitive clown leading the way. If you don't know why I feel this way - refer to the images below:

I know we can't change history but we do need to confront it. Our 'leaders' patronisingly talk about 'healing'. How is healing possible when the truth has not been acknowledged and those who were hurt have no audible voice? How is healing possible when the majority of indigenous Australians live in poverty, in appalling conditions with low literacy levels and poor health?

Aboriginal Australians make up less than 2% of the population and 29% of the prison population, which I can confirm because 80% of my prison art students are Aboriginal. Most still begin life disadvantaged in their own country, with a clown of a Prime Minister whose mantra is: 'If you HAVE a go, you'll GET a go'. 

He has no fucking idea.

But what can you expect from a born-again Christian who believes if your life is bad, it's either God's will, or your own fault because you don't believe in his particular brand of religion, or belong to his special church-club?

Until we address the dire circumstances and inequity the majority of Aboriginal Australians deal with every bloody day, I won't be celebrating Australia Day.

Top image: Author. Digital collage.

Other images: Courtesy of Diane Evers, Greens Member of Legislative Council for SW Region.

The Not-So-Lucky Country

The Easterly winds are blowing like mad again. We had a couple of days respite last week and managed to squeeze in a couple of reasonable surf sessions, but now the madness is back. I'm tired of watering my small garden already and we probably won't get rain for months - around Easter usually. One of the predicted changes to the climate with global warming was increased wind and less rainfall. And that will render even more huge tracts of land in the wonderful Land of Oz uninhabitable.

We can thank idiots like this man - one of many world 'leaders' - who are doing sweet FA to turn things around, even though Australia is one of the worst emitters. According to Wikipedia, we 'have one of the highest per capita emissions of greenhouse gas in the world, with its 0.3% of the world's population releasing 1.07% of the world's greenhouse gases'. We have a government who until recently was happy to cheat it's way out of reducing greenhouse gases by manipulating carbon credits. What the rest of the world must think of us. I'm not proud to be Australian.

Australia Day is looming and I don't enjoy that either. There will be an abundance of patriotism, small Aussie flags flying from cars and self-congratulatory pats on the back, just for being Australian. We live in a bubble here. I hope the bubble bursts soon because it's becoming more and more unbearable watching the inequity grow, and our beautiful country bake and burn.

Image: Author. Digital collage. Background drone photo by Bart Lebbing.

Impeached

I just couldn't resist. I'm glad Trump is being impeached. It is the right thing to do if democracy is to survive in the US but I am concerned it will fully unleash the demons. I guess it's a price that may have to be paid for the good of the country in the long term.

Image: Author. Digital collage.

F.A.B.W.A.

 

If you think I've been AWOL in the blog-o-sphere you'd be correct. My relaxing summer holiday has turned out to be quite busy. I volunteered my graphic design services for a local group who want an enquiry into prescribed burning practices in this state, and eventually Australia-wide. My original offer expanded to include a couple of other environmental groups working together on a market stall to educate the public about several related issues - climate change, forest degradation, species extinction and fire management. 

The poster above (which still needs a bit of tweaking re space) is the result of 5 of us working together on the concept, and me doing the final design work. It's taken hours and hours. Presenting complex information in a simple format that engages and educates but doesn't overwhelm is unbelievably difficult. It's always easier to make things complicated. But I'm a stickler for paring things down to the bare minimum, because I know most people aren't motivated to hang around and be educated if it's too much effort. You have to slip under their guard really.

The poster above is one I did for the last market a couple of weeks back. This and the one below are posters I did for the Fire & Biodiversity WA group (Prescribed Burns?). I find it pays to use images of as many cute fluffy animals as you can if you want to get the punters in, most probably kids followed closely by parents.

The poster below is another I completed for the next market day.

There's also a logo nearly finished, and a 3D digital drawing (below) of the Mardo* who stars in these posters in the pipeline as well. I'd like to get it printed on t-shirts eventually - maybe we could raise some funds that way. For now we've decided this little guy (sitting on the log) will be the 'mascot' for the fire group.

Images: Designed by author. Photo credits available.

Mardo*: 'The yellow-footed antechinus (Antechinus flavipes), also known as the mardo, is a shrew-like marsupial found in Australia.'

We're Fucked

 

It's been way too hot here today for any sort of comfort. Australians are supposed to cope well with the heat. I don't. I never have. Today it was 38 degrees where we park our cars and I felt like I couldn't breathe. 

I live on the south coast because I don't like the heat, but the heat has followed me here. How was I supposed to know we were going to cook the planet in my lifetime? Today I watched the beautiful big leaves on my Tamarillo wilt and die before my eyes. In comparison I saw how much better the native plants were faring. The problem with that is that you can't eat most of them, and many of the ones you can eat don't taste that great, and there's a lot of work to make them edible. Australia is a hot dry continent. I hope migrant hopefuls take this into account before they try to escape COVID and move here.

I often wonder how parents feel about climate change. Every time I see a new baby I think to myself: 'I wonder if those parents REALLY thought/think about climate change.' I am told the instinct to breed is powerful. It must be if humans continue to deliver their kids into the fire that planet earth is fast becoming. It's terrifying. Forget about the afterlife, hell or purgatory - we are already there.

Image: Author. Original concept. Hand drawn, digitally coloured.