Author: Chris Johnston

Green Fire-Walls

You might be interested in this webinar about what green fire-walls can do. Link to register. Thanks to FOBIF for sharing this information

Green Fire-Walls: A VFA Webinar

About the webinar

VFA have a webinar coming up with Angelique Stefanatos who developed the Green Fire-Walls project back in 2019 with a Gippsland Landcare Grant. This project came out of Angelique’s experience of severe respiratory illness and the impact of ‘planned burns on her health and welfare. It took 2 years to research and develop the fire-walls ‘toolkit’, which was then distributed to Gippsland Landcare groups and has now been picked up and adapted in other states.

Hear Angelique describe this critical project for how we educate ourselves and others about how to understand fire and forests:

  • What is a green fire-wall & why this project was created
  • Green Fire-Wall design for farms and roadside reserves and importance of native vegetation in the landscape
  • Fire-wise garden design using rainforest as inspiration
  • Concerns about planned burns and their failure to prevent wildfires, their risks to human health, as well as their threats to biodiversity 
  • And some indigenous perspectives

Presenter Bio

Angelique Stefanatos grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne and studied Biological Sciences to become a zoologist. Her career and life were seriously impacted when she contracted a serious lung disease which left her with  life-long reduced lung capacity. After moving to the Northern Territory fort her dream job at the Alice Springs Desert Park, Angelique moved back to Victoria and settled near Lakes Entrance on a Trust For Nature property.

In 2015, having never experienced a Victorian planned burn before, she was unprepared for the fire that was lit along her boundary line, which smouldered all night, creating thick smoke and settling in her valley, nearly asphyxiating her while she slept. (Angelique calls herself ‘the human canary’ when it comes to being a living air quality monitor, due to her reduced lung capacity.)

This incident was devastating on her health and took months to recover, but was nothing compared to the emotional trauma and eco-anxiety she experienced in 2017, when Forest Fire Management Victoria cleared many linear kilometres of roadside vegetation on her doorstep, including recorded Greater Glider habitat. This was the ‘last straw’ for Angelique, and she deeply experienced what Professor Glenn Albrecht calls ‘Solastalgia’: the loss of solace and subsequent nostalgia for the environment to go back to how it was before a destructive event.

Angelique tried everything to stop the roadside clearing, including meetings with fire-managers and local politicians, newspaper articles, radio interviews, letters to state politicians and finally a mini blockade, but it was futile. Up until then she had felt ‘at one’ with her local environment, but due to of her sense of powerlessness, she experienced the 2017 roadside destruction of her plant and animal companions as a devastating soul-trauma, and found it more unbearable than the physical asphyxiation from the smoke in 2015.

The phrase she heard parroted back repeatedly from the fire managers was: “The public want more burning to feel safe.” So this is when she realised that she would have to create a non-threatening tool to help educate farmers, home gardeners and the general public, to help change the narrative. And that’s how the Green Fire-Walls project was born, thanks to a Landcare grant in 2019. It took 2 years to produce the fire-walls ‘toolkit’, which was then distributed to Gippsland Landcare groups and has now been picked up and adapted in other states.

 WHEN: April 30, 2026 at 6:30pm – 7:30pm
 WHERE: Online

Postponed – Renewing the forest with fire?

POSTPONED. Sorry folks, we’ve had to postpone ‘Renewing the forest with fire?’. We are hopeful about getting a new date in August and will advertise the new date in the Newstead Echo and local social media. Please pass on this message to others who might be interested.

[Below is what we had planned]

Renewing the forest with fire?

A Newstead 2050 Community Conversation Thursday 10 July, 7pm-8.30pm, Mechanics Institute Hall, Newstead

Join us in July to learn about the different ways that fire is used in the Muckleford Forest, the processes and the outcomes. Looking at three recent planned burns, we’ll invite our panel to talk through the ways in which fire has been used and whether it might help renew the health of the forest.

Panel

  • Karl Just: botanist and zoologist, consultant specialising in flora and fauna surveys and ecological restoration projects
  • Levi Jessen-Fennell: Djaara Djandak Wi team leader involved planning and conducting the Dja Dja Wurrung cultural burns across Djaara Country
  • Geoff Park: Field naturalist, nature photographer and blogger, creator of the remarkable Natural Newstead blog.

The three recent Muckleford Forest examples are: Djaara Djandak Wi (or cultural burn) on Spring Hill Track just north of Newstead in 2023, and two planned burns conducted by Forest Fire Management Victoria (FFMV) along Bells Lane Track (2024) and in the Maldon Historic Reserve (2025).

Talking Fire, a project auspiced by Newstead 2050 Inc., is a community initiative designed to create community awareness and understanding about fire in the Box-Ironbark landscape that came out of the 2013 Newstead Community Plan. Talking Fire worked with Dja Dja Wurrung and Forest Fire Management Victoria to find a local area that could be the focus of Djandak Wi (‘Country Fire’) – or cultural burns – to demonstrate how fire might heal and renew Country; the area on Spring Hill Track was selected. To find out more about Talking Fire and previous events, look at the website https://talkingfire.org/.

Rethinking planned burns

Kinglake Friends of the Forests, Friends of Box Ironbark Forests, Friends of the Whipstick and the Whroo Goldfields Conservation Network have engaged Dr Zylstra to speak at a public meeting at the Castlemaine Senior Citizens Centre at 7pm on Tuesday 20th August to explain his studies and model of bushfire behaviour. We are hopeful that a greater understanding of fire behaviour will lead to a review of the practice of prescribed burning, greater protection for the flora and fauna of the forests and a reduced risk of bushfires for communities.

Forest Fire Management Victoria (FFMV) plan to burn 10,000 Ha of forest in the Murray -Goldfields districts in the next 2 years. This is despite acknowledgement by the Victorian state department of Environment, Energy and Climate Action, DEECA that “Box-Ironbark forests are considered not prone to recurrent fires, making them possibly atypical of dry, sclerophyllous vegetation in Australia.”

With climate change creating more extreme fires and a longer fire season, governments have ramped up “hazard-reduction” burning. New research however shows the practice can actually make forests more flammable. Over time, some forests tend to thin out and become less likely to burn – hazard reduction burning disrupts this process.

Dr Philip Zylstra is a fire behaviour scientist and Adjunct Associate Professor from Curtin University. In his former work as a remote area fire fighter, he realised that planned burns for fire mitigation were not only causing immediate environmental harm, but could increase fire risk to communities in subsequent years. As many others noted, the bush responded to these burns with a dense flush of understorey growth. As a result, Dr Zylstra undertook Australia’s first detailed and systematic attempt to link the mechanisms that drive fire behaviour in forest environments, developing the only peer-reviewed model to show how forest structure and composition drives fire behaviour in Australian forests.

According to Prof Zylstra:
“The open understorey and historical rarity of bushfires in the Box-ironbark near Whroo are a reminder that some forests are natural advantages for controlling fire. Disturbances such as burning and logging can break down these valuable defences, causing regrowth that drives a pulse of elevated fire risk which can last for decades. The fires in the Pyrenees are a tragic example of this, as the average annual area of bushfires has nearly tripled since widespread logging began in that area. Certainly climate change is a major influence, but it doesn’t let us off the hook. The old modelling which drives the push to disturb forest does not account for the natural controls that undisturbed forests have placed on fire since the days of Gondwana.” (Zylstra, P. 2024, pers. comm., Feb 26)

Shared from FOBIF

Cultural Fire – Save the Date

Trent Nelson is scheduled to speak at the March meeting of the Castlemaine Field Naturalists on the Murray Goldfields Cultural Burn program (Djandak Wi) and talk about the burns in the area of Castlemaine.

Trent is a Dja Dja Wurrung Traditional Owner. He works in the Forest Fire Operations Division, Department
of Energy, Environment and Climate Action.

Date: Friday 8 March – 7.30pm
Where: Fellowship Room, Uniting Church, Lyttleton Street, Castlemaine

More details soon or check out the CFN website: https://castlemainefieldnaturalists.org.au/

[Photo: Trent Nelson, 2016 at a Talking Fire event]

CFN meetings usually start with members’ observations – reports on interesting flora or fauna recorded during the previous month – followed by a talk from a guest speaker. Members and visitors are all welcome to attend.

And for those interested in research on the impacts of fire, here is a link to an article on the impacts of changing fire regimes on hollow-bearing trees in south-eastern Australia.

Strategic Fuel Breaks? Rescheduled to 20 October

Rescheduled due to rain and Muckleford Creek flooding.

DELWP have established an east-west strategic fuel break along Bells Lane Track in the Muckleford Forest. The process involved cutting and mulching for a distance either side of the track, except where the vegetation was judged to be of a high quality or had strong habitat values, particularly in the Conservation Reserve section. Only understorey plants were cut and mulched. DELWP did some pre-work consultation in May 2022 and community members provided their views on sections where cutting and mulching should be minimized.

On Thursday 20 October, there is an opportunity for anyone interested to find out more through:

  • a look at the works done along Bells Lane Track – meet at 11.30am at the eastern end of the track at the corner of Bells Lane Track and Muckleford School Road (45 mins)
  • a presentation by DELWP plus discussion – Newstead Community Centre (Lyons Street, Newstead) – 12.30-2pm

Interested? Just turn up! DELWP contact is Justine M Leahy (DELWP) justine.leahy@delwp.vic.gov.au

(Also posted on the Muckleford Forest blog)

Strategic Fuel Breaks?

DELWP have established an east-west strategic fuel break along Bells Lane Track in the Muckleford Forest. The process involved cutting and mulching for a distance either side of the track, except where the vegetation was judged to be of a high quality or had strong habitat values, particularly in the Conservation Reserve section. Only understorey plants were cut and mulched. DELWP did some pre-work consultation in May 2022 and community members provided their views on sections where cutting and mulching should be minimized.

On Thursday 6 October, there is an opportunity for anyone interested to find out more through:

  • a look at the works done along Bells Lane Track – meet at 11.30am at the eastern end of the track at the corner of Bells Lane Track and Muckleford School Road (45 mins)
  • a presentation by DELWP plus discussion – Newstead Community Centre (Lyons Street, Newstead) – 12.30-2pm

Interested? Just turn up! DELWP contact is Justine M Leahy (DELWP) justine.leahy@delwp.vic.gov.au

(Also posted on the Muckleford Forest blog)

The state of the environment: Cultural burning

The recently released State of the Environment Report has attracted a lot of media attention. This article in The Conversation looks at what the report says in relation to cultural burning and ‘institutional’ bushfire management programs – ‘planned’ or ‘prescribed’ burns.

While the article refers to 25 years of research in the ‘stone country’ of the Arnhem Land Plateau, one of the observations is that ‘once the ecological benefits of cultural burning are lost, they cannot be simply restored with mainstream fire management approaches’ using the cypress pine (Callitris spp.) as a case study.

Arnhem Land, NT. [Photo by Vladimir Haltakov on Unsplash}

One of the differences the article highlights is that ‘institutional fire management’ tends to be large-scale, and ‘based on concepts of efficiency and generality. It is controlled by bureaucracies, and achieved using machines and technologies’. It is an ‘industrial approach’ rather than using ‘place-based’ knowledge and close relationships with Country.

Here is the link to the article: New research in Arnhem Land reveals why institutional fire management is inferior to cultural burning (the full research report is here – https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-12946-3).

Bu can we use both traditional knowledge and technology? A recently webinar by Australian Wildlife Conservancy on jointly-managed areas in the Kimberley highlighted that helicopters were being used to conduct cultural burning in remote locations. Instead of the helicopter flying a ‘standard’ pattern and the operator dropping incendiaries at regular intervals, the approach was that a traditional owner/elder for each patch of Country would be in the helicopter and determine precisely where fire was to be released into the landscape. Many helicopter trips no doubt, but sounds like a great example of combining and using knowledge, connections and technology.

COVID strikes again!

I have some bad news – COVID has struck one of our Djaara fire practitioners and we again need to postpone Workshop 1 in the Fire for Healthy Country series that was scheduled for next Saturday 28 May.

I have emailed everyone who has booked, including those on the waiting list. I will post the new date here and to all booked participants (etc) as soon as I can.

What can I say but … rats! Such tricky times.

Maldon area; fire, ecology, people – can they all co-exist?

Workshop 1 – Sat 28 May

Workshop 1 will be held on Sat 28 May, 10am-3pm (or 4pm). Dates for Workshops 2 and 3 are likely to be June and August respectively. Fingers crossed that COVID doesn’t trip us up again!

If you have booked already, you’ll get an email via Humanitix as well. If you can’t attend, please let us know as there is a waiting list. If you want to attend and haven’t booked, please use the link on our main webpage and add yourself to the waiting list.

Our workshops will be guided by Amos Atkinson and Mick Bourke, both Djaara fire practitioners. Workshop 2 will involve the Djandak crew and DELWP.

And don’t forget, you need to do Workshop 1 to be involved in Workshop 2, and do your Basic Wildfire Awareness to be on the ground during Workshop 2.