Table of Contents
In the Hawkesbury, fire is not an abstract threat, it is part of our landscape, our memories, and our responsibilities. From Bilpin to Bowen Mountain, Kurrajong to Colo, Wilberforce to St Albans, our region sits at the intersection of rugged bushland, farmland, and small-town living. We know beauty. We also know risk.
Roger Underwood AM has dug up a chapter written almost forty years ago by Australia’s most respected bushfire scientist, Phil Cheney. Astonishingly, the lessons he documented in 1985 are the same ones our state is still struggling to act on fuel loads left to accumulate, communities underprepared, agencies slow to suppress fires early, and a public conversation shaped more by politics than real fire science.
For a region like ours, this is not academic. It is personal to every household.
A Warning from the Past That Speaks Directly to Our Future
Cheney’s message is sharp, practical, and grounded in real experience, the kind earned on the fireground, not behind a desk. He explains exactly what conditions lead to uncontrollable fires and why ignoring basic fuel management guarantees disaster. His insights are not theory; they are the fundamentals that once kept Australian communities safer.
And yet, here in NSW, these fundamentals have slipped. Underwood’s piece reminds us that modern policy has drifted away from proven wisdom and that communities like the Hawkesbury often pay the highest price.
A Community That Has Already Carried Enough
Our readers don’t need reminding of the 2019–20 fires or the 2020–2022 floods or the countless times locals have stepped up while government agencies played catch-up.
Hawkesbury families, farmers, business owners, volunteers, and local rural brigades understand risk better than most. What we need now is information that cuts through the noise, and this article delivers exactly that.
Why We’re Sharing This with You
The Hawkesbury Gazette is committed to strengthening our region through knowledge, accountability, and community resilience. This article:
- debunks the myths that confuse public debate
- outlines the real drivers of catastrophic fire behaviour
- calls for responsibility from landowners, residents, and government
- champions early intervention and practical preparedness
- echoes the lived experience of our rural fire bridage volunteers
Most importantly, it gives our community the power to understand what actually keeps us safe.
A Call to Read, Reflect, and Prepare
Bushfire season is not something we can wish away. It’s something we prepare for.
This article is a reminder that the answers already exist, we simply need to return to the science, the history, and the common sense that protected communities for decades.
It’s not alarmist. It’s not political. It’s reality. And it’s essential reading.
The Hawkesbury is strong because we are informed, connected, and proactive. Reading this piece is another step toward ensuring our region remains safe, prepared, and resilient.
The Hawkesbury Gazette thanks Brian Williams retired Captain of Kurrajong Heights RFS Brigade for bringing this article to our attention and obtaining permission for it to be reproduced.
Turn to the full article below “Think Fire, Know Fire” by Roger Underwood AM.
Think Fire, Know Fire by Roger Underwood AM
Browsing my bookcase the other day, I came across Think Trees, Grow Trees, a 1985 publication from the Institute of Foresters of Australia. This excellent little book was the brainchild of, and was edited by Dr Wilf Crane, one of my contemporaries at Forestry School, a notable forest scientist and a famous, loveable and eccentric character.
Wilf was motivated to publish the book by his concern about the decline of trees and woodlands on farmland in eastern Australia during the 1970s and 1980s. His aim was to encourage professional tree planting (“the right tree in the right place”), but also professional management of trees, woodlands and forests, so as to ensure their health, vigour, productivity and long life.
To me, the most important part of the book (in terms of contemporary relevance) is the chapter called Living with Fire. It was written by Phil Cheney, also a friend and a contemporary of mine at Forestry School. Before he retired a few years ago Phil had become the chief of bushfire research in the CSIRO, Australia’s premier bushfire scientist and expert, and was the recipient of international awards for his research into fire science.
I read Phil’s chapter with interest, but also (ultimately) with falling spirits. The paper (written over 40 years ago now) is full of bushfire wisdom, basic bushfire science and the sort of practical common sense that is underpinned by real-world experience, exactly what every Australian bushfire manager became accustomed to read from Phil back in the day. What depressed me, however, was the realisation that the wheel has turned since it was written decades ago, and key lessons have
been forgotten. Out in today’s bushfire world, especially in Victoria and NSW, but to a lesser extent Qld and Tasmania, the same basic errors that Phil cautions against are still being made, the same old traps fallen into, and there is the same failure to profit from the lessons of bushfire history and science.
The paper begins with a statement so sound and so basic, that almost nothing more needs to be said:
In the Australian environment, people who chose to live in the country or in the bushland surrounding our major cities, must accept that fire is an integral part of that environment. They must understand how fires behave, and what measures can be taken to minimise the impact of wildfires under extreme conditions.
If only they did. On the contrary, from what I can see around the country, very few people who live in bushfire-prone areas are aware of the dangers or appreciate the threat … at least not to the degree that they are motivated to take the necessary mitigatory measures to protect themselves and their assets. Nor do our government agencies achieve much success in either educating them or enforcing responsible bushfire preparedness. In Western Australia, for example, where things are mostly better than in the eastern states, I can still name two major country towns (Denmark and Margaret River) where the community is mostly in a state of denial about the bushfire threat, while at the same time local environmentalists are active in opposing bushfire mitigation (like fuel reduction burning).
Phil Cheney did not mince his words. “Conflagration fires” (his term for the high-intensity, uncontrollable fires that cause serious damage), he wrote, will always occur whenever the following elements occur simultaneously: heavy and continuous fuels, drought, strong hot winds, and an ignition source. This is a precise description of the situation that prevailed in the lead-up to the Black
Summer bushfire disasters in 2019/20 and every preceding bushfire disaster. Instead of recognising the harbingers of disaster, communities were caught by surprise, and were wholly unprepared. The local ‘Fire Chiefs’, who should have been aware of Cheney’s prescription for bushfire calamity, and well-prepared for the calamity that occurred, blamed the fires on “climate change”.
Living with Fire was written well before the notion that ‘Global-warming-causes-bushfires’ had become accepted wisdom amongst people who know little about bushfires and retired “Fire Chiefs” looking for an excuse for their incompetence. Nevertheless, Cheney anticipated the ‘Fire Chiefs’ in a section of his paper about fire behaviour. On the subject of temperature, he says:
People naturally tend to relax fire precautions on cold days – but if low
humidities are forecast [you need to remember that] … fires burn almost as
fiercely on cold dry days as when the temperature is high.
This is a point which the ‘Fire Chiefs’ deny, and most journalists misunderstand. Back when I was an outspoken critic of bushfire policies, I was always telephoned by some journalist after a hot day had been forecast and asked for a doomsday comment. Over and again, I would point out that temperature per se is not the factor that firefighters fear: it is the combination of strong winds and
dry fuels (low humidity) that ensure things will be difficult on the fire front.
Indeed, as Cheney points out “a fire burning under calm conditions is relatively easy to control, even if the fuel is heavy and the fuel moisture content is very low.”
The alternative scenario was demonstrated dramatically in the February 2021 Wooroloo Fire in WA. The temperature was relatively mild, but strong winds combined with a low dew point, and heavy, dry fuels, led to an intense and fast-moving fire that defied all efforts at control for days on end.
The idea that fires will become uncontrollable if global temperatures rise a couple of degrees flies in the face of long bushfire experience, to say nothing of elementary physics. It is the silliest excuse I have ever heard for failure to prepare for the worse, and for professional incompetence.
Back in 1985, Cheney also anticipated the latest fad among environmentalists opposed to bushfire-mitigation burning. This is the notion, advanced by academics opposed to bushfire mitigation burning, that if eucalypt forests are left unburnt long enough, they will become non-flammable. This absurd fantasy is extrapolated by the anti-burning brigade to assert that therefore bushfire-mitigation burning is not needed. However, as Cheney pointed out, based on his own experience
and that of hundreds of foresters and firefighters all over Australia over the decades:
…forest fuels … continue to build up until the rate of decay more or less balances the rate of litter fall. In an unburned mature forest, fuel loads of 15-20 t/ha are common. Under drought conditions, large logs and deep, partially decomposed litter beds dry out and are consumed by a fire. More than 50 t/ha of surface fuels may be burned by a forest fire during a drought. This … is the reason why forest fires are so damaging and so difficult to control under drought conditions.
Cheney does not fail to point out the other critical factor relating to long-unburnt forests, especially those comprising mostly stringybark or candlebark trees. This is the way, in the long absence of fire, fibrous bark accumulates on the tree stems. When ignited in a wildfire the burning bark is lifted by the wind and becomes the firebrands that start spot fires ahead of the main front, or the embers that flow into and ignite houses. One of Cheney’s many sensible recommendations to people living in fire-prone areas is to replace stringybark trees with smooth-barked species in the surrounds of the home. The green bureaucrats in the City of Armadale in WA have none of this. On the contrary, as part of their Urban Forest Strategy, they urge landowners in the bushfire-prone area of the Perth Hills to plant up their back and front yards with jarrah trees, i.e., stringybarks of extreme
flammability.
As expected, Phil Cheney is a strong advocate of people being responsible for their own bushfire safety, and for taking appropriate measures to protect their own properties.
Ask yourself this question? [he asks an imaginary landowner]. Why should a volunteer firefighter put his life at risk to protect your property when you are notprepared to institute a few basic hazard reduction measures? Remember, they are volunteers.
He also makes another very pertinent point, seemingly forgotten so often by firefighting agencies these days:
In a major fire, firefighters must concentrate on suppressing the fire rather than saving individual homes. Sounds tough? Maybe, but there are many examples where fires might have been contained to a few hectares if the firefighters had concentrated on suppressing the fire rather than on protecting a home with hazardous surroundings.
This was one of the most important principles I was taught as a young firefighter. The first priority must be to attack and put out the fire. The alternative approach of focusing on “saving assets” while letting the fire burn unchecked is advocated by many “Fire Chiefs”. As a result of this approach, fire crews operating in the face of an approaching headfire are sent from home to home to home, heroically trying to save them, winning some, losing some, while the fire just gets bigger and nastier,
and descends on ever more homes. Trying to save assets instead of stopping the fire is a hopeless strategy; firefighters are constantly being put in the most dangerous situations, and end up chasing their tails, never getting in front of the game, and ultimately dependant for relief only upon the arrival of rain.
It goes without saying that one of the main reasons why these assets take so much effort to save and often cannot be saved, is because they are so ill-prepared, the land-owner having taken no responsibility for making his land and house as resilient to fire as possible.
There is one final lesson from Phil Cheney’s 1985 paper, just as relevant today as it was then:
Bushfires, he wrote, must be attacked and if possible extinguished as soon as possible after detection.
You would think this hardly needs to be said. But again, I have observed a surprising new approach emerge (first seen, I think, in the 2003 Canberra fires). This is the policy of watch and wait, allowing a bushfire to burn along happily by itself, during which time the authorities “keep an eye on it” but take no steps to control it.
When I read about a fire in a national park in NSW during the build-up to the 2019/20 fires being allowed to burn unchecked for three weeks, I nearly fell off my chair. Yes, it didn’t do much during most of that time, other than grow in perimeter. But as soon as angry weather conditions arose, it got up, and then it got away. “Watch and wait” is possibly the most retrograde policy change in Australian bushfire management, equal in stupidity only to the incomprehensible “Residual Risk” approach adopted by the Victorian government (which I would explain if I understood it).
Interestingly Phil had nothing to say at the time on the general fallacy of reliance on Air Tankers dropping water or retardant, mostly because that futile policy had not emerged at the time.
Today one of the most elementary mistakes that “Fire Chiefs” are making is to call in the water bombers before ordering the bulldozers. Every firefighter on the ground knows that water/retardant bombers cannot put out and secure a forest fire; at best, and under the most favourable conditions, they will retard it. Unfortunately the “Fire Chiefs” believe their own publicity, and promote a fire control strategy that looks good on television but does not work on the ground.
I was almost overcome by nostalgia reading Phil Cheney’s 1985 paper in Think Trees Grow Trees … it was a bit like an unexpected meeting with old friends on a social occasion. Here in a brief chapter in a book were the golden bushfire principles, and the practical nous that I had been brought up on, and which once guided Australia to a pretty good position in the bushfire world. But much of it seems to have been forgotten or is being undermined by “experts” from academia and “Fire Chiefs” with a bee in their bonnet about global warming.
Best of all, I was reminded that Phil was an old-school bushfire scientist. He worked in the field with real fires, and he established a sound working relationship with real bushfire managers, foresters and volunteer brigades. I compare this with the “bushfire experts” of today, especially those in academia, who work entirely from the comfort of their air-conditioned office in a leafy campus, playing with computer models, and far-removed from the smoke and heat of the real bushfire world. A recent paper (much lauded by the ABC) promoting the idea that, far from helping, fuel reduction burning is making our forests more flammable, was based entirely on a computer model, and the “research” did not involve a single measurement in the field.
I am very happy that Phil is not yet in his grave, because if he was, he would be turning in it when he observes the way bushfire management and research has gone in Australia over the last 25 years.
Reference:
Department of Arts, Heritage and Environment in association with the Institute of Foresters of Australia (1985): Think Trees Grow Trees. Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra.
If you have an article that adds to this discussion email Editor@Hawkesburygazette.com
Hawkesbury City Council Disaster and Emergency Committee
The Hawkesbury City Council Disaster and Emergency Committee is a council committee that includes 12 elected councillors, with the Mayor as the Chairperson. The committee is responsible for overseeing disaster and emergency management planning for the local government area, which includes managing risks, responding to emergencies, and informing community resilience efforts. It also holds public meetings that members of the public can attend and address.
A meeting of the committee has been convened for 2 December 2025.
