Chap called Sheahan up in Reedy Creek got into bother a few years ago when he bulldozed 247 eucalypts around his house, thus creating a 100 metre moat against fire. Nillumbik Shire fined him $50,000 and his costs added as much again. After the fire last Saturday, his is the only house left standing for several kilometres around. The Sheahans lost some vehicles, their TV antenna melted, it took four of them, all CFA trained, to save the house, but save it they did.
The Shire of Nillumbik will not permit ratepayers to cut down a tree further away from the house than six metres. That’s the trunk we’re talking about, so plenty of houses in the shire are overhung with branches. And a fire-wind can snap large trees at the base.
Since Wordability HQ is at the southern edge of Nillumbik we take a close and particular interest in this policy. We understand that in our area, which belongs to something called the Green Wedge, the shire is intent on preserving an uninterrupted canopy. That’s an uninterrupted canopy of volatile eucalyptus leaves.
We, too, have incurred the wrath of the shire when we felled half-a-dozen trees just outside the three-metre limit, partly for fire safety, partly because their roots had gummed up the septic system. Not good enough, said the man in the cardigan, and before leaving he took a lot of photographs. My partner got us off. She wrote a magnificent letter of placation, pointing out how many trees we had in fact planted, how many environmental weeds removed. Nothing further was heard, and as you can see, there are rather a lot of trees still around, if not quite the uninterrupted canopy of councillors’ dreams.
I wonder if this catastrophe (over 300 dead, 1800 homes destroyed, 7000 people homeless) will mark the beginning of a new phase in Australians’ attitude to the bush? Phase 1, as we know, was to find it ugly and alien and impossible to draw with any verisimilitude. In phase 2 we learnt to love the gumtree, people hung Hans Heysens on their walls but continued to plant camellias.
A 1950s ideal. But notice the gumtree lurking in the background . . .
The 1960s ushered in Phase 3, in which urbanites began to apologise for our existence, native gardens became fashionable and the green movement was in full swing. This is the period in which places like ours became sought-after and protected.
Not that we’re all that authentically natural. Our district was settled in the 1840s by loggers and goldminers. (Yes, before Ballarat.) Between them they pretty much took out the over-story. Most of the bush around here is regrowth, some only thirty or forty years old. People who have bought houses here since that time – most of us – chose a home among the gumtrees. In so far as they understood them, they thought the risks were worth it.
Saturday will begin a new period of strife over these issues – that’s abundantly clear from the press. And in these places on the edge of the cities, I predict we will see the beginnings of Phase 4, a return to the view that the bush is all very well, but it needs to be tamed and caged if people are to live alongside it. As for those who live in the middle of it, the people in those small places like Reedy Creek (which the press has taken to calling hamlets) their situation is desperately grim. To construct a genuinely safe set of dwellings will involve not only new building standards, but the destruction of the bush around them. Will Mr Sheahan prove a prophet in his own country?
