Aussie burns
With worse to come
Freakishly early bushfires have torn across eastern Australia this week, raising fears of what awaits in the summer months for a land already shrivelled by years of drought.
‘‘We’ve never seen this before in recorded history. Fire weather has never been as severe this early in spring,’’ said Andrew Sturgess, head of the Queensland Fire Service’s prediction unit.
Monstrous summer bushfires and smoke hazes have long been a part of Australia’s summer, which starts on December 1. This year, however, scores of homes have already been destroyed and tens of thousands of hectares of farmland burnt out, forcing hundreds of people to flee to emergency shelters.
A crippling drought and aberrant weather patterns, which many blame on climate change, have conspired to leave unusually large areas of the land vulnerable. The southern half of Australia has come through its driest winter since records began and parts of the eastern states of New South Wales and Queensland have experienced record-high winter temperatures. The soils are parched and huge expanses of woodlands and grasslands are tinder-dry.
Fierce winds of up to 95 kilometre per hour drove this week’s fires fast and far. Some who fled likened the pace and sound of the flames to an approaching freight train. Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology reports that extreme heat events have become more frequent, and rainfall has fallen by as much as 20 per cent in
southern Australia since 1970.
‘‘It’s the worst drought since white man got here. It’s relentless. It’s soul destroying,’’ Robert McBride, one of the largest private landowners in New South Wales, told The Times at his Tolarno Station, 965km west of Sydney. McBride’s land sprawls across almost 80,000 hectares.
Here Australia’s largest river system, the Murray-Darling, irrigates an agricultural basin larger than the combined areas of France and Germany, and the region traditionally produces a third of the nation’s food supplies, from grain and grapes, to avocados and apples.
Yet there are alarmingly few animals left on pastures that just a few years ago were dotted with sheep and cattle. Paddocks are barren and brown. The top soil is blowing away, covering cars in the east coast cities. The national sheep flock has crashed to a 100-year low and the number of cattle is at its lowest level in a quarter of a century. Devastated by drought, last year’s grain harvest was so poor Australia was forced to import it for the first time in more than a decade.
The McBride property once ran 338,000 merino sheep, employed 400 staff and had three pubs, its own jail, school, blacksmith shop and animal feed store. Today there are 10,000 sheep, and McBride says he has seen them walk away from putrid trough water: ‘‘They’d rather die than drink it.’’
He blames greedy corporate farming, which has drained the rivers. He fears Australia will become a net food importer within five years.
Towns across the interior are running out of water. The 2000 residents of Warren, 480km west of Sydney, last week faced the prospect of houses being left to burn because water supplies for fighting fires were too low. Stanthorpe, a Queensland town of 4000, will run dry by Christmas.
Vegetable prices have risen by 8 per cent in a year and fruit by 7 per cent. A lamb cutlet now costs A$4.50 compared with $1.80 two years ago.
The environmental consequences have shocked Australians. When millions of fish were pictured floating dead, starved of water and oxygen in the drying Darling River last summer, the images provoked a national outcry. A mass rescue operation intended to transport tens of thousands of fish to safer waters has begun, but McBride, whose farmhouse is on the river, and who alerted the nation to last summer’s mass death, believes the effort is futile. ‘‘It’s like sending rescuers out six months after Burke and Wills were dead,’’ he says invoking the memory of the doomed explorers who perished in 1861 while attempting a 3200-kilometre traverse of Australia.
‘‘It’s the worst drought since white man got here. It’s relentless. It’s soul destroying.’’
Robert McBride, one of the largest private landowners in NSW