The flames licked to the side and jumped over the treetops. It was January 2020 and Greg Slade ran through the smoke and passed through the fallen eucalyptus trees on a burning road on Australia’s kangaroo island.
Slade, the acting manager of a desert shelter, had evacuated 18 employees and dozens of guests. He hung up again to protect the hotel, but with winds of 50 knots and scorching heat, the retreat would not survive the worst fire season in the country’s history. Like, thousands of homes and businesses would soon be reduced to smoking debris.
It took Slade 12 hours to get to safety that day. He spent the next ten months traveling, and this October he got a job in another 700-square-kilometer retreat on the Australian island of Fraser, east of Queensland.
The fires swept across the island to its pristine white sand beaches. With the island suffocated by smoke, staff and tourists were forced to evacuate as the fire threatened local attractions, such as the rainforest with trees up to 150 feet tall growing in the sand, a unique phenomenon, according to UNESCO.
But within weeks of work, a new gunpowder forced him to evacuate again.
According to Slade, 42, the new fire “became quite nasty and reached less than 100 meters” from his new workplace. Australian luck, time and firefighters saved the business. But for the first time in memory half of Fraser Island, an ecological oasis and UNESCO World Heritage Site, burned at the same time.
After last year’s devastating wildfires in Australia, which killed at least 33 people and three billion animals, from koalas to frogs, and set fire to an area twice the size of Pennsylvania, the country still it is beginning to struggle with a future that promises ever larger and more serious fires.
As the most explosive part of Australia’s fire season begins, weather patterns indicate that this year there will be heavy rain, perhaps tempered by flames and years of scorching heat and drought in the country. This week’s rain has helped firefighters put an end to the Fraser Island fire, although the burns are expected to happen in January.
But, as the island’s experience shows, unique landscapes across the continent continue to be at risk of transformation and conflagration, as climate change, poor land management and other environmental threats increasingly clash with the fire.
A rare place at risk
Fraser Island, also known by its Aboriginal name, K’gari, is the largest sand dune island in the world, with cliffs, unusual dune lakes, and rare ecosystems. Its main view is a rainforest of Kauri pines, giant ferns and turpentine that can live for a thousand years. The beaches, moors and forests of the island are also home to sensitive species, from knots, petrels and other birds to flying foxes, skins, sea turtles and wild dingos.
A sandy road reveals the sensitive soil anchored by the unique vegetation, which in turn supports the island’s rare and endangered species.
Fraser’s October fire was lit by an illegal bonfire on the beach. Unlike the racing megafocs that burned large sections of New South Wales and Victoria a year earlier, this fire did not move with either force or ferocity. But his slow march was relentless. “It was alarming how great he was,” says Rod Fensham, a professor of ecology at the University of Queensland.
Fire is a natural part of the Fraser landscape, but in recent years the southern dry winter season has spread later in the spring and has also been warmed by climate change. According to Jamie Shulmeister, a researcher at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand who has studied Fraser for years, it cures vegetation more quickly and causes the fire to go out of control before it is noticed.
“In the past,” he says, “this type of fire could have passed easily, but the probability is that it would have been extinguished in a day or two.” Instead, it ruined more than 200,000 acres and burned for two months in a row.
Fraser is sparsely populated and the pockets of houses and businesses were saved. But the geology of the island is unlike anywhere else. It houses plants and animals that live in sensitive niches, such as acid swamps with fish and amphibians specially adapted to tolerate water chemistry.
Even in areas that evolved with fire, flames that burn too much can destroy the vegetative cover and allow sand to move with the winds. Once this begins, the island’s dune system can change, potentially reconfiguring entire ecosystems.
This is not the only risk. So far, it appears the fires did not penetrate the rainforest of Fraser Island, according to Shulmeister and Fensham. But a fungus from the South American tree called myrtle oxide infects the vegetation near its edge. Large hot burns combined with myrtle oxide can alter the regenerative capacity of shade species, making it difficult for rooting plants in the rainforest. For the rainforest, fire can pose “an existential threat to their survival,” Shulmeister says.
It will be years before Shulmeister can say for sure whether this fire caused irreparable damage. For now, he hopes the Fraser Island fire is “mostly a warning sign.”
Lake Mckenzie, a freshwater lake, is one of the main tourist attractions on the island and has so far not been affected by the fire. For biosecurity and cultural reasons, there has been opposition from the Butchulla Indians to using the lake to fight the fires.
Less rainfall than usual in recent months created dry conditions, aggravated by heat; November was the hottest month in Australia. An illegal bonfire on the beach caused the fire, which firefighters fought to control for six weeks.
Photograph by Matthew Abbott
For example, Slade feels warned.
After the evacuation order was withdrawn, Slade returned to work. Like many Australians, he feels comfortable around gunpowder. He saw it in the jungles of Victoria, the region around Melbourne, South Australia, at the age of twenty and has even taken fire management courses. And, unlike his experience on Kangaroo Island, no one in Fraser, even during the evacuations, felt he was fleeing for his life.
But the other day he took a tour to study the damage. While the Fraser flame burned more slowly than last year’s megafocs, it was hard not to be humiliated by its dirty power.
“There’s a lot of vegetation trapped on the ground,” Slade says.
He doesn’t feel like going through it again.