The Ownership of Everything by Simon Winchester

Author:Simon Winchester [Winchester, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780060839789
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2005-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

It is a curious reality that many aboriginals who visit Australia’s southern city suburbs today say that it is they who are scared to death, and by the very opposite—by the existence of the thick and untended woodlands and the unburned stretches of underbrush and high and dry grassland. “I was terrified,” remarked a young indigenous woman who had settled briefly in the dry-country town of Nowra, two hours south of Sydney. “I couldn’t sleep. I told everyone that we need to go home. This place is going to go up, and it is going to be a catastrophe.”

And indeed, in Nowra, her apprehensions were amply justified. A local newspaper from January 2020 reported on just the kind of catastrophe that the woman had feared, a cruel classic of Australia’s most recent bad fire season. The town was consumed by flame. There were fires raging to the north of the small town. huge fires to the south, flame heights of at least twenty meters rising up on one side of the Shoalhaven River and forty meters on the other, and dozens of smaller fires in areas that hadn’t burned in decades. An evil-looking yellow, greasy-seeming pyro-cumulous cloud rumbled with its self-generated thunder outside. “The southerly is going to hit around nine, 9.30 and unfortunately you’re the ones that will have to deal with it,” the local fire chief was quoted in the paper as saying, trying to explain the situation to anxious townspeople. “What it’s going to do I have no fucking idea.”

He really did have no idea. The southerly winds hit two hours earlier than expected, roaring through the forest with gusts of more than one hundred kilometers per hour, whipping up dirt and dust and ash and filling everything with smoke. Strike teams rushed here and there, trying to douse fires that sprang up almost at random. At Nowra a firefighter explained what he thought of as strategy: we can’t stop the fire, so we’re just trying to direct it as best we can. Strike teams were sent across the state on Saturday, moved around like chess pieces against an opponent that ignored all the rules. “It’s turned to shit everywhere.”

But it needn’t have done so.

An academic paper devoted to the aboriginal practice of controlled burning, and published in 2010, with Jabiru’s Violet Lawson one of the nine authors, made an important point about the attitude of white Australians to the fires that so frequently afflict them. Indigenous peoples have had centuries of experience with fires, she wrote, and they generally should be listened to, their wisdom and knowledge respected and absorbed by those who have long supposed them to be mere primitives.

Indigenous people generally are all too often generously armed with foresight and wisdom about the management of their lands. One example far away from Australia has been quoted over and again: the Andamanese Islanders, who live remotely and have had little contact with “civilization” in the seas off southeastern India, astonished all by surviving en masse the devastating 2004 tsunami, which killed a quarter of a million people elsewhere.

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