The flames licked sideways and jumped over the tops of the trees. It was January 2020, and Greg Slade ran through the smoke and walked down fallen eucalyptus trees along a burning road on Australia’s Kangaroo Island.
Already, Slade, the interim manager of a wilderness shelter, had evacuated 18 employees and dozens of guests. He hung back to protect the hotel, but with winds of 50 knots and scorching heat the retreat will not survive the worst fire season in the nation’s history. Like thousands of homes and businesses, it would soon be reduced to rubble.
It took Slade 12 hours to get to safety that day. He spent the next 10 months traveling and, in October, got a job at another retreat on the 700-square-mile Fraser Island in Australia, east of Queensland.
Fires broke out across the island to its clean white sand beaches. With the island smothered by smoke, staff and tourists were forced to evacuate because the fire threatened local attractions, such as the rainforest with trees up to 150 meters high growing in the sand, a unique phenomenon, according to UNESCO.
But a few weeks after work, a new fire forced him to evacuate again.
The new flame “became quite ugly and reached 100 meters” from his new job, says Slade, 42 years old. Luck, the weather and the Australian firefighters saved the business. But for the first time in memory, half of Fraser Island, an ecological oasis and UNESCO World Heritage Site, burned suddenly.
Following last year’s devastating fires 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 is just beginning to fight a future that promises more and more fires.
As it is usually the most explosive part of Australia’s fire season, weather patterns indicate that there will be heavy rain this year, perhaps tempering the flames and years of heat and scorching drought in the country. This week’s rain helped firefighters finally put out the fire on Fraser Island, although the burns are expected to burn by January.
But as the island’s experience becomes clear, the continent’s unique landscapes remain in danger of transformation and conflagration as climate change, poor land management and other environmental threats increasingly clash with fire.
A rare place at risk
Fraser Island, also known as its aboriginal name, K’gari, is the largest island of sand dunes in the world, with cliffs, unusual dune lakes and rare ecosystems. Its signatory star is an inland rainforest of Kauri pines, huge ferns and turpentines that can live a thousand years. The island’s beaches, pastures and forests are also home to sensitive species, from knots, rocks and other birds to flying foxes, diving, sea turtles and wild dingoes.
A sandy road reveals the sensitive soil that anchors the unique vegetation, which, in turn, supports the rare and endangered species of the island.
Fraser’s October fire was ignited by an illegal campfire on the beach. Unlike the racing megafires that burned large sections of New South Wales and Victoria a year earlier, this flame did not move with force or ferocity. But his slow march was tireless. “It was alarming how big it was,” says Rod Fensham, a professor of ecology at the University of Queensland.
Fire is a natural part of Fraser’s landscape, but in recent years the dry southern winter season has extended later into 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 been studying Fraser for years, it heals vegetation faster and makes it ripe so that the fire is out of control before it is noticed.
“Once upon a time,” he says, “this type of fire could have happened easily, but it probably would have gone out in a day or two.” Instead, it shredded more than 200,000 acres and burned for two consecutive months.
Fraser is sparsely populated, and his pockets of homes and businesses have been spared. But the geology of the island is different from anywhere else. It hosts 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 have evolved with fire, flames that burn too hot can destroy vegetative cover, allowing sand to move with the winds. Once it starts, the island’s dune system can change, potentially reconfiguring entire ecosystems.
This is not the only risk. So far, it appears that the fires have not penetrated the rainforest of Fraser Island, say both Shulmeister and Fensham. But a South American mushroom called myrtle rust infects the vegetation near its edge. Large hot burns combined with myrrh rust can alter the ability of shade species to regenerate, making it difficult to root plants in the rainforest. For the rainforest, fire can be “an existential threat to its survival,” says Shulmeister.
It will be years before Shulmeister can say for sure whether this flame has caused irreparable damage. For now, he hopes the Fraser Island fire is “especially a warning sign.”
Lake Mckenzie, a freshwater lake, is one of the main tourist attractions on the island and so far has not been affected by the fire. For biosecurity and cultural reasons, there was opposition from the indigenous Butchulla population to use the lake to fight fires.
Less rainfall than usual in recent months has created dry, exacerbated heat conditions; November was the hottest in Australia on record. An illegal campfire on the beach started the fire, which firefighters tried to control for six weeks.
Photo by Matthew Abbott
Slade, for one, definitely feels warned.
After lifting his evacuation order, Slade returned to work. Like many Australians, it is comfortable around fires. He saw it in the bush of Victoria, the region around Melbourne in South Australia, in the 1920s and even took fire management courses. And unlike his experience on Kangaroo Island, no one on Fraser, even during the evacuations, felt he was fleeing to see his life.
But the other day he made a trip to analyze the damage. Even though the Fraser fire burned slower than last year’s megafires, it was hard not to be humiliated by its brute power.
“A lot of vegetation is completely nuked to the ground,” says Slade.
He is not eager to go through this again.