Oh, California. We Australians have been watching your burning nightmare unfold with the sad realization that you are now living in ours.
It’s always fire season somewhere in Australia. Bushfires, as we call them, haunt our collective imagination. Tales of the terror they instill have featured in Indigenous storytelling for thousands of years and weave through our modern literature, films and television. They’re as integral to our landscape as gum trees and kangaroos; some species of local plant life have even evolved to need bushfires for seed germination.
As Angelenos stand in the ashes of their own fires, the fear, rage and finger-pointing has kicked in. Australians have been there, too. Fire transforms what it touches, not just the air that it poisons and the land it blackens, but also people and institutions. Over time, we’ve learned that comanaging nature and urban sprawl involves trade-offs that are difficult but worth making.
Nearly every Australian has a bushfire story — or a few. I was a 6-year-old in the suburbs of Sydney when I first saw that red sun in the unnatural darkness of a smoke-filled sky. A vast majority of us live in or around a city, but our suburbs and inland towns have long crept into adjacent forests and grasslands similar to fire-prone California landscapes. It’s a dangerous choice: Australia is hotter and dryer than the United States, with strong winds and frequent droughts. The eucalyptus trees that dominate native vegetation are infused with a volatile oil that’s highly flammable and their dried-out bark and leaves form a blanket of fuel on forest floors.
Australia’s deadliest fires occurred in 2009 in Victoria, my adopted home state and one of the most vulnerable to bushfires. On a single day, 400 distinct blazes ignited. The thousands of firefighters deployed to fight them were overwhelmed; more than 2,000 homes were destroyed, 173 people were killed and hundreds were injured.
Victoria’s premier at the time, John Brumby, responded decisively. He warned the public in advance, accepted help from other Australian states and the military, set up relief centers, quickly made financial assistance available and visited hard-hit communities. He initiated an inquiry to identify ways in which the state might better prepare for and respond to fires. Sixty-seven recommendations were ultimately made, and Mr. Brumby heaved huge amounts of money and political capital into their speedy application.
Fire authorities in Victoria now assess properties by their “bushfire attack level,” a six-tier scale of risk. There are statewide restrictions on which building materials can be used and a range of rules to make sure that vents, porches, patios, windows and underfloor spaces comply with fire safety standards. Fall short, and a construction permit will be refused, you won’t be able to move in, or the structure may even be torn down. Property owners are also responsible for clearing vegetation around structures to serve as firebreaks.
In California, controlled burns face legal, environmental and liability constraints. In Victoria, the government must meet targets to reduce combustible grasses, brush and dead vegetation through burn-offs, and there is a growing recognition of the value and wisdom in traditions of intentional burning practiced by Indigenous Australians to manage the land. Emergency management services in Victoria are centralized, with just three statewide fire services covering urban, rural and forest areas. In a crisis, they default to a unified command. And where California has relied on evacuations and reactive accommodations, Victoria maintains a network of purpose-built community fire refuges, relief centers and designated “last resort” zones. Government-issued apps also provide immediate threat warnings.
Did developers push back on the reforms, as they have in California? Of course they did. Did homeowners grumble about their obligations? Yes, and they still do.
But Victoria’s fire prevention framework remains solidly in place because the public realizes its value, and other states have taken up similar policies. What powered this change was the recognition that fires are getting so bad that prevention and mitigation requires more intervention from both government and the community. Australians have come to accept that preparedness involves contribution and sacrifice even at the granular level of a household. Your fire is everyone’s fire when it’s spreading at approximately 75 miles an hour or leaving burned and screaming koalas in its wake.
As Greg Mullins, the former fire chief of New South Wales, put it to me, “Expecting fire departments to make fire problems go away is, frankly, delusional.”
As a result, Australia’s firefighting army today includes tens of thousands of community volunteers nationwide who are organized, trained and equipped by professionals — and work alongside them. Mr. Mullins, who has also helped fight blazes in Los Angeles, said, “Australians tend not to see fires as a government problem, but a shared one.” This reduces “pointless blame games after big fires,” he added, facilitating more constructive, collaborative responses and policy change.
Crucially, Australia’s increasingly catastrophic fires have forced the public to accept that climate change is making things worse and to get behind leaders who recognize that. This became clear during the brutal Black Summer fire season of 2019-20, which charred an area larger than Florida, destroyed 3,000 homes, killed or displaced an estimated three billion animals and affected nearly 80 percent of Australians in some way.
Australia’s skies had been yellow with smoke for months and fires were still raging when a tourist’s viral photograph showed then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison enjoying a beach holiday in Hawaii. Mr. Morrison, who had repeatedly dismissed concerns over climate change, resisted breaking off his vacation for days until the death of two young volunteer firefighters seemed to shame him into coming home. He defended his absconding during a national crisis by quipping, “I don’t hold a hose, mate.”
Black Summer’s devastation caused acceptance of climate realities to increase even more — and voters to demand action from political leaders. In 2022 federal elections in which climate concerns figured heavily, some of Mr. Morrison’s critics wore Hawaiian shirts to the polls as they voted his conservative government out of office. A string of once solidly conservative parliamentary seats also fell to pro-climate independents.
There are no ideologues in a fire shelter. There are only terrified, traumatized citizens whose survival depends on a combination of collective preparedness, bravery and luck. Fire has taught Australians that government and the public together must deliver the first, and the more they do the less we have to rely on the other two. It is worth noting that in a better regulated and more prepared Victoria, the fires of 2019-20 caused only five fatalities in the state, far fewer than occurred a decade earlier.
In crises like this, you can play politics, point fingers and resist reality, or you can choose safety. Australians chose the latter. We don’t regret it.
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