The flames licked sideways and leaped over the treetops. It was January 2020 and Greg Slade was racing through smoke and down eucalyptus trees along a burning road on Kangaroo Island in Australia.
Slade, the acting manager of a wilderness refuge, had already evacuated 18 staff and dozens of guests. He hung on to protect the hotel, but with 50 knots of wind and scorching heat, the retreat would not survive the worst fireseason in the country’s history. Like thousands of homes and businesses, it would soon be reduced to smoking rubble.
It took Slade 12 hours that day to get to safety. He spent the next 10 months traveling, and in October he got a job at another refuge, on Australia’s 700 square kilometer Fraser Island, east of Queensland.
Fires raged across the island to the pristine, white sand beaches. As the island had been smothered in smoke, staff and tourists were forced to evacuate as the fire threatened local attractions, such as the rainforest with trees up to 50 meters high growing in the sand, a unique phenomenon, according to UNESCO.
But weeks into his job, another wildfire forced him to evacuate again.
The new fire “got pretty nasty and came within 100 meters” of his new workplace, 42-year-old Slade says. Luck, the weather and the Australian fire brigade saved the company. But for the first time in memory, half of Fraser Island, an ecological oasis and UNESCO World Heritage Site, burned down all at once.
In the wake of last year’s devastating wildfires in Australia, which killed at least 33 people and three billion animals, from koalas to frogs, and burned down an area twice the size of Pennsylvania, the country is only just beginning to struggle with a promising future. ever larger and more severe fires.
As Australia’s typically most explosive part of the fire season gets underway, weather patterns indicate that this year there will be heavy rains, perhaps subdued flames and the country’s years of scorching heat and drought. Rain this week finally helped firefighters plug the Fraser Island fire, although burns are expected to smolder in January.
But as the island’s experience shows, unique landscapes on the continent remain at risk of transformation and fire as climate change, inadequate land management and other threats to the environment increasingly collide with fire.
A rare place with risk
Also known by its Aboriginal name, K’gari, Fraser Island is the world’s largest sand dune island, with cliffs, unusual dune lakes, and rare ecosystems. The signature view is an inland rainforest of Kauri pines, giant ferns, and turpentines that can live for a thousand years. The island’s beaches, moors and forests are also home to sensitive species, from knots, petrels and other birds to flying foxes, skinks, sea turtles and wild dingoes.
A dirt road reveals the delicate soil that anchors the unique vegetation, which in turn supports the island’s rare and endangered species.
Fraser’s fire in October was lit by an illegal campfire on the beach. Unlike the racing megafires that set fire to large areas of New South Wales and Victoria a year earlier, this fire did not move with force or ferocity. But his slow march was relentless. “It was alarming how big it was,” said Rod Fensham, a professor of ecology at the University of Queensland.
Fire is a natural part of the Fraser landscape, but in recent years Australia’s dry winter season has extended into later spring and has also warmed due to climate change. According to Jamie Shulmeister, a researcher at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand who has studied Fraser for years, that the vegetation heals more quickly and ripens the fire to run out of control before it is noticed.
“In the past,” he says, “that kind of fire could easily have happened, but chances are it would be gone after a day or two.” Instead, it restored more than 200,000 acres and burned for two months in a row.
Fraser is sparsely populated and his homes and businesses have been spared. But the island’s geology is unlike anywhere else. It is home to plants and animals that live in sensitive niches such as acidic swamps with fish and amphibians specially adapted to tolerate the chemistry of the water.
Even in areas evolved with fire, flames that burn too hot can destroy vegetative cover, allowing sand to move with the wind. Once that starts, the island’s dune system can shift, potentially reconfiguring entire ecosystems.
That is not the only risk. So far, the fires don’t seem to have penetrated Fraser Island’s rainforest, both say Shulmeister and Fensham. But a South American tree fungus called myrtle rust infects vegetation near the rim. Major hot burns in combination with myrtle rust can alter the shade species’ ability to regenerate, making it difficult for rainforest plants to take root. For the rainforest, fire could “pose an existential threat to its survival,” said Shulmeister.
It will be years before Shulmeister can say for sure whether this eruption caused damage that cannot be undone. For the time being he hopes that the fire on Fraser Island is “primarily a warning sign.”
Lake Mckenzie, a freshwater lake, is one of the island’s main tourist draws and has not been affected by the fire so far. For biosecurity and cultural reasons, there has been resistance from the indigenous Butchulla people to use the lake to extinguish the fires.
Less rain than usual in recent months has resulted in dry conditions, exacerbated by heat; November was the hottest ever in Australia. An illegal campfire on the beach started the blaze, which firefighters found difficult to control for six weeks.
Photo by Matthew Abbott
Slade certainly feels warned.
After his evacuation order was lifted, Slade went back to work. Like many Australians, he is comfortable with wildfire. He saw it in the bush in Victoria, the Melbourne region of South Australia, when he was in his 20s and has even taken fire management courses. And contrary to his experience on Kangaroo Island, no one on Fraser, even during evacuations, felt like they were fleeing their lives.
But recently he drove to investigate the damage. Although the Fraser’s fire burned more slowly than last year’s megafires, it was hard not to be humiliated by its raw power.
“A lot of vegetation is completely nailed to the ground,” says Slade.
He doesn’t want to experience that again.