Fire’s been part of the Australian ecosystem for probably about
30 million years. It’s been a long time and it’s gone hand in
hand in the development of our unique fauna and flora. So our
eucalypts, our acacia flora for example, basically started to
spread across the continent when fire became more common. The
dry forests of Victoria are largely in foothill sort of country,
so the foothills are areas where we get reasonably high
rainfalls which means their fairly rich in fauna and flora in
those areas. But they also get subjected to seasonal drought
conditions and it is in those dry conditions that we tend to get
more fires occurring. And one of those things that probably
often missed is that fire creates an opportunity for
regeneration of particularly the plant species but it needs to
be fire with a certain pattern and distribution across the
landscape. Some fires, they’re so intense and so large, that
they create a long term structural change to the environment. So
large intense fires can be a part of the p