Fires

The last time I was in Australia, we went for a drive in the country. Actually it was up into the mountains. At that time, we drove through an area that had been burned in a very bad fore the year before. I Australia we call these fires Bush Fires. Bush is a word we use to mean forest - "The Bush" means the forest. I don't know why we don't say forest - probably because the forests in Australia look so different from the forests in England.

Anyway, we drove through an area that had been burned in a bush fire. Australia experiences bush fires quite often, and the trees are actually pretty tough. The get burned badly and they look dead, but after a year or two, they start to sprout new leaves. The area I saw looked very strange. The fire had burnt off all the branches, so there were only the tall trunks sticking up into the air. The new leaves sprouted all over the trunks of the trees so that it looked like the trees were covered in a kind of green fur. The ground was still black. I guess the animals and birds who lived there were killed during the fire, or escaped. They still had not really come back to the area, so it was very quiet. It was a strange place to visit - hundreds of hairy green tree trunks, black earth and an unusual quiet.

Australia is a very dry country. Summer is especially dry, the opposite of Japan. We often get fires in summer. Sometimes they are lit by lightening, but sometimes by crazy people who love fires. This happened a while ago and the people were caught. The fire they started caused the deaths of many people, so for the first time in Australian legal history, they were charged with murder and not arson, which is the usual penalty for starting fires.

Fires spread really quickly because one of the common trees, the Eucalyptus tree, contains a kind of oil. When the trees burn, the oil catches on fire as well. You can imagine how quickly a fire spreads when there is burning oil spreading through the forest. The original people who lived in Australia, we call them Aboriginal, used to start small fires which they could control. This was very clever thing to do; by starting small fires, they burned some of the grass and bushes. The trees are very strong in case of fire, so in a small fire they did not get damaged so much. This technique prevented the grass and bushes from getting too overgrown. Nowadays this controlled burning does not happen any more, so the grass and bushes get too big and when there is a fire in summer, there is a lot of fuel for the fire and the fire gets out of control.

European people have damaged the land in Australia since we started arriving two hundred years ago. One reason for this is that people did not understand the land of Australia. People thought it was possible to do the same things in Australia that were done on Europe. We have done quite a lot of stupid things. We cut down a lot of trees, which cause a lot of the soil to run into the rivers and end up in the ocean. We introduced rabbits, which kill a lot of out native trees. We are slowly learning and now people realise we have made a lot of mistakes. Because Australia is one of the driest countries in the world, I have read that we are one of the first countries to experience the really negative effects of global warming. Probably the first developed nation anyway. I hope that we can learn from our experience and share this new knowledge with other countries.

▼▽▼▼【講師】Eddie先生のバックナンバー━━━━━━━━ ・【Milkshakes】2010.05.21 (Fri)

Posted By: Eddie Palmer on June 18, 2010