by Robert J Lee
Decades of detritus accumulated under the forest canopy forming two metre thick beds of tinder have caused utter devastation across large areas of once pristine forest in Tasmania.
Uncontrollable wildfires in January wiped out 38,000 acres of forest ecosystems in the Central Plateau that once attracted many thousands of bushwalkers and tourists every year.
The State Government has not yet revealed the magnitude of other devastated areas in World Heritage and forestry.
Unique alpine flora including pencil pines, king billy pines and cushion plants, some more than 1,000 years old have been lost forever.
Wilderness photographer and bushwalker Dan Broun has returned from the Central Plateau. He told the ABC he walked four hours into the bushfire affected areas just after the fires.
“The scene is complete and utter devastation. There is kilometres of burnt ground, everything is dead,” he said.
He said small pockets of areas protected by rock escaped the fire.
“I also witnessed devastated wildlife; burnt wallabies, dead wombats and the like,” said Mr Broun.
Fire ecologist David Bowman said the fires burning in Tasmania were a sign of climate change.
However the so-called experts prefer to ignore the decades of dried matter that has built up on the forest floor, due to a lack of hazard reduction burn offs.
Until the late 1800’s, the Aborigines burnt these areas from time to time in a dry season creating a suitable environment for animals and understorey regrowth, preventing any sizeable fuel load from covering the forest floor.
The former leader of the Greens, Tasmanian Bob Brown can be directly blamed for this conflagration because the Greens campaigned long and hard to halt all sustainable forestry harvesting, have all sensible land managers kicked out and to lock up vast forests much to the detriment of the ecology.
www.cairnsnews.org 
Is the author an American? They’re called “bush”fires in Australia.
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