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2005 (c) Peninsula Community Access Newspaper Inc
The value of trittering |
It may be strange to begin a book on trees with a discussion on bush fires.
Yet every Australian, and in particular the millions who live on the Central Coast with a number whose houses front the bush, know the ever present danger each spring and summer.
Having spent many summers in a cottage fronting Jervis Bay National Park, I was interested to know how they kept fires out of the park, with so many roads from which careless motorists throw lighted cigarette butts.
I asked the park people.
They showed me a trittering machine, basically a giant lawn mower drawn by a tractor with which they cut a 20 to 30 metre swathe of the bush along the roadsides to prevent fires.
I wrote to the world authority on fires in Australia, America and Europe on the value of trittering,
World Authority Professor Stephen Pyne replied it was as good as any other method to reduce litter; animal grazing, control burning or trittering which had the virtue it did the least damage to the bush.
Having no modesty, I add his opening paragraph from American Florida where he lives in retirement,
"Your letter of 27 January has finally caught up with me, and I confess it left me thunderstruck.
"I have known about your writings; anyone in the least interested with the story of the Australian environment must, I am honored that you should write."
Also in his book Burning Bush, he congratulates our volunteer bush fire brigades as the best in the world.
In his opening chapters he give the best introduction I have ever read on that remarkable group of trees; the eucalyptus.
Roger writes: "Eucalyptus formed with fire and the genus Homo."
Charles Darwin in his Voyage of the Beagle was less complimentary.
"In the whole country, I scarcely saw a place without the marks of a fire.' - a tribute to the energy of the First Australians who burned the country each spring as soon as the bush would take a fire; for ease of later hunting.
The white fellers fearful of their crops bribed them to stop the practice until disastrous wildfires showed forest experts how to protect their crop of timber by controlled burning which continues to this day.
Dr Vincent Serventy, Pearl Beach