Preface
TO THE 1998 PAPERBACK EDITION
WHEN I WROTE Fire in America, I embedded in its structure the naive belief that I would, in coming years, be able to rewrite all or portions of the text, and that the steady accumulation of new documents would provide the basis for further insights. Both assumptions failed. Perhaps the second was the more fundamental. Steadily, but quickly after contemplating Antarctica and composing The Ice, I recognized that I would learn more about American fire history by comparing it with other lands than by plumbing ever deeper into American archives. I needed to move out in order to move down. Australia was an obvious—and fortunate—choice.
The inquiry began even as Fire in America was published in 1982. An Antarctic earth science symposium in Adelaide brought me to Australia, and I tweaked the travel to include a stop-over in Canberra where I met Phil Cheney, then hiring staff for Project Aquarius, an expansive fire research program, and explored the possibilities of future research. For several years I tried the Fulbright Fellowship program without success. In 1986, with The Ice written but not yet published, I succeeded in landing a small grant from the Geography Program of the National Science Foundation. The Defense Nuclear Agency, for which I had written a study of historic fires and their relevance to the nuclear winter question, contributed some further (by their standards) pocket change in return for a report on Australia’s relevance to nuclear winter research. All in all, the money was enough to spirit me to Australia for nine weeks of intensive library work and geographic reconnaissance.
The Australian fire community was lavish in its tolerance and bottomless in its courtesies. I spent four weeks in Canberra, mostly gorging on the CSIRO Division of Forest Research library and National Bushfire Research Unit collections. Then I embarked on a five-week study tour that took me into and around Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide, Perth, Darwin, and Brisbane. Here I learned the art of blitzkrieg scholarship. It was smokechasing reincarnated. Find the records. Size up the resources. Hotspot; control; mop up; move on. Open access to photocopy machines made it possible to collect reams of documents for later, more thorough examination. As critical masses were reached, I would ship the piles back home. I still possess four canvas Australia Post bulk mailers, now converted into duffel bags. I probably left more than one host counting his silverware.
When I returned I took up my new academic post at Arizona State University West, then housed on the grounds of an abandoned grade school about five blocks from where I had grown up in Phoenix. A good job, but a new campus understaffed by junior faculty with a temporary library whose holdings could barely fill a single-axle trailer was not the place to find the blocks of time I needed to write. Eventually a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities gave that time to me.
Almost simultaneously an invitation to participate in a symposium on Australian science, part of the country’s 1988 bicentennary celebration, brought me to Melbourne for a week. I gathered up scores of used books, collected more documents, and returned by way of Canberra for another week-long round of research. Then I wrote. About a third of the way through the manuscript, I received a MacArthur Fellowship. My meditation over that event produced the Cycle of Fire scheme.
Burning Bush thus began independently of the Cycle. It was a comparative study, the first of what I vaguely hoped would be several, and only secondarily found a habitat in the Cycle. That it existed made the Cycle plausible, however. With Burning Bush, Fire in America, and The Ice, I had at least half the imagined ensemble. Studying Australia also confirmed my intuition that comparative studies, eventually global studies, were the surest way to advance fire history. I learned more about America by studying Australia than I ever could have otherwise. Had I doubled the documentation that went into Fire in America (which by then I had), I could not have more proportionally advanced my interpretation of what that experience meant. I would like to believe that the Australian fire community would agree.
From the onset I had imagined the book as copublished in Australia and America. A few months before publication, however, Australia revised its copyright laws—went protectionist—and made it impossible to bring out an Australian edition until a new (paperback) edition appeared in America. That took another year and a half. Meanwhile, what I thought would be doubly exotic for American readers—fire and Australia—proved too often doubly arcane. A promised review in Newsweek was blown off the pages by the Gulf War’s January 1991 air offensive. By the time Allen & Unwin issued an Australian edition, I was in Sweden on a three-month Fulbright Fellowship, and had the otherworldly experience of chatting by telephone with Australian radio interviewers about mallee fires and Ash Wednesday while sitting in a kitchen chair in a Swedish apartment amid a gray dawn not far from the Arctic Circle. It was hard to focus.
So like the rest of the Cycle, Burning Bush needed a context if it was to survive. In return, it contributed the story of a most remarkable continent and a fire history that, while in some respects like North America’s, differs in ways that make clear that fire regimes are human artifacts, or rather human reshapings of natural material, like statuary, pastures, and parks. The Australian Alternative was essential to any sense of completeness the Cycle might wish to claim. Besides, the book was an ecstasy to write. The long, long hours of labor in libraries and over smudged photocopies blew away like smoke with each gust of insight. The book was my grateful thanks to Australian colleagues.
As always there are second thoughts. The lengthy chapter on British fire history proved unnecessary in the light of subsequent developments; Vestal Fire repositioned that story squarely in Europe. So also some of the speculations about early hominids and fire have been made (or will be made) superfluous. That I had already written on many of these themes in Burning Bush ensured an unavoidable degree of repetition in later volumes of the Cycle. Stubbornly, I prefer to consider them as welds, not redundancies.
Some scientific critics were irritated that I had not committed more firmly to ecological explanations, that when pressed to decide which fire phenomena were true I morphed facts into metaphors. That, of course, was my intention. Ecological science is far too unstable to serve as a foundation for history. Rather it furnishes convenient scaffoldings to be erected, torn down, and reassembled on the hard pilings of philosophy and art. The rest will be swept away in the next storm of discovery and paradigm shifts.
But that critique raises the larger question of sources. Little of the material in Burning Bush is original in the sense of having been milled from archival ore. Almost all had been published in some form or other, officially or informally. I gathered every scrap I could find. I dumped scientific and technical studies into the common stew. What I can claim is to have given that mass a new shape, to have informed it with a historical schema, if not a true narrative. That challenge was both literary and conceptual.
The literary problem was how to trace a narrative line that, like an ellipse, had two foci, one in nature and one in culture. Burning Bush forced me to bring into consciousness what I had done intuitively before. I had to think through how to