We are not the only organisms that need fire, even if we may be the only ones to hold some control over it. Many plants need it, particularly forest trees. None needs it more perhaps than the Mountain Ash, the tree that dominates wet sclerophyll forests in south-east Australia. Eucalyptus regnans needs fire, very hot fire, to properly regenerate. Many trees don’t easily catch alight in even the most hectic bushfire. Flames have difficulty finding enough purchase on smooth bark to make it up to the canopy. But the Mountain Ash invites ground fire up into its canopy. Tom Griffiths describes its features: ‘a heavy fall of highly flammable leaf litter … particularly in dry seasons, hanging streamers of bark that take the flame up into the canopy and become those firebrands propelled by the wind in advance of the flame, and open crowns whose pendulous foliage encourages updrafts.’

The hill and mountain country to the north-east of Melbourne is dominated by these trees. In Aboriginal Australia, the firestorm cycles of burning and regeneration were measured in hundreds of years, and the fires were mostly the result of lightning strikes. Lightning-instigated fires continue, but they are now sublimated, perhaps overtaken, by human-induced fires: from faulty power lines, misuse of equipment, careless campfires, and, of course, arson. In settler/migrant Australia, the cycles of big fires are calculated in decades, not centuries. Four years after Black Saturday, the Blue Mountains are now on fire.

Living with Fire: People, Nature and History in Steels Creek is an unusual book. Historians Christine Hansen and Tom Griffiths have written it at the behest of the community. It is a combined product of the professionals and the community. Griffiths is a distinguished environmental historian; Hansen’s field is social history and material culture, particularly in relation to Aboriginal Australian social history. Both have had life experience north-east of Melbourne and knew Steels Creek and members of its community before Black Saturday.

Steels Creek, both as a community and as a stream, occupies a valley about ten kilometres long, an offshoot of the Yarra Valley, on the outskirts of Melbourne. It is the kind of country that fire likes. Of the ninety-five dwellings that existed in Steels Creek on the morning of 7 February 2009, sixty-seven were completely destroyed by the end of Black Saturday. In five of those, ten people lost their lives.

In Griffiths and Hansen’s book, Steels Creek becomes an epitome of living with fire in this country. We have examples of the destructiveness of fire, both in the great conflagrations and in individual houses where timber was the only affordable product, even for chimneys. Any lack of care at the hearth would lead to destruction. Smallish bushfires were a norm of summer. Steels Creek is also shown as an epitome of the precarious history of small holding settlements. It was first settled in the mid-nineteenth century by a mix of viticulturists and pastoralists. Since then there have been waves of changing activities: gold mining, logging, dairy farming, viticulture again. In the last four decades, it has become home to many whose relationship to the land is primarily one of enjoyment not income. Before this move, it would have been best to describe the small holding farmers and the loggers of the area as workers who made a modest living. The newcomers, including academics and self-funded retirees, are more comfortably off.

‘In Griffiths and Hansen’s book, Steels Creek becomes an epitome of living with fire in this country.’

One of the underlying themes of this book, which is as much a product of the ‘community’ as it is of two historians, is, What makes a community? It is raised in the question posed early in the book: ‘How do you define Steels Creek?’ The problem is shared by many rural areas that have had a large influx of ‘tree-changers’ into a place where many people belong to families that have lived there for generations. For instance, the photographs of the case studies of the fate of particular houses, predominantly belonging to those who had recently moved to the area, present comfortable middle-class houses that contrast strongly with the historic photographs of homes which are little more than shacks.

Despite glib platitudes, natural disasters do not necessarily bring communities together. The American sociologist Kai Erikson has shown they can just as easily rip them apart: minor divisions become major rifts. One has a sense that this book itself is an act of holding a community together. This makes it a special achievement. But one has a sense, too, that this must by necessity stymie the two historians in important areas. One of these areas is in discussing the fate of the local Wurundjeri. They are simply displaced; violence fades into silence. Yet one of the most poignant passages in the book is Hansen’s discussion of the 1839 panorama sketch of hills seen from near the confluence of Steels Creek and the Yarra by the Protector of Aborigines, William Thomas. The peaks in the rough outline bear Wurundjeri names. As Hansen points out, these names were not descriptions of forms: they held in them essential knowledge of the land. Much of the language is lost, but there is evidence that the name for what is now known as Christmas Hills translates as ‘Hills of Fire’. This manifests an Aboriginal Australian understanding of the land’s relationship with fire that settler/migrant Australia is still learning.

Hansen and Griffiths – at pains to place Black Saturday within its context – play down any sense of it as ‘unprecedented’. People, they suggest, fail to learn that such firestorm conflagrations are part of living in rural Australia, particularly in the hills and mountains dominated by species such as Mountain Ash. The community ‘forgets’. As Hansen puts it, ‘by the time another fire is due, a generation has come and gone and nobody remembers the one before’. But people ‘forget’ much quicker than that. What you hear constantly, out there in the country, is ‘We hope we don’t have a day like that again’. There is a genuine belief that it can be avoided. This is a product of psychology: if you are going to live in the land, you have to believe in the probability that it will not destroy you.

There are many great moments in this book. I particularly like Griffiths’s discussion of the meaning of ‘Bush’ and Hansen’s descriptions of how the community has come together. But its most valuable gift for those of us not of Steels Creek is its exposition, in microcosm, of the precarious correlation of human, fire, and country.