The recent stories marking the five-year anniversary of the California wildfires in 2018 are also a crystal ball into the lengthy recovery ahead for Maui communities.

But as well as looking to the West Coast for insights, there may also be value in looking to the West South West, especially as we head toward a festive season that will be unlike any other for many Hawaii families.

Wildfires and Christmas in Australia go together like ugly sweaters and “Die Hard” in the United States.

Except in Australia, they are called bushfires.

The height of the Australian summer coincides with the Christmas season and therefore the specter of large-scale bushfires usually hovers over the Xmas and New Year period.

This is why the quintessential Australian Christmas movie isnʻt the equivalent of “Itʻs A Wonderful Life” but “Bushfire Moon,” (or for U.S. audiences “Miracle Down Under.”)

“Summer did not normally arrive in this district until mid-way through December,” author Jeff Peck wrote in the original book. “In this year of 1891, however, the hot weather had begun much earlier than that. And with no spring rain, the land was now parched and barren.”

The rural/urban divide in Australia is profound, but significant tracts of the major cities all rub shoulders or overlap with the Australian Bush. The Bush (capitalized for emphasis) — a proxy for the pre-colonial landscape — carries a similar narrative/psychological weight to The American West.

But bushfires are not just part of the Australian national mythos. They are an ever-present reminder of the reality of a landscape that has and continues to be, shaped by fire.

The Australian equivalent of the California wildfires of 2018 had happened nearly 10 years earlier in the Black Saturday Bushfires on Feb. 7, 2009.

As many as 400 individual fires burned over 1.1 million acres and killed 173 people in the course of a day, 113 found in houses where the flames had outrun the fire engines trying to quell them.

Before Black Saturday there was Ash Wednesday in 1983, Black Friday in 1939 and dozens of other disasters back to Red Tuesday in 1898 and Black Thursday in 1851 — most of which took place in the south-eastern state of Victoria. The regularity and severity of these events has offset the tendency toward “natural disaster amnesia” – the human phenomenon of pushing threats that arenʻt immediately evident to the back of the mind.

In most of Australia therefore, fire has become woven into both popular culture and the rhythms of seasonal community life.

The Possibility Of Renewal

A year after the California wildfires Australia had its worst fire season on record called, you guessed it, Black Summer. The resulting fires were so severe that many blazes created their own weather systems.

On Dec. 30, 2019 the coastal town of Mallacoota in the state of Victoria was surrounded by a slow-moving bushfire that generated similar apocalyptic imagery to the Maui fires as the sky turned dark orange and red.

New Yearʻs Eve there saw 4,000 trapped residents retreating onto boats and into the sea for refuge from the flames in the way that we know Lahaina residents did.

Bruce Pascoe, who lived in the area since 1972, was more than a routine observer of those events because heʻs also one of 50,000 volunteer firefighters in the state and was involved in fighting the flames; including a six-week blaze that threatened his duck farm.

Pascoe, who identifies as an Aboriginal man of Yuen heritage, also happens to be the author of a 2014 book “Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?” that rebooted a long-standing national debate about the role of fire in the antipodean landscape and particularly its use as a management tool by Indigenous Australians.

In his book Pascoe visited anew many of the earliest written accounts by European colonial settlers who observed vast tracts of – from the western viewpoint – untouched land that, in retrospect, clearly show evidence of controlled burns and fire fuel reduction by Aboriginal people.

Drawing on a large body of archaeological and ecological evidence, Pascoe argues these techniques were developed over tens of thousands of years and the practice aided biodiversity and the management of other food resources, including the cultivation of crops by original inhabitants.

With all that in mind, the catastrophic fires that summer presented people like Pascoe the sobering opportunity to closely observe the work of fire in the local landscape, and heʻs now using that experience to change course for the future — by going back to the past.

Pascoe saw in the fire that the trees in previously logged forests were dangerously close together and so now “weʻre looking at the bush differently,” he said.

His plan became to thin out forest cover leaving only the largest trees interspersed with crops growing on the cleared forest floor, “the way itʻs always been.”

A year after Black Summer, an Indigenous Traditional Agriculture Hub was established in Mallacoota, part of a broader initiative to rehabilitate and restore habitats scarred by the 2019-2020 fires and cultivate native species of tuber and grain, eventually in commercial quantities.

“The Hub will be a place to share this knowledge so that other Indigenous farming ventures won’t have to start from scratch,” Pascoe said. “Aboriginal people are not angels or saints or geniuses, weʻve just had a lot time to look at the country and learn from her.”