Conclusion

Let us start with two pieces of data, one from history and one from economics, and a deduction drawn from sociology and politics. The first, from 85 years ago, occurred when the judge presiding over an Australian Royal Commission into the devastating “Black Saturday” bushfires pronounced “We have not lived long enough”. What he meant was that European settlers in this country, Australia, had not learned how to live in a land characterised by climatic extremes of drought, fire and flood. The words echo in environmental historian Tom Griffiths’ “we have not yet lived long enough”, after his review of the long history of lack of preparedness for such events, despite the repetitiousness with which that lack of preparedness has issued forth from reports and enquiries too numerous to mention here. The second is the Productivity Commission’s (2014) finding that 97% of Australia’s public funds spent on disasters went to crisis management and recovery and only 3% on preparedness. What we might derive from these points is that “there is no such thing as a natural disaster” (Hartman & Squires, 2006). The history of Indigenous fire management over millennia, leading to early European settlers’ puzzlement over what appeared to be curated/estate like landscapes, underscores the fact that human preparedness and the lack of it are material factors in the severity and impact of any “natural” disaster, that is, if we may have lived long enough by now.