Australian Bush Life

We only use our wood fire for heating our house. As our home is under trees we wrestled with the concept of solar/thermal energy for heating but we do not receive enough direct sunlight to achieve this. We did not feel that it was sustainable to cut down our bush to gain access to sunlight. As the reason we had chosen this house initially was because of the bush (trees) and the beautiful wildlife biodiversity it provides. Cutting this exact bush down did not provide us with the moral answer. Also living under the trees also provides us with much desired shade in summer.

Firewood collection - sustainably.

Instead we manage and source all our firewood from our bush block in a sustainable manner. We feel that this is probably the most sustainable heating fuel option as it is truely a fuel that can provide a current and renewable energy source. Fossil based fuels source energy which is millions of years old, but the energy in the trees we use for fuel has been generated in less than 100 years and can be recycled within or lifetime.

After ensuring that our need to heat is as low as possible by improving insulation and reducing drafts within the home some concepts we consider to improve the sustainability of this home heating option are:

• Use trees that are already dead, but we don’t take every dead tree.
• Ensure that dead trees with good hollows are left as habitat.
• Leave some dead trees on the ground as logs to rot and provide habitat and nutrients to the forest.
• Only burn wood that has been thoroughly dried – no green wood.
• Protect and manage our bush habitat by reducing weeds and ensuring regeneration for future use.
• Planting indigenous trees as required in un-treed areas for future use and as habitat improvements.

Harvesting wood can be a sustainable product for human consumption such as heating, but this does not endorse some of the harvesting practices that are used in native forests around where we live. But the logging of native forests debate is a whole other issue for another blog post!

Since the bushfire about 90% of the eucalypt trees on our bush block shot out epicormic shoots. The eucalyptus trees that haven’t produced and maintained epicormic shoots after a year would be assumed dead. These shoots are a sign of the tree healing and are usually the result of a major trauma event such as when a tree is lopped or after a bushfire event.

Epicormic shoots help the tree make it’s own energy through photosynthesis. They give the tree and any new seedlings growing beneath the tree protection from sunlight and frosts – which is particularly important in the first year after a bushfire event as the soil is very vulnerable to these severe environments with no ground cover and no canopy.

Eucalypt shooting epicormic growth.

Epicormic shoots bud out from the bark of trunks and stems and can be quite fragile if knocked whilst they are young (first few years). Once they grow to a larger size they can grow a stronger bark around them and take on a form like normal branches.

It is important to be aware though that as a recovered injury as epicormic branches become older and heavier they may be more susceptible to falling, particularly under strong winds. It is important to keep an eye out on trees in areas where we move under them while they are healing particularly avoiding being under them during strong winds.

Epicormic shoots really assist the tree in survival through the first few years until they can grow more stable structures such as branches in the canopy or form new trunks from lignotuber shoots.

If you love trees as we do, which is why we chose to live in the bush, prepare yourself for an emotional roller coaster ride after a bushfire comes through your area. It is nearly 1 year since the bushfire passed through our area and the chainsaws were still going just last weekend. The sound of the chainsaw brings such pain to our hearts, then BOOM……. the loud thud as another home (a large tree with hollows) for wildlife hits the ground. This is followed by many more hours of noisy chainsawing as the tree is chopped up into smaller parts. Feel the serenity!

The weird thing is when the bushfire event happens you are so relieved that it is over that you don’t realise the emotional ride you need to go on after that. After the bushfire we were actually looking forward to the new biodiversity that was going to re-appear spurred on by the fire event which re-invigorates our indigenous plants. If only we realised how many other people did not feel this way and were so traumatised that they took out the blame on our” indigenous plants, the “bush” and in particular trees of which most are eucalypts.

Trees have been felled almost constantly since the bushfire. Mainly in the 3 months immediately after when people just went crazy with bulldozers and chainsaws taking out their anger on trees, removing in minutes what many took over 50 years or so to grow to their size (last bushfire around here was about 50 years ago). Around spring another heavy time for ”cleaning up” in preparation for the next bushfire season. This year must have been especially bad as the Royal Comission into the Black Saturday fires announced that local government laws were no longer valid and that people could remove trees within 10 metres of there house without getting any kind of permit.

It has been a really stressful and emotional ride. We felt the pain for each tree that was toppled by surprise or by being tagged with a ribbon for future removal, so we had longer to feel distressed about it. We understood that there were some dead trees (which still can be animal homes) and dangerous trees that need to be removed, but what we observed was clearly outside these boundaries and a clear disregard for the beauty of that tree or it’s potential as a home for our wildlife. 

We will never understand why people chose to live here if they have removed all the trees – it just becomes another suburb and there are already plenty of them so why not go and live there if you don’t’ like the trees. If the trees are all cut down from here, then we ask ourselves “where can we move to where the trees are safe and the wildlife have homes as we don’t want to live in a suburb?” It is a classic case of NIMBY syndrome – they like the trees but “not in my back yard”.