Twenty years of northern fire talks

The recent 20th Northern Australia Fire Managers (NAFM) forum prompted much discussion on the aims and achievements of the group over the past two decades, with several speakers reflecting on how the original aims were still relevant despite all the progress.

In what was the largest annual meeting of this group, more than 65 fire managers and researchers from across the north of Australia discussed the history and future of the forum plus topics of current interest in the tropical savannas.

Chaired by the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC, the group met in Townsville, Queensland, in June. This year marked the 20th anniversary of the forum, which gathers fire managers over three days from a range of public and private organisations from across northern Australia. This included an overnight field trip that viewed fire management issues at a large solar park, defence land, a nature sanctuary, a wetlands forest, a eucalypt forest, and coastal woodlands.

Among other issues, the meeting compared fire preparations and weather data to produce the annual Bushfire Seasonal Outlook for northern Australia.

Forum attendees included representatives of the Queensland Fire and Emergency Services, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, Bushfires NT, WA Department of Fire and Emergency Services, WA Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, NSW Rural Fire Service, Commonwealth Department of Defence, the Bureau of Meteorology, the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience, Charles Darwin University and the Australian Wildlife Conservancy.

This year the meeting was hosted by the Queensland members – Queensland Fire and Emergency Services and the Department of Environment and Science - with the support of the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC.

QFES Deputy Commissioner Mike Wassing closed the forum with a summary that noted the healthy discussion on its past and future, and the focus on “why” it exists and “how” it can have more impact.

“I think that doing the why is really, really important.  I am probably like a lot of you in this room, I spend a lot of time on committees, and a lot of those committees don’t understand why they exist in the context of actually trying to resolve a problem.

He said this was not the case with NAFM. “You don’t actually have this amount of people in the room in Northern Australia and have a forum like this for 20 years without having a real clear vision of ‘why’.”

He suggested the real challenge for the forum into the future was to better define how it organised itself for the greatest impact in each jurisdiction.

“My reflection in listening to you is that NAFM is a community of practice.  In a community of practice you don’t need to have a formal governance arrangement around it; it is a group of people who share a craft.  Whether you are a land manager or a fire manager, you are sharing a craft or a profession.

“A lot of it is about sharing information, sharing learnings, and sharing research, and that is the really clear conversation that we had here today and will have over the next couple of days.”

The 2019 NAFM forum will be held in the Northern Territory.

All presentations from the forum and past forums are online.