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The Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area 40 years on

The Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area (TWWHA) meets seven of the ten criteria for World Heritage listing, an achievement not surpassed by any other property. The TWWHA was first inscribed in 1982. Since then, the world has changed significantly, and this is demonstrated by the issues that are arising in places like the World Heritage Area. This in turn has influenced how the area needs to be managed.

A recent paper published in Austral Ecology and called Natural Values and Threats of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area: Changed Perspectives Over Four Decades Since Listing (available here) considers how threats have changed over the past four decades and how management approaches have responded.

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Visiting the Canning Peak fire 13 months on

In February 2025, more than 20 fires were started by dry lightning strikes in western lutruwita/ Tasmania.

Some small blazes were quickly extinguished, and those that got away went on to burn more than 90,000 hectares of Tasmania, especially public land and within the Cradle Mountain Lake St Clair national park.  The Canning Peak fire burnt sections of the famous Overland walking track (around 860m of boardwalk and a foot bridge were damaged), precious sections of pencil pine and other fire sensitive communities were impacted, and a hut belonging to a guiding company was lost.

A year on, I managed to get in to have a look at the eastern edge of the fire, along the section that burnt across the Overland Track.

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The snow gum summit declaration

Friends of the Earth recently hosted the second ‘snow gum summit’. It was held in Jindabyne and around 120 people gathered to hear from experts in the fields of snow gum die back and the threats of more frequent and intense wild fire.

There was a strong First Nation presence at the forum, which is reflected in the summit statement, reprinted below.

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The fires of 2025/26

The devastation of Black Summer lingers in the back of everyone’s mind who knows the high country.  Each year we wait to see what fires will happen, and how quickly those fires will be contained. It has been a number of years since we have had a truly awful fire season in the mountains of the mainland high country. 2025/26 has seen large and very destructive fires across much of Victoria, with Harcourt, Longwood, the Otways and Walwa probably the best known.

It has also been a summer of significant activity in the high country. This is a quick look at some of the key fires in Victoria, up until mid February. Lets hope the fire season starts to slow down from here.

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The Dargo – Wonnangatta fire

As Victoria braced for the potential of catastrophic fire conditions on Friday January 9, 2026, much of the attention of media and community was understandably on the fires that were already threatening towns, farms and other human assets, especially the big fires around Walwa and Longwood.

Meanwhile, multiple fires were starting due to lightning in the high country. Some, such as near Mt Howitt and on the Bogong High Plains, were contained fairly quickly. However, one has gone on to burn a significant section of the high country. The Dargo – Wonnangatta Complex (also marked as the Mt Darling – Cynthia Range fire) is not yet under control. A Complex is named where there are multiple fires in close proximity, which can then be managed by a single incident team.

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The fire that launched a campaign

Do you remember how intense Black Summer was? With much of Gippsland already on fire, on December 31, 2019, a dry lightning storm passed across the high country of north eastern Victoria and East Gippsland, starting hundreds of new fires. Forest Fire Management Victoria (FFMV) crews and aircraft swung into action, and did their best to quell the many small fires that were slowly consuming individual trees.

As a volunteer with the Mt Hotham – Dinner Plain fire brigade, I headed up the hill as the area was evacuated. There were four fires around Dinner Plain, all small and slowly consuming the unfortunate trees that had been hit by lightning.

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AI and fire fighting. What’s going on?

Whether it is in a national park or other public land, a paddock or a house fire, one of the most important aspects of stopping fires is to get on to them quickly. The sooner that firefighters arrive, the smaller the fire will be and the easier it is to contain. In Victoria, one of the ways we try to keep fires small during high fire danger days is by launching aircraft as soon as a fire is detected. Often aircraft can then get on scene and start to contain the fire before local brigades arrive. This system (called pre-determined dispatch or PDD) was developed as part of the  response to the Victorian Bushfire Royal Commission (VBRC), and was based on a model used in a number of other states. Under PDD, fire fighting aircraft are mobilised as soon as a call out occurs for local fire brigades with a trigger needed to authorise the launch of aircraft.

Other ways we get onto fires quickly includes things like deploying remote area firefighters onto new start fires, inserting rappel crews from helicopters, and sending multiple vehicles at the same time to ensure there are enough resources to tackle the fire. We use real time analysis of satellite images and on some days put aircraft up for surveillance (rather than firefighting) purposes. There is lots of chatter about using drones that could carry water or fire retardant that could be sent to put out small new start fires. And of course, we have traditionally relied on staffed fire lookout towers to spot fires while they are small.

In recent years Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been billed as being a new option for spotting new start fires quickly.

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First summer fire in the VIC mountains

The awful fires of Black Summer linger in our memory. The land slowly recovers. Since then, things have been fairly quiet in recent summers in the mountains of the mainland high country. With the first mountain fire of the season now contained, and vast areas of fire damaged forests in recovery from previous fires, it is essential that with any new start fire the authorities:

  • Get on to new start fires as rapidly as possible
  • Escalate the availability of resources to contain the fire, rather than ‘letting it burn’
  • Ensure that fire management plans highlight the need to exclude fire from fire sensitive or recovering areas and the protection of ecological as well as human assets.

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Snow gum summit tickets now on sale

The second snow gum summit will happen on Ngarigo Country in Jindabyne over the weekend of March 14 and 15 next year.

The first summit happened at Dinner Plain earlier this year, attracting about 100 people, who heard from wonderful speakers.

Tickets for the 2026 gathering have just gone on sale. Like the 2025 event, this is expected to sell out, so grab one today if you’re planning to attend.

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Fire: how do we control things when we can’t control things?

The Tasmanian National Parks Association (TNPA) recently dedicated an issue of their newsletter to the question of how to manage wild fire in Western Tasmania. As has been widely noted, including here at Mountain Journal, fires having been getting more intense in western lutruwita/ Tasmania since a ‘tipping point’ sometime around the year 2000. Since then, there has been an increase in the number of lightning-caused fires and an increase in the average size of the fires, “resulting in a marked increase in the area burnt”.

As TNPA notes in the introduction:

The direct impacts of climate change for Tasmania are changes to weather patterns with corresponding changes to levels of temperature, rainfall and evaporation – most likely a warmer, drier climate overall.

The outcomes of some of these changes are beyond our ability to influence. For example, there are no options for protecting an entire landscape from drought, although it may be possible to save examples of individual species.

As discussed in the following essays, the increased frequency and intensity of wildfires is already resulting in demonstrable impacts on some of Tasmania’s most highly valued species and ecosystems (paleoendemics and alpine ecosystems) and options do exist for how it is managed.

  Continue reading “Fire: how do we control things when we can’t control things?” →

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Skiing in the Pyrocene

Back in 2022, I helped host an event at Mt Hotham called Climate change, fire and the Alps. I remember being struck by something that was said by one of the speakers. Craig Hore, who at that point was a Ranger in Charge of Fire and Emergency Operations North East District, at Parks Victoria, reflected on his long connection to the mountains. Fire regimes in the high country have changed in the last quarter century, with more frequent and intense fires.

Craig reflected on the fact that since the fires of 2002/3, the mountains have been transformed. With ever more frequent fire and drier conditions, he doesn’t think that we can go back to what the Alps used to be like. In his early days as a Ranger he could drive through older forests for hours. But now so much of the park has been badly impacted by fires. “I doubt we will ever see those old forests again.”

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Snow Gum Summit will return in 2026

Snow Gum Summit – Next Ascent: Protecting Alpine Landscapes

Friends of the Earth Melbourne is excited to share that we are organising a second Snow Gum Summit, which will take place in March 2026 on Ngarigo Country in Jindabyne. The Summit will bring people together from across the Australian Alps bioregion spanning Victoria, NSW and the ACT, to address the threats facing these iconic landscapes we all know and love.

Snow gum forests and woodlands are under accelerating stress from climate change, fire, and beetle-driven dieback. The widespread dieback is equivalent to that of a mass bleaching event of the Great Barrier Reef. Without bold interventions, these ecosystems face ecological collapse within our lifetimes.

The summit will happen over the weekend of March 14 and 15.

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