Setting the woods on fire: a memoir of George Peet

George Peet: WA’s greatest forest fire fighter

I was listening to the old Hank Williams song Settin’ the woods on fire the other day, and this started me thinking about George Peet, a man who played a significant part in my professional life, and one of Western Australia’s greatest sons. He set the woods on fire more times than most, not as an arsonist, but as a champion bushfire fighter.

Above all, George understood the concept of fighting fire with fire. He was the man who, more than anyone, taught us the fundamental essences of forest fire science, but more than that, he taught us how to apply the science to controlling forest fires in the real world.

George’s philosophy, like that of the fictional hard man Jack Reacher, was “get your retaltion in first”. He did not believe in waiting for trouble to come knocking at the door – he went out and met it at the front gate and turned it down, or turned it off, before it had a chance to cause losses, pain or distress.

Some said the approach was aggressive, or at best unsubtle. But the thing is, it worked. Again and again, the old adage was reinforced; prevention was better than cure, just as we had learned at our grandmother’s knee.

This is my story abouit the man who changed the face of forest bushfire control in Western Australia … and way beyond. I was priveliged to work under, and with him for 30 years and more.

A ‘sort-of’ friendship

George was about six years older than me, but we were near-contemporaries at Forestry School and as officers in the Western Australian Forests Department. But he had not become a forester by the usual route, as I had. He had spent several years farming before taking up forestry – a background that gave him maturity, toughness and practical skills way beyond those of youngsters like me who moved straight into forestry after school and university.

But despite these differences, we became colleagues and ‘sort-of' friends. Although he spent most of his career in research and specialist duties while I was in operations, we were frequently thrown together because for both of us, bushfire science and bushfire management were the main pre-occupations of our careers, and also our passion.  We might never have become close friends, but there was a mutual respect, and a shared motivation. These forged a happy partnership, a professional friendship if you like.

Catching up

By coincidence, in the mid-90s George and I both retired from the agency at about the same time, and some years went by during which our paths did not cross. Then, walking my dog along the cycle path near Point Walter early one morning, I suddenly had to step aside as a phalanx of yellow-jacketed cyclists emerged around a bend and swept towards me. One of them looked familiar – a stocky, bearded, muscular figure, cycling with fierce concentration, and up with the leaders. “Hey George!” I cried (for it was indeed George Peet), and he saw me, broke from the pack with a skilful manoeuvre, and coasted back for a brief chat. I was in the mood for a yarn. But George was impatient to get going (impatience was one of his hallmarks), and he soon mounted up and tore away, clearly intent on getting back to the head of the group before they reached Attadale. I would have been disappointed if he had behaved otherwise.

It was good to see him, and as I walked on, I reflected upon how George had been a profound influence in my life, especially in the early days when I was trying to make my way in the small (but important, at least to me) world of Western Australian forestry. Today I look back on him as one of the immortals, a member of that generation of foresters who worked in the native forests between 1960 and 1990. He was truly one of the people of whom it can be said that they changed the thinking of an era, and the practice of forestry.

Backstory

George joined the Forests Department, immediately after graduation from Forestry School, in January of the fateful year of 1961. Thus, he was just in time to experience first-hand the Summer of the Great Fires, when towns burned and forests and farms all over the south-west were incinerated. He had been appointed a junior forestry officer at Tallanalla, an isolated settlement in the jarrah forest east of Harvey and was only there a few days before he was sent to the almighty conflagration that is still known today as The Dwellingup Fire. Later he recalled [End Note 1]:

There were 19 or more lightning strikes, mainly northeast of Dwellingup, and they were fanned by periods of strong winds. Eventually the fires were overcome by a very spirited attack by the large suppression force team that had flowed into Dwellingup from the south-west, but not before they had burned out three towns, dozens of farms and thousands of hectares of prime forest.

My minor role in all this was to drive a gang truck with a light pumper from Tallanalla to Nanga Brook, and pick up the Nanga Mill Bush Boss and his logging crew and take them to the fire. Before I left Tallanalla I was given sound advice by Archie Hancock, the District Forester. Archie simply said “these are very experienced bushmen and firefighters. Don’t try telling them what to do. Just tell the Bush Boss what the job is and leave him to it".

Having worked for years on farms I knew good advice when I heard it, and the Bush Boss and his crew did an outstanding job.

George and his crew worked for two days building a containment line along one flank of one of the fires before:

… on Tuesday 24th the fire weather became catastrophic. The whole of the southern flank broke away. We were recalled to Dwellingup.

At Dwellingup we were sent to the northern edge of town to put out spot-fires in a two-year-old burn adjacent to the Forest Cadet School and Dillon's block. This had been a good burn, but unfortunately it was only about 200 m wide (from memory) and that’s where the fires that burnt Dwellingup came in. Don’t believe claims that a narrow burn like this will protect against a rolling crown fire. That’s nonsense!

Although it was only 6 pm, the whole sky was lit with a red glow. Suddenly everything went dark and we were enveloped in a hailstorm of spot fires. We scrabbled to get on the truck and just reached the Cadet School, which was about 200m away, before the fire engulfed us. The building was new and the timber comparatively green, but the eaves had been ‘blocked in’, and we got the windows tight shut just as the flames engulfed the buildings on both sides. Numerous burning embers came in through the window joints, and some wood shavings were ignited, but there were enough of us to put out all the internal fires, aided by water from the bathroom shower. The Nanga logging crew were tough and determined men, and they were not going to give in without a fight. We managed to keep the building intact. Outside, I still don’t know how, our truck survived.

That night the town of Dwellingup burnt down. George and his crew spent the night (with most of the townsfolk) on the town football oval. The next morning, he was part of a small team who volunteered to walk from Dwellingup to the nearby town of Holyoake, which it was believed had also been destroyed overnight. Their grim task was to check for survivors, or deaths.

The scene that greeted George the morning after the fire: all that is left of the town of Holyoake

Recollecting this event, George was still able to find some grim humour:

The whole area was silent, blackened and glowing, the smoke was thick ... As we neared Holyoake we suddenly heard the sound of singing! Then up out of a creek rose an old fella clutching a wine flagon. He was well away! He waived the flagon towards us, and walked off. We never saw him again …

The experiences at the Dwellingup Fire had a profound impact on George and determined the subsequent trajectory of his career. In the wake of the fires, he was transferred to Dwellingup (as it was being rebuilt), appointed to the Research Branch, and became WA’s first bushfire research scientist. This was part of the department’s overall strategy to see if ways could be found to ensure there would be no more Dwellingup Fires.  

Part of his early work included mapping the intensity of the great fire. It was a project that deepened his sorrow at the extent of the devastation but also provided key insights into how the fire had burned differently in different fuels. Even under the worst conditions, George found, forests carrying light fuels before the fire, while they had re-burned, had survived almost intact. Forests carrying long-unburnt, heavy fuels before the fire, were cooked to lifeless black sticks.

Jarrah forest devastated by high-intensity wildfire (photo by Todd Brittain)

Working with George

I started work with the Forests Department in 1963 and was transferred to Dwellingup in the spring of that year. There I soon met George.  We had offices in the same building, and George and his wife Gillian lived in the house next door to the Single Officer’s Quarters in the forestry settlement where I was batching. It wasn’t long before Gillian was including me in the occasional evening meal, the start of a lifelong admiration and affection I had for this cultured and intelligent lady.

As I soon discovered, however, George was not only a fire researcher. He was also the Department’s designated Fire Weather Forecaster, a subject in which he was largely self-taught but became expert. I was running the department’s field officer training scheme at the time, and one of the things I taught the cadets was how to read weather instruments and synoptic charts and to sense what was going on around them in terms of bushfire weather. So, one or more of us was often in the little radio room at the back of the district office at 7.30 in the morning observing the analysis of weather readings and their evolution into weather forecasts. George would be standing silently, wreathed in a fug of blue pipe smoke, studying barometric charts and weather data, weighing wooden rods on a beam balance, doing calculations on the back of an envelope and making notes from the observations reported on the HF radio from various district offices down in the south-west. After a few minutes deliberation he would take up his pen and paper and write out the day's weather forecasts (max temperature, wind direction and strength, and estimated fire hazard), one forecast for the jarrah forest and one for the karri forest, and then at 7.45 he read them out over the radio to “all stations”. After this he would go home for breakfast.

I was deeply impressed. Looking back, George’s performance as a weather forecaster was a revealing indicator of his personality and modus operandi. He was good with technical detail, had the capacity to analyse a complex situation and reduce it quickly to a concise and sensible plan of action, and once having decided what he wanted to do, he got it done with a minimum of fuss and then went and did something else. His weather forecasts, by the way, were nearly always spot-on.

The experimental fires

The big research issue of the day, and the problem in which George was up to his neck, was to understand how and why forest fires behaved differently from one day to the next, and one forest to the next - and to be able to precisely predict fire behaviour (intensity, rate of spread, height of flames etc), based on easily measured or forecast variables. If we wanted to undertake controlled (or “prescribed”) burning to mitigate summer bushfires, or if we needed to project the way a wildfire would develop in the next few hours, this information was essential. In pre-George days, prescribed burning and fire projection was an art, lacking science. Everything depended on the judgement and experience of fire-hardened old foresters with a moist finger to the wind and their nostrils flaring.

These days, many bushfire researchers (and here I am referring to “researchers” in the inner-city universities) do their work with computer models in the comfort of an air-conditioned office. George did it the hard way, lighting and measuring real fires in the real bush. His method was to set hundreds of “experimental fires” out in the jarrah forest, east of Dwellingup. The development of each fire would be timed, measured, recorded and mapped, and this data would be equated to weather data, fuel characteristics and topography measured on the spot at the time of the fire.  

The cadets and I assisted with some of George’s experimental burns and got a first-hand appreciation of the work. It was fatiguing, and to some extent dangerous, but exciting. I later recalled [End Note 2]:

George would select the site of the next experimental burn and set up his meteorological field station. The match would then be dropped. Every 5 minutes Goerge would blow a whistle, and we would dash in over the burnt ground, dodging around trees and hurdling logs, and then throw coloured metal marker plates at the seat of the flames all around the perimeter of the fire. Eventually George would declare “That’s it” and we would get to work and put the fire out. Later the fire would be surveyed by measuring and plotting the location of the markers from the point of ignition, thus giving a picture of how the fire developed over time.

Data from over 400 fires were collected and analysed [3].

Dropping the match to start an experimental fire in the jarrah forest

 I often used to see George at his desk back in the Research building, where I also had my office. George would agonise over complex mathematics as he tried to develop equations which incorporated all the variables (temperature, humidity, wind speed, slope, fuel age etc) and gave a good fit to the measured data in the field. This was 1963/4 and not only did research officers not have a computer to do the multivariate analysis for them, but they also didn’t even have an electric calculator. All the maths had to be done longhand or with a hand-cranked Facet calculator, and the sort of thing a computer would do in three seconds today might take a week of laborious arithmetic by hand. George would grunt and swear to himself, tear at his hair, get up and stomp down the corridor, snarling at passers-bye, and produce a smoke pall from his pipe which blotted out the sun. But he was wonderfully dogged, and in the end, produced the first Jarrah Forest Fire Behaviour Tables and Prescribed Burning Guide.

Experimental fire developing in the jarrah forest (photo courtesy of Lachlan McCaw)

I well remember a day in 1965 when I attended (along with all the district staff) a training session run by George in the Dwellingup forestry office, in which we were taught how to work our way through the tables in his new prescribed burning guide. There were about 15 of us sitting aound the big table in the district’s drafting room, and George patiently worked us through the process. The aim was to end up with a predicted Headfire Rate of Spread for a fire ignited under a given set of weather and fuel conditions. Once the rate of fire spread was known we could design the lighting pattern for a prescribed burn for a particular area of forest.

The burning guide was basically three sets of tables:

Table 1 predicted rate of fire spread in 5 year old fuels with a 50% crown canopy cover. The inputs were fire hazard (which had to be determined by a separate calculation) and wind velocity;

Table 2 corrected the rate of spread for the actual fuel age in the proposed burn; and

Table 3 combined rate of spread with the available hours of burning in the day, enabling calculation of a lighting pattern for a proposed burn.

We did not know it then, but we were participating in a watershed moment in Australian bushfire history – the point at which bushfire behaviour could be accurately predicted from measured variables, using equations based on empirical science.  It was far more than a model, however. The predicted fire behaviour was validated in the field every time we did a burn, providing real-time feedback on George’s equations which turn he would incorporate into his next analyses.

This sort of stuff is taken for granted in the bushfire community these days, all the calculations now being done by computer in the blink of an eye, nobody laboriously working their way through sets of tables … but at that time George’s work was truly revolutionary [4].

Moving south

In 1965, having broken the back of the problem in the jarrah forest, George then set out to tackle the karri forests of the deep south. He moved to the Manjimup Research Station and started work on karri fire behaviour. In 1968 our paths crossed again, when I was appointed DFO (District Manager) at Pemberton, in the heart of the karri country.

We attempted prescribed burning for wildfire mitigation in the southern forests back then, but it was a fearsomely dangerous and difficult job. We had the daily weather forecast, but no scientific understanding of the subtleties of the forest or the way it burned. The fuels were far heavier and more complex than in the jarrah forest to the north, and I sometimes had the impression that there were only two states: either the forest was too damp and would not burn, or it was too dry and burned with ungovernable fury.

Furthermore, the understorey and litter fuels were so thick and prickly it was physically impossible for forest workmen to walk through the forest lighting spot fires, especially in the areas which had not been burned for twenty or thirty years. Two crewmen perished when attempting a burn down on the Shannon in the early 1960s, and this was the last thing any of us wanted.

But George was at work behind the scenes. With his crew of technical officers, which by 1969 included a gifted young forest officer named Rick Sneeuwjagt, he had a study area in karri forest out on the Four Mile Brook, and here they lit and measured their experimental fires. I would drop in occasionally for a briefing. Compared with the northern jarrah forest, it was bafflingly difficult. Indeed it was not until Rick had identified that there were six different vegetation/fuel types in the southern forests, and coupled this to defining the way the fuel profiles for each type dried after rain (which they did in two directions), was it possible to construct the first fire behaviour tables and burning guides for the southern forests. This was in the early 1970s, and the tables were later published as the now famous “Little Red Book”.

The cover of the 1975 edition of “The Little Red Book” by Rick Sneeuwjagt and George Peet. These fire behaviour tables were unique in Australia and probably the world at the time

George takes to the air

But by this time, George had again changed direction. It was not enough to know when to burn, it was a matter of how to get it done, and at a scale that made the effort worthwhile. He turned his focus to pioneering a wholly new way of conducting prescribed burns, one that involved aircraft, thus overcoming the major obstacle to a burning program that was effective in reducing fuels at a forest-wide level. This was the advent of Aerial Burning [5].

The idea was born from discussions over beers at the pub between George and David Packham, a brilliant young scientist from the CSIRO’s Bushfire Research Unit who was working on various projects in WA at the time. David was a qualified pilot as well as a bushfire scientist, and listening to George expound on fire behaviour, burning technique, and especially the problems of inaccessibility in the karri country, the Great Idea suddenly emerged. Aerial ignition, coupled up to the new fire behaviour knowledge, would provide the solution to prescribed burning in thick forests, and to getting the necessary daily production rates to enable a forest-wide system of fuel management to be accomplished. They started with some scribbles on the back of a beer mat and ended up with an approach that reverberated around the world.

Back in Victoria, David Packham worked on the technology, while down in the southern forests of WA George Peet turned to the practical issues of converting the idea into reality.

Almost single-handed, George designed, field-tested and refined the aerial burning methodology which is still used today and later came to be used all over Australia and in many countries around the world. But he not only designed it he participated, right through from concept to implementation, and was personally involved in every aspect of the business, from constructing airstrips, to navigation equipment, organisation on the day, and post-burn assessment. George flew as Navigator (i.e., Skipper) in every aerial burn for the first couple of years, before relinquishing this role, and was followed by a proud dynasty of brave and tough young foresters who worked as aerial burning “Navs” over the years. A measure of the courage underlying George’s dozens of flying missions was the fact that he suffered severely from airsickness.

Early phase of an aerial burn in the karri forest. The aim is a mosaic of small, mild-intensity fires that reduce the tonnage of bushfire fuel without harming the forest.

George was a risk-taker, but a calculated one. A lot could go wrong when you flew over the forest dropping incendiaries. Indeed, things did go wrong with some of the first aerial burns … but nothing disastrous, and every miss-step was treated as a learning experience, and we got better very quickly. Today’s aerial burns are highly sophisticated (using helicopters and GPS) compared to the days when George was running them, but the approach, and the wonderful outcomes are the same.

 Incidentally, many years later, both George and David received the Order of Australia Medal for their work on the development of aerial burning.

George Peet receiving his OAM from the Governor of Western Australia, Sir Francis Burt.

Another turn of the wheel

The involvement with aerial burning took George away from research, but by then others were already taking over the technical and scientific aspects of bushfire research. These arrangements were formalised when George was transferred to HQ, and appointed the Fire Operations Officer (FOO), later retitled Fire Control Superintendent, running the Forests Department’s specialist Fire Branch from Como. His mission was simple: quality control of fire management in forest districts throughout the Department. His job: see that those of us in the field were doing our bushfire work faultlessly, and ensure the department was at the forefront in adopting new approaches and technology.

Some of the innovation under George’s leadership was spectacular, for example the development of aircraft for bushfire detection. For thirty or more years we had used men and women observers on lookout towers to spot and report fires. It was effective but the system had some inherent flaws. George revolutionised all this, as I later recalled [5]:

Sitting at my desk in the DFO’s office at Pemberton one day in early 1973 I received a telephone call from George Peet, the Forests Department’s Fire Control Superintendent. I loved George – he was as tough as nails, demanded perfection, accepted no excuses and took no prisoners, but he was a true-to-life bushfire expert, the best I ever knew. He had a solid background in bushfire science, having spent years in research, and also in field operations, and he had studied bushfire management in other States and overseas. When George told me to do something, I did it, and did my best to do it well.

George’s message in that fateful telephone call was brief and to the point. He told me that the previous summer (1972/3) he had tested the feasibility … of using a light aircraft to spot fires. Now he would like to test the concept properly, to conduct a systematic trial and see if an effective detection system incorporating aircraft could be designed.  A suitable aeroplane would be hired and based at Manjimup (which was the only local town with an airstrip in those days), but the trial would be held in the Pemberton District. Gerry van Didden, the Fire Branch aircraft guru, would organise the aircraft hire, recruit a pilot and help with all aviation-related issues. It would then be up to Gordon Styles (the regional bushfire officer at Manjimup, a man of enormous practical experience and capability), and me to design a systematic approach, train the pilot and monitor his daily work.

My additional job [George told me] would be to conduct an experiment that would enable comparison of the results of the aerial fire spotting with that of the lookout towers over the same period for the same forest. George made the point that I would be required to submit a detailed report at the completion of the trial … and, being a man of few words, he then said goodbye and rang off. Nothing, as far as I can remember was ever put in writing.

Thus was a whole new system of bushfire detection initiated.

The trial was so successful that a bushfire detection system built around spotter aircraft (coordinated with the lookouts) was implemented for the whole Western Australian forest estate within five years and is still applied today.

A modern fire spotter, patrolling the forest on the lookout for a bushfire outbreak (photo courtesy of DBCA)

 Running the rule

Now whilst I always admired George highly, there were times when I was intimidated by him.  His early days as FOO were before he took up daily jogging, cycling and weekend marathon running. He would work off his excess energies on any beardless whelp of a district forester (like me) who failed to achieve the standards of fire control perfection which he set. George was a frequent visitor to the districts, and he was ruthless in demanding high performance. He never shouted or abused, always speaking softly and politely, but with great concision. Yes, he was gruff, and had little time for pleasantries or small talk, but his message got through.  

He was also thorough. No minor error of judgement in a crisis, no failure to read the weather, no aerial burn that was too hot or too cold, no slackness in the fire training program, the district fire records, planning or equipment, would escape his attention. His district inspections were carried out with the assistance of a 19-page checklist, and when he carried out a washup after an instance of fire control mismanagement the culprit would be so well washed up for the condition to be almost terminal.

George was not, however, without a sense of humour. He enjoyed a good yarn, and I can still hear his short bark of laughter at a witticism from his best mate Jim Williamson.

Nor was it difficult to please George, at least in one way. There was nothing he liked better than to be given details of some potentially nasty bushfire being nipped in the bud because it started in, or ran into, an area where the fuels had been reduced by a prescribed burn. This happened in the districts nearly every summer, to such an extent that we almost became blasé about it. The smoke from a new bushfire ignition would pop up, be reported by the lookouts or Spotter plane, we would plot the fire’s location on the coordination board and then consult the bushfire history map to see when the area in question was last subjected to a burn. Sometimes the fire would plot within, or approaching an area with long unburnt fuels, and your stomache would knot with apprehension. More often than not, however, in those days, we would be able to heave a sigh of relief, knowing that a fire starting at that spot would never cause much grief, thanks to recent burning and light fuels.  In later years we had to put up with environmentalist Professors from Murdoch University asserting that fuel reduction prescribed burning “had little value” in the control of forest fires [7]. Needless to say, the people saying this had never plotted a smoke on a coordination board on a hot windy day and felt the stab of alarm, or had actually fought a forest fire. George would listen to this nonsense and snort with contempt … but if he had a fault (as did we all in those days) he did not sniff the political winds. The opponents of prescribed burning eventually gained the upper hand and in the early 2000s, the program was gutted.

Before all this, however, George was in his element. It was a different world back then. In the first place, the department was totally behind the bushfire mitigation burning program. There was not an officer of my age or older who had not been tempered by the Great Fires of 1961, and many of them had also experienced the terrible fires of the 1950s. We nearly all had friends or colleagues who had died or been injured fighting high-intensity forest fires in the days before broad-acre prescribed burning. It was manifestly obvious to us that deliberate planned use of creeping fires was effective in minimising the damage caused by high-intensity wildfires, and that the burning program was making forest firefighting easier and cheaper, and safer for our frontline firefighters. The whole organisation bought into the forester’s basic credo: if you don’t get your bushfire management right, no other objective can be achieved.  Getting bushfire management right meant preventing large, high-intensity damaging summer bushfires, and prescribed burning to reduce bushfire fuels was the basic underpinning of this strategy.

Compare:

A mild-intensity fire in a prescribed burn, the flames are not much more than knee high, and the outcome is often patchy

A summer wildfire, the flames reaching out over the tops of the trees and everything consumed

In that different world of the 1970s and 80s, George was lucky. He had the full support of senior Departmental administrators and scientists, and they had the full support of the Government and the Opposition. It would be another decade before the department’s bushfire specialists were forced to spend a high proportion of their time defending themselves and the department against academic activists with hair-brained schemes and laughable theories. George just had unlimited time to concentrate on fire operations at the front.

 The apogee

In 1975, George introduced quarterly meetings of Fire Branch and district fire operations staff. The meetings would move around, so that all districts were covered in turn. The idea was for the local foresters to demonstrate their bushfire record and system, and for them to be subjected to rigorous questioning and examination. It brought a whole new meaning to the phrase "being judged by your peers".

This coincided with the time George (for health reasons) suddenly took up jogging, converted to eating lettuce instead of steak, and cut back massively on his daily alcohol intake. Overnight, he became noticeably less amiable, and harder to please. At this point one of us found a strange and fearsomely spine‑covered fish washed up on the Warren Beach. It was mounted over a plaque inscribed “Prickly bastardus ‑ the George Peet Fish". Old Prickly was awarded annually to the district with the best fire control system, as decided by George. The year he gave up smoking, no-one won it.

Karri forest fire group, 1979, apprehensively awaiting an inspection by George Peet (L-R:  Alan Walker, Roger Underwood, Rick Sneeuwjagt, Ron Kitson)

The result of all this was that, based on George's research, his technical developments and then his drive, toughness and rigorous expectations, the WA Forests Department became recognised world-wide for its professional forest fire management. Foresters, firies and national parks managers from the eastern States, the USA and Canada were frequent and regular visitors. George himself was always in demand to visit other places and countries and sort them out. He spent six months in Kenya helping their forest service design and implement a new fire management system, he published his work and he spoke at conferences and meetings. He also undertook a major study tour in the USA and Canada, looking at the way their forest services approached the job (and was mostly unimpressed).

 All good things come to an end

In 1985, when he was in his mid-50s, George made a major career change, moving from the Fire Branch to become one of the inaugural Regional Managers in the new department of CALM [8]. This was a tough assignment. It quickly got tougher, with politicians, environmentalists, the Miscellaneous Workers Union, the ABC, and groups with names like ‘Cottesloe Doctors’ Wives Against Prescribed Burning’, gathering around him like storm clouds. The activists referred to him sneeringly as “Pyro Peet” and depicted his foresters as ecological vandals. For the first time in his professional life, George found himself having to deal with people who were trying actively to obstruct, undermine and annoy him, rather than support and back him. Furthermore, they were succeeding. I was also in CALM in those days, and they were unhappy times – working in a government agency trying to do its best but without political or community support never ends well.

It also needs to be said that there were some internal ructions within George’s regional jurisdiction. He was admired and respected by his staff but not universally liked. This was especially so for the rangers who came into CALM from the former National Parks Authority, and who were not used to being told what to do, by when and to what standard. George’s management style reflected his personality: he was gruff and single-minded, often uncompromising. He set and insisted on the highest standards in everything, and he expected everyone to have the same work ethic and dedication as he did. He certainly did not suffer fools gladly, nor did he show a kindly tolerance to those whom he regarded as undisciplined slackers. Having said all that, he ran a very efficient show.

To his credit, George stuck it for several years and did as good a job as was possible in the circumstances. But the external pressures got to him, especially from those opposed to the fuel reduction burning program. One day he said to me “If they don’t want us to protect them from bushfires, they can bloody-well burn”. The very next day he decided he had had enough and retired on the spot. I understood how he felt; it was a statement born of puzzled frustration. But I also knew George took very seriously his Duty of Care to the forest, to his firefighters, and to south-west communities, and would never have set this duty aside.

However, his era as a Regional Manager was not without highlights. I particularly rejoice in the memory of the time he drew a huge, glinting carving knife from his briefcase to make a point in the style of Crocodile Dundee (“This is a knife!”) at a meeting of senior staff in the Head Office training centre.

But it ended well. Like everything else in his life, George embraced retirement with single-minded enthusiasm, and relished being able to spend more time with Gillian.

 In retirement: the devoted couple George and Gillian (photo courtesy of Jess Brittain)

The legacy

George’s pioneering research into bushfire behaviour did not come to an end when he moved into regional operations. He established a dynasty of top-notch research scientists who followed in his wake, building on his work, and sustaining his principles. These included Rick Sneeuwjagt, Paul Jones, Neil Burrows and Lachlan McCaw working in WA, and George’s great mate Phil Cheney working in the ACT and the Northern Territory. All made major contributions to our understanding of bushfire science and practice.  The later work by Neil Burrows was particularly significant. He realised that George’s early fire behaviour models were derived from fires burning at the mild end of the spectrum. This meant the models applied nicely for prescribed burning, but they underestimated the ferocity of fires burning in heavy fuels under extreme weather conditions.  Building on George’s work, Neil conducted a series of “hot” experimental summer fires in jarrah forests, and although they improved fire behaviour predictions, they weren’t sufficiently large or intense to reliably predict the behaviour of large wildfires burning under hot, dry, windy summer conditions. Later, Phil Cheney and Lachlan McCaw conducted a series of larger, high intensity experimental fires (known as ‘Project Vesta’) from which a new model was developed to better predict the behaviour of wildfires. George Peet was not part of this research, but he provided essential backroom support. He also never lost his interest in the fire research program or his successors, as Rick Sneeuwjagt remembers:

 …”one of George’s finest attributes was his commitment to mentoring young research officers like Paul Jones and me. After he became Fire Superintendent, George always took advantage during his field visits and inspection tours to call in to the research office. Here he would pull me aside and grill and advise me on all aspects of research leadership, tech staff supervision, setting research objectives and strategies, experimental design and data analysis. He was generous of his time, and helped to build my confidence in my analysis of complex fire fuels and in running experimental fires …” [9]

 A final reflection

Back in my bachelor days at Dwellingup in 1964, Gillian once invited me round to tea at the neighbouring Peet homestead. George and I had been out together all that day with the fire research team, and many happy hours had been spent lighting up and measuring experimental bushfires in the jarrah forest. Some of them had gone rather well. I arrived to find Gillian giving George a dressing-down … for his inability to get a decent fire going in the kitchen stove on which she was cooking the dinner. There was also a gaggle of little children running around, getting in the way and insisting Daddy do this or do that. George was taking all this with an expression on his face like a puppy getting its tummy scratched. In later years I often saw George beaming proudly over the scholastic or musical achievements of these same little kids, as they grew into beautiful and accomplished young women [10].

Thus, I knew both George Peets – the tough, dedicated forester and pioneering firefighter, and the husband and father, content in the bosom of his loving family.  It was a privilege to know both, and to have been associated, even at the periphery, with his outstanding achievements.

George died in 2019 after a debilitating illness. I was saddened, but in a way I was not sorry, as he had become bitter about the “new” (and failing) approach to bushfire management adopted by the department that replaced CALM in the early 2000s. He simply could not understand why the magnificent system he had pioneered was now rejected.  I am also thankful that he did not live to see the nonsense about bushfires produced with wonky computer models coming out of the universities these days (masquerading as “science”), or the false doctrines promoted by climate alarmists. He would, however, have been pleased to see the resurgence of practical common sense in the current bushfire approach in Western Australia [11].

Fortunately, he had outlets … he was a fanatical cyclist, a marathon runner, a traveller to antique lands (with Gillian), and he kayaked every Sunday on the Swan River with his lifelong friend and confidant Jim Williamson.

When I think back on George I believe that had he been born a generation earlier, he would have become the brilliant commander of a fighting force in some theatre of World War II, having risen from private to Colonel through sheer energy, single-mindedness, attention to detail and a ruthless demand for excellence and results from those around him. His fighting troops would have loved him.

He set the woods on fire

George Peet was responsible for setting more woods on fire than most of the rest of us put together, but he knew what he was doing and why: he believed absolutely in fighting fire with fire, and that prevention was better than cure. What is more, he provided the science and the practical leadership that ensured fire was used professionally, and this ensured that southwest forests and communities were free from damaging wildfires for more than a generation. His blueprint for successful bushfire management is there to be picked up and implemented at any time, provided there are forest managers with the courage, and the political support, to do so.

It is good to remember and pay tribute to George. He remains one of my great heroes.

 End Notes

1. This is an excerpt from A Bushfire Initiation by George Peet. In: Tempered by Fire (2011). A Bushfire Front bushfire history publication

2.   Excerpt from The Firefighter – George Peet. In: Old Growth Foresters (2006), York Gum Publishing, Perth WA.

3.      George Peet’s experimental methods were based on those developed by Alan McArthur, the father of bushfire science in Australia. By coincidence I had also participated in some of McArthur’s early research. He was the lecturer in bushfire science when I was a student at Forestry School in Canberra, and he often employed students as his technical assistants. 

4.      George did not confine himself to fire behaviour research. He also did pioneering ecological studies on vegetation recovery after fires of different intensity. Moreoveer, he meticulously published his work, and was awarded Honours and Masters degrees for theses submitted to the University of WA and Melbourne University.

5.      The story about the conception and development of aerial burning in Western Australia, and George Peet's role in it, is told in detail in Fire from the Sky (2015). York Gum Publishing, Perth WA

6.      Excerpt from Eyes in the Sky (2022) a Bushfire Front publication which recounts in detail the development of fire spotting using aircraft.

7.      Their actual words were “Evidence suggests that fuel reduction burning in wildlands produces little benefit for wildfire control.” The authors of this strange assertion were Professors Neil Enright and Joseph Fontaine, and it was made in a paper called Climate Change and the Management of Fire-Prone Vegetation in Southwest and Southeast Australia published in Geographical Research in 2013.

8.      In 1985 a new agency called the Department of Conservation and Land Management (CALM) was formed by an amalgamation of the Forests Department, the National Parks Authority and the wildlife section of the Fisheries and Wildlife Department. It was a shotgun marriage with inherent internal tensions, and it lacked community support - although it did settle down over the years and mostly worked well. However, CALM did not survive, and successor organisations were seriously constrained when it came to bushfire management.

9.      Personal communication from Rick Sneeuwjagt to the author.

10.   Phil Cheney, the doyen of Australian bushfire scientists, summed it up when he wrote in a tribute to George: …”he was a great man, but he was also  a lovely man, wise, loyal and a good friend. I have great memories of us working, running and drinking together.  He was a scientist and a firefighter, but foremost he was a family man, dedicated to Gillian and his girls …”.

11.   The current department, as I write in 2026, has its heart in the right place, understands the need to reduce fuels in the forest so as to make summer wildfires easier, cheaper and safer to control and has some fine young staff. However, the department lacks effective political leadership, is starved for resources, and is constantly under attack from academic and environmental activists. The fire situation in Western Australia is pretty good, but in the eastern states, especially Victoria, the Gorge Peet philosophy and approach to forest bushfire management was long ago abandoned.

… and to send you all off on a good note, here is Hank Williams, setting the woods on fire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL1lbcYyKHg