Look at that to get your close.

Her book is A Future in Flames, the story of bushfires in Australia, but the story of

bushfires everywhere if you consider the threat to arable land, to people, to wildlife, to ecosystems, and yet not a threat because as we've established it is part of a continent, a part of nature.

We come now to the question of what burns.

In my conversation with you about the koala, I learned that eucalyptus is a torch when it's

hit by fire because of the eucalyptus oil and burns very quickly and then blows through.

There's another tree that also you write about the mountain ash

and that tree, the ash forests of Australia.

Both the eucalyptus and the mountain ash regenerate very quickly. Is that correct, Danielle?

Yeah, so mountain ash is a eucalypt as well. It's actually the largest of all the eucalyps and the largest

hardwood in the world. It's as tall, if not possibly taller in the past than the Redwoods, California.

And the eucalyps are what we call the fire adapted

group of plants.

So they're drought adapted and those drought adaptations have happened to have made them resilient in that generally in the face of fires. So they regenerate after fire. They most of know, there's a lot of deaths,

but there's also majority usually survive fires.

Mountain Ash has an interesting history

because it actually does die after fire,

but it releases a huge load of sea into the forest and it needs a lot of sun to

regenerate so in the aftermath of a fierce fire a very very fierce fire and mountain ash fires are notorious if you say only

happen every two or three hundred years naturally and the forest burn really fiercely and then the cleared areas are just re-seeded with all these

mountain ash so mountain ash all grow at the same rate and altogether so there's the

same stand forests which makes them really spectacular but

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