29/06/2026
A few factors overlooked by “experts”,
McArthur knew this nearly 70 years ago.
One of Australia's greatest bushfire scientists, Alan McArthur, recognised something in the 1950s that seems to have been forgotten or deliberately ignored by parts of contemporary bushfire research.
Using suppression experiments in Western Australia, McArthur examined how the difficulty of controlling fires changed as fire weather became more severe, while working with essentially the same fuel type. His famous graph is well known among foresters but conveniently forgotten by academia. It shows a progressive transition from fires that could be controlled relatively easily to those that became increasingly resistant to suppression.
The remarkable thing is that this knowledge wasn't derived from a theoretical computer model. It was based on empirical field observations. As fire researcher Greg McCarthy recently reminded everyone, McArthur's work showed that once the Forest Fire Danger Index exceeded about 50 (Extreme), no suppression attempt succeeded, even when maximum resources were deployed.
Nearly 70 years ago, McArthur had already identified a point at which weather dominates fire behaviour and suppression efforts become ineffective. Let that sink in for a moment, because some of today's fire researchers often present weather-dominated fire behaviour as a contemporary focus of bushfire research, even though its operational consequences were recognised decades ago.
In fact, some of these researchers argue that climate change is increasingly affecting the effectiveness of suppression by making fire weather more frequent or severe. McArthur's work reminds us that suppression has always had operational limits once fires entered extreme weather conditions. Those limits are not a new discovery.
McArthur had already demonstrated the operational consequences of weather-dominated fires almost 70 years ago. However, today's bushfire researchers, who increasingly rely on modelling, are trying to tell us that their work proves the need to move beyond McArthur's work because they now focus on weather-driven fire behaviour.
The fact is, they are simply rediscovering what McArthur had demonstrated decades earlier.
The real lesson from McArthur's work is not that weather eventually dominates. Every experienced firefighter already knows that. The real lesson is what happens before the fire reaches that point. Every catastrophic bushfire, with very few exceptions, begins as a small fire under conditions where suppression is still possible. McArthur's graph effectively illustrates the narrowing window of opportunity.
McArthur's graph is not merely a description of fire behaviour. It is fundamentally a graph about opportunity. It identifies the progressively shrinking window in which suppression remains effective. That is where bushfire management should focus its greatest effort, because once the weather moves beyond those thresholds, the options become increasingly limited, regardless of how sophisticated our models become.
As the weather deteriorates, the likelihood of successful suppression declines steadily until it disappears. This has profound implications for bushfire management. Rather than concentrating almost exclusively on understanding fires once they have become uncontrollable, researchers today should follow foresters' lead and devote far more effort to understanding how to prevent them from ever reaching that stage, a much more relevant approach to saving lives and assets.
That means keeping fuel loads manageable, enabling rapid detection and an aggressive initial attack. It also means recognising that every hour a fire remains uncontained before severe weather arrives increases the likelihood that it will enter the part of McArthur's graph where suppression no longer works.
This is why I become frustrated when some Johnny-come-lately researchers dismiss or belittle McArthur's work. I have even seen criticism, not because there were faults in his work, but simply because much of his pioneering research was not published in “peer-reviewed” journals.
That misses the point entirely because McArthur wasn't producing elegant academic papers. He was solving real-world operational problems for firefighters. It is a pity that current researchers are not doing likewise.
His work was grounded in careful observation, field experimentation and practical validation, and it has influenced bushfire management across Australia for generations. His conclusions came from observing and fighting real fires, not from parameterising landscapes on a computer and hoping the model reflected reality.
Perhaps today's researchers, instead of trying to explain why McArthur was supposedly wrong, should recognise how much he got right. Nearly 70 years later, his graph still poses the most important question in Australian bushfire management: Why are we spending so much time studying fires after they have become uncontrollable, instead of making sure they never get there in the first place?
I think the final question is the key message. It doesn't deny that research into extreme fire behaviour has value. Instead, it questions whether current research priorities are sufficiently focused on the stage of the fire when intervention can make the greatest difference and keep people safe and assets protected.
McArthur understood something that remains as true today as it was in the 1950s. The best way to deal with an uncontrollable bushfire is to stop it from becoming uncontrollable in the first place. That simple operational truth deserves to be at the centre of Australian bushfire research once again.
