Black Saturday's pre-history (Inside Story)

Black Saturday seared itself into the history books and the memories of many on 7 February 2009. The grieving, the slow recovery and the debates continue. Over missions of years, the world's tallest flowering plants, the great Mountain Ash eucalypts of the forests of Victoria, have evolved as "fire weeds" ensuring their survival by spreading their seeds in ash beds open to the light previously shadowed by their towering canopies. They die to survive. Their cycles are much longer than ours. But their special relationship to the inevitability of devastating fires withing the "fire flume" of the Victorian bush offers a tough but essential lesson for the local communities and policy makers at both state and federal levels, as historian Tom Griffiths (Australian National University) tells Peter Clarke.