The book is both a question and an answer: what starts bush fires? Poor land management, natural occurrences such as lightening strikes, and man-made situations such as falling power poles or carelessly discarded matches: they all cause bush fires, resulting in damaged property, destroyed homes and wrecked lives. This book was inspired by Tom Griffith’s Forests of Ash. I was interested in doing something about bush fires, which terrify me. The text on the wrapper colophon is taken from the Australian Royal Commission investigation into the 1939 bush fires in the state of Victoria—text so beautifully and movingly written by Judge LEB Stretton that extracts were used in English exams in Victoria until quite recently. Stretton was the first white Australian to identify that European patterns of land management increased the frequency and ferocity of the fires: Indigenous Australians used the land differently, deliberately setting smaller fires to burn off the forest fuel so that when the natural bush fires came they weren’t as dangerous.