Fire as Good: Reshaping Our Relationship with Flame

Fire can seem like an all-consuming destructive force as it tears through bushland, consuming houses, and causing irrevocable harm to people and animals. But fire has shaped the environment and almost every aspect of the human experience.

Whether through natural adaptations by plants in fire prone environments or contained in machinery and contraptions, fire is an incredibly useful tool. Humans are defined by their ability to harness fire, applying it to the cooking of food, creating light in the dark, and trapping it in engines and pumps to make achievements that were once thought to be a dream a reality.

Environmental Benefits

Bushfires are a fact of life in the Australian landscape. The continent’s hot, dry climate and abundance of flammable eucalypt forest mean that fire has shaped this landscape for millions of years, long before humans arrived, and long after we are gone.

Fire clears the way for new life. Species such as the banksia produce tough, woody seed pods that stay sealed for years, only cracking open under the intense heat of a passing fire. Other plants rely on chemicals carried in bushfire smoke to trigger germination in seeds that have lain dormant in the soil, sometimes for decades.

With this in mind, Aboriginal peoples have practised deliberate, low-intensity burning across the Australian landscape for tens of thousands of years, using fire to encourage new growth, support hunting and reduce the fuel that feeds larger, uncontrollable fires later in the season. This traditional knowledge, often described as cultural burning or fire-stick farming, underpins the hazard reduction practices used across NSW today.

Cooking

Learning to harness fire changed the course of human evolution. Anthropologist Richard Wrangham’s influential “cooking hypothesis” argues that the ability to cook food is what allowed the human brain to grow as large as it did.

Early humans used fire to smoke and cook meat, extending the life of scarce food and making it easier to carry. Cooking also unlocked nutrients that raw food could not offer, and made previously inedible plants and meats safe to eat. Archaeological evidence for the deliberate, everyday use of fire dates back at least 800,000 years, though some researchers argue our ancestor Homo erectus may have been cooking as early as 1.8 million years ago.

Cooking on half drum barbeques at Firefighter Demonstration [Museum of Fire Collection]

Lighting

Long before people mastered lighting on their own terms, they were reliant on the sun by day and whatever light the moon offered by night.

Early humans used campfires and burning branches to extend useful hours past sunset, creating a space for communities to gather, work and talk long after daylight had faded. As portable light became possible, candles emerged as a common household solution. In other cultures, oil lamps were the method of choice.

The real transformation came with gas. From the early 1800s, gas lighting spread through the streets of London and other major cities, turning once-dangerous night-time streets into places lit by rows of gas flame. For the first time, city life did not have to stop at sundown.

Industry

Fire has long been the tool that turns raw material into something useful — softening metal into tools and weapons, and firing clay into pottery, brick and glass. Furnaces and kilns, both heated by fire, sit at the centre of this transformation, and their history stretches back thousands of years, to structures made of little more than clay, earth and stone. From building materials to cutlery, machinery to glassware, the ability to confine fire within a forge or a kiln gave humans the means to reshape the material world around them.

Metropolitan Fire Brigades workshop in Headquarters ca. 1900 [Museum of Fire Collection]

Power and Electricity

As automation and industrialisation took hold, fire moved from the open hearth into the boiler and the furnace. Cheap, accessible coal and steam-powered machinery meant that although people no longer relied on naked flame for lighting, cooking or heating in their day-to-day lives, fire remained central to how those comforts were delivered — this time through the generation of electricity.

The building that houses the Museum of Fire today is itself part of that story. Construction began in 1951 on what was the first contract job undertaken by the newly formed Electricity Commission of NSW: Penrith Power Station, which burned coal to generate electricity for an area stretching as far east as Blacktown, as far north as Windsor and Richmond, and as far west as the Blue Mountains.

Engines

By the early 1700s, engineers had begun to ask whether fire could do the physical work that had always relied on human or animal muscle — and the answer arrived in the form of the steam engine. Thomas Newcomen built the first commercially viable steam engine in 1712, designed to solve a growing problem in Britain’s coal and tin mines: as shafts were dug deeper, they flooded with water faster than it could be removed by hand. Newcomen’s engine used fire to heat water into steam, which filled a cylinder before being condensed back into water; the resulting vacuum drew a piston down, and the engine’s rocking beam did the work of pumping water out of the mine.

~ Story by Museum of Fire Heritage Team