Your Summer Guide to Australian Bushfire Arson

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I’ve just spent two months trying to interview an arsonist. I’ve wanted to ask them a whole lot of questions based around "why" but they’ve all said no, or simply ignored my calls. This isn’t surprising but the problem remains that every summer there’s a whole lot of discussion on arsonists, met with complete silence from the guys who know the most. With fires burning across VIC, NSW and WA last week, and Victorian premier Denis Napthine suggesting arsonists should wear electronic ankle bracelets, it seems an opportune moment to know more. So while I haven’t got an arsonist, I can explain a few things I’ve learned while trying.

Firstly, seeing arson as a concern of forensic psychology is a relatively new idea. Since the mid-1970s, Australia’s population has doubled, while arson arrests have risen by 2000 percent, which is actually a sign of public awareness translating into arrests, rather than an increase in behaviour. Thanks to a handful of psychologists around the country, the public as well as the authorities have a much clearer understanding of the people drawn to arson, the behaviour they exhibit, and how they can be curbed.

By far the biggest advances have come out of the Australian Centre for Arson Research and Treatment (ACART) at Bond University in Queensland. Headed by forensic psychologist Dr Rebekah Doley, they’ve pioneered a categorising system that places arson behaviour into four psychological profiles to aid in rehabilitation. The first profile is the Instrumental group, which includes people who use fire as an instrument to another end such as procuring insurance money or concealing another crime. Together with the Revenge/Threat group—who use fire to intimidate—these profiles explain the vast majority of arson in both forests and private property.

The next two groups cover a minority of cases, although they receive the most attention. The first is the Mental Illness/Personality Disorder group, which includes the exemplary Brendan Sokaluk who was convicted of lighting the Victorian Black Saturday fires in 2009. To get an idea of just how sadly bewildered he was by his own actions, you can watch a Fairfax video of him answering police questions a bit like Forest Gump. Indeed, the video illustrates just how mental deficiency is the root cause for this group, often without any conscious desire to hurt people. Finally, the smallest and most sensationalised group are the Pyromaniacs. These are the people who experience pleasure and sometimes sexual gratification by lighting fires and often become repeat offenders by chasing the high. The problem for state fire authorities is that these people are also drawn to firefighting as means of getting a hit followed by positive attention for putting their own fires out.

A text-book example of this was a guy named Peter Cameron Burgess who, back in 2001, was a bored 19 year-old living on a diet of entertainment sports and action movies in country NSW. We know this because the crime journalist Rochelle Jackson interviewed him for her 2008 book Inside their Minds, which was later turned into a segment for Radio National and rebranded for 60 Minutes. She describes how Burgess spent a lot of 2001 thinking about 9/11, as did everyone else, but with a particular fixation on the praise directed at the New York firefighters. A few months later he’d become a volunteer firefighter himself, which turned out to be less exciting than he’d hoped so he started lighting grass fires for something to put out. It didn’t take long for other the volunteers to notice he always the first on the scene so he left town and tried joining crews in the Wyong and Blue Mountains areas, all the while upping his fire habit to once or twice a week. At the time of his arrest in 2002 he was on a kamikaze spiral of nearly a bushfire a day, although at his hearing he was convicted on only twenty-five and sentenced to two years in jail. The RFS has since embedded an intelligence officer to nab pyromaniac volunteers as part of their Strike Force Tronto program.

Besides better understanding arson psychology, we’ve also nationally become much better at keeping records and extrapolating meaningful information from the data. According to a report released by Monash University and the Australian Institute of Criminology we get around 54,000 bushfires per year, of which 9 percent are officially declared deliberate. The actual number of arson cases is likely much higher as most arsonists are never caught and 42 percent of fires remain unexplained. A closer look at these numbers was released by the AIC in 2009 and examined 133 bushfire arson defendants who appeared before NSW courts between 2001 and 2006. Of that number 31 percent were under eighteen at the time of offence, while the average age was 26.6. Of those people, 37 percent had a prior conviction but only in 2 percent of the cases was the conviction for arson. Unsurprisingly 90 percent of all defendants were male.

In all my efforts to find an arsonist, I’ve talked to some disarmingly normal people and trawled their mostly normal lives across the net. One has recently been married and his Facebook page is full of happy bridesmaids and children, despite the fact that the groom spent a year in jail for destroying six homes in a fire near Cessnok, NSW. These people bury their pasts, their friends forgive them, life goes on. And I guess this is the whole problem with arson as a pathological pursuit: it’s not committed by people who are intrinsically evil, it’s committed by people who are intrinsically bored and atrocious at forward thinking. And stamping that out a character type is nigh on impossible. The best we can really do, is be aware of it.

Follow Julian on Twitter: @MorgansJulian