Man fined $3,000 for St Helens bushfire that torched two homes

A 56-year-old Tasmanian man has been convicted and fined $3,000 over a bushfire that destroyed two homes and burned through 1,200 hectares of vegetation on the state's upper east coast. Michael John Davis was found guilty in the Launceston Magistrates Court this week of lighting a fire on December 9 without taking reasonable precautions to stop it spreading. He also pleaded guilty to a low-range drink-driving charge and appeared by videolink, his lawyer James Oxley telling the court he lives in Indonesia.

Prosecutors said Davis was at his parents' property burning a shoebox of tax records in a fire pit while smoking cigarettes. He stayed with the fire until the box was gone, then went inside to make lunch for his bedridden father. Half an hour later he found bushland on the home's northern boundary — metres from where he'd burned the receipts — alight. He threw buckets of water at it and asked his mother to call the fire brigade when she got home.

The fire raced north through bushland. Two residences on St Helens Point Road were destroyed, and TasNetworks and Telstra infrastructure was damaged.

Oxley told the court the Tasmania Fire Service had confirmed no total fire ban was in place that day and no permits were required in the area, and said the paperwork burned fit in a single shoebox. He asked Magistrate Simon Brown to spare Davis a conviction, warning it could hurt his bid to renew his visa with the Indonesian government, where he plans to stay with his wife.

Brown refused, citing the toll. He described the consequences as catastrophic, said Davis' moral culpability sat at the lower end of the scale, and noted that lighting a fire outdoors in Tasmania in December demands real care. Davis watched the fire and believed it was out, the magistrate said, but took no steps to wet it down or stamp on it to make sure.

Davis was fined $2,000 over the fire and $1,000 on the drink-driving charge, and had his licence suspended for six months.