Will Australia Get Sick if it’s Not Burnt?
Fire-Stick Farming
Australian Aborigines, perhaps the iconic culture ‘living in harmony with nature’, believed that the Earth needed them to manage the world. Without their continual management, the world would become ‘sick’.
The idea that Australian Aborigines used fire as a deliberate, carefully applied management tool leapt on to the whitefella’s radar in 1969. In that year, Australian archaeologist Rhys Jones published a paper coining the term ‘Fire-stick farming’. Of course, many non-Indigenous people had long been aware that Aborigines made frequent use of fire. The evidence is there in the notes of the earliest explorers. But it was Jones’ linking ‘fire’ with ‘farming’ that caused a stir.
Up until then (and quite some time later) Australia had ‘legally’ been considered ‘Terra Nullius’ when it was located by Europeans. Under the European doctrine of the time, if you didn’t farm the land, you didn’t own it. It was a ‘land of no-one’, just waiting for the guys who made that rule to take it and farm it. The idea of ‘fire-stick farming’, was, therefore, a challenge to the status quo.
It stimulated an explosion of scientific publications, addressing Aboriginal use of fire, as well as the broader topic of fire ecology. It remains a contentious topic. There has been a concerted effort to find clear evidence for burning by Aboriginal people in the prehistoric charcoal record. It might seem relatively easy — but the major signal to date is that fires over thousands of years have mainly been controlled by climate, not by people (Mooney et al., 2011). Some papers have argued that if deliberate burning by Aborigines did occur, it was of little consequence to the environment (Horton, 2000), while others argue that the consequences were catastrophic (Miller et al., 1999).
Historians have also had their say. There is the masterful synthesis by Bill Gammage: ‘The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia’. It’s a huge compendium on the documentary evidence for Aboriginal burning, the specifics of its application, and how extensive the practice was. A similar work by Bruce Pascoe, “ ‘Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture’, collates early European observations that some Aboriginal groups at contact were full-on ‘farming’ — by any definition.
‘Fire Country: How Indigenous Fire Management Could Help Save Australia’
Many of those contributions from both scientists and historians could be characterised as ‘western academia’ (despite some of them identifying as indigenous). In that context, Victor Steffensen’s book ‘Fire Country: How Indigenous Fire Management Could Help Save Australia’ is refreshing. It’s from a thoroughly indigenous perspective. ‘Fire Country’ is the personal account of Steffensen, growing up with elders, full of practical knowledge about ‘cultural burning’, but stymied in its application by officialdom- ‘the three Ps of power: the police, parks and wildlife, and the pastoralists’.
‘Fire Country’ includes a wealth of detail about the practical local application of burning, but also snippets about the motivations behind it. The intriguing point that came through again and again in Steffensen’s book, was that if country was not burnt correctly, it would become ‘sick’. Here are a few quotes from ‘Fire Country’:
“Every time we drove through the country, the old people kept saying that it was sick. They would say, ‘Oh, look at our country, the grass, we need to burn it.”
“Their land was choked up with dead vegetation and weeds because their fire practices had stopped the same way as our own had in Australia… I came to realise there must be so many places and cultures on the planet suffering from the same syndrome of sick country.”
“I commented on how sick the landscape was, from a lack of the right fire management… As I said, the area had not been burnt for over twenty years and it wasn’t looking its best… The country had been neglected for so long that it stopped producing many plants that were supposed to be living there.”
“…. unmanaged, sick landscapes of excessive fuel loads everywhere, waiting to go off.”
What does Steffensen mean by ‘sick’? It clearly includes a build up of old, dead grass and weeds— the ‘fuel’ that can ultimately lead to very hot, extensive, uncontrollable canopy fires. I would take ‘sick’ to mean that the landscape is in such a state that one or more measures of ‘health’, such as biodiversity and soil nutrient levels, are or will, deteriorate. Those are outcomes of megafires.
Plenty of other indigenous people around the world managed their landscape with fire. The First Nations of North America come to mind (Stewart et al., 2002; Vale, 2002), and also the Saami in the far north of Scandinavia and Finland. But I don’t know that in their fundamental belief system, this was a requirement to keep the world healthy (if anyone knows of cases where this is documented, let me know). I agree with the basic concept of using Aboriginal burning techniques to sort out some of Australia’s ecological problems. But still, you’d really want to have a good think about any humans claiming that nature can’t do without them. It begs the question — what did Australia do without Aboriginal people?
Speaking as someone who studies fossils plants, I can tell you that Australia’s forests did just fine for tens of millions, and even over a couple of hundred millions of years before humans arrived on the scene. Its forests thrived, evolved along with the climate and soil, and sometimes they burned after lightening strikes. So the belief that Australia now needs constant management by humans so as not to get ‘sick’, is confronting. You could think it was a kind of conceit – that the Earth actually depends on humans.
In that seminal paper by Jones, he listed six reasons why Aboriginal people burnt. They were:
- For “fun” (!)
- Signaling”
- To clear the ground
- Hunting
- Regeneration of plant food (Many plants eaten by both Aborigines and animals that they hunted are “more palatable when young”, as they regrow after a fire)
- “Extending man’s habitat”. By this, Jones had in mind burning back rainforest, to favour (at least in some places) more productive non-rainforest vegetation.
Today we would probably subsume the last two points into ‘optimising biodiversity’. That is, a main goal of Aboriginal burning could be interpreted as maximising the amount and range of animals to hunt, and to ensure there were always plants at the right developmental phase to eat. But no where in Jones’ list do we find ‘to stop the Land getting sick’ (and likewise, several of Jones’ points do not appear in ‘Fire Country’).
Perhaps I’m putting too much of a western slant on the word ‘sick’. But whatever it means, Aboriginal people felt they had a responsibility to the Earth, to manage it. Not just for their gain, but a mutualistic thing. If they looked after the earth, the earth would look after them.
Now a cynic might say that any burning was primarily about benefits to Aborigines themselves. It was to maximise production. Farming in other words. But there’s more to it than that. There is a fundamental difference between the light, cool fires promoted in Fire Country, and the catastrophic hot and huge ones, such as Australia experienced recently. The later don’t do any one, any animal, and even the soil of the earth, any good. In that basic sense, they should be avoided. It’s what any good farmer would call good land stewardship.
But (to use a more New Zealand-relevant example), if you cut down a rainforest and turn it into a dairy farm — the farmer can talk about ‘good land stewardship’ (not putting too much fertilizer on, not letting run-off get into the streams, not over-grazing, and so-on) until the cows come home, but wouldn’t letting nature do what it wants, and letting the land revert back to rainforest, also be ‘good land stewardship’? Turns out that in Australia, Aboriginal wisdom says … No. Letting nature do what comes naturally wouldn't be good land stewardship.
How could such a world view develop? Presumably, something happened since humans arrived in Australia tens of thousands of years ago, and at some point, Aboriginal people figured that they needed to maintain country.
This is where Tim Flannery’s ‘Future Eaters’ Hypothesis comes in. In his 1994 book of the same name, he proposed that the earliest Aborigines caused the extinction of large herbivores — and without them to eat large amounts of vegetation, ‘fuel’ built up and caused bad fires. The Aborigines learned, presumably the hard way, to avoid these large fires by taking the place of the herbivores, and burning the excess vegetation. Fire is, basically a ‘herbivore’ (Bond and Keeley, 2005), so in theory at least, can take the place of vertebrate herbivores. So here is another reason for Aboriginal burning – ‘hazard’, or ‘fuel reduction burning’. It’s to use timely, small and gentle, or ‘cool’ fires, to avoid catastrophic hot and extensive fires.
The details of Flannery’s Hypothesis have been debated ever since — did those herbivores go extinct soon after humans arrived, or not? Was it climate? Did it really make that much difference? But surprisingly few (if any?) of the critiques go back to that point — what happened to make the Australian Aborigines realise they needed to keep burning their land?
But maybe it was more to do with the massive environmental changes that Aborigines have had to cope with, but were right out of their hands. Humans have occupied Australia since well before the height of the last glacial period, but as conditions changed (typically getting warmer and wetter) rapidly into the Holocene, Aborigines may have used fire as a way to maintain a kind of status quo. For example, in Tasmania, extensive use of fire probably prevented much of the landscape disappearing under rainforest (Bowman and Brown, 1986; Thomas et al., 2010, and numerous other studies cited in this paper).
Incidentally, a profound environmental change occurred in Europe over the Pleistocene to Holocene. Open steppe conditions with abundant large animals were replaced by forest and smaller animals so rapidly that a grandparent might have struggled to explain to his or her descendants just what the place once looked like. However, in Europe humans changed their lifestyle to cope. They didn’t, as far as I know, try to fight the overwhelming wave of forest growth with fire. (It does suggest an interesting question – Why not?).
If vegetation build-up leads to a situation where extremely hot, extensive, uncontrollably canopy fires break out, as they did in 2019–2020, then the term ‘sick’ conveys the situation well. And part of the reason behind that ‘sickness’ has been changed firing practices.
‘Re-wilding’ by burning
‘Re-wilding’ has become a topical concept with a spectrum of understanding about how it is defined. In one view (more North America perhaps) it’s more about the selective reintroduction of certain large animals (think deer, or wolves) to reestablish a basic ecological system that operated pre-colonial times. In another view (European perhaps) the emphasis is more on a ‘hands-off’ approach to let fundamental ecological processes do their own thing.
And that’s where that particular understanding of Rewilding, meets an entirely different world view. Head-on. To most folks, any definition of ‘Rewilding’ likely implies either an absence of management, or at least keeping it to the absolute minimum. It certainly doesn’t incorporate constant landscape-scale burning. But the reality of Rewilding in Australia is that various degrees of management, including an extensive use of fire, are going to be necessary (Sweeney et al., 2019). Quite a few thousand years of local knowledge isn’t to be scoffed at. ‘Rewilding’ isn’t a one-size fits all kinda thing. And with Australia in the cross-hairs of very particular outcomes of global warming — including an increase in extreme fire weather, we will have to modify our ideals to suit.
Wilderness
What about ‘Wilderness’? Like ‘Rewilding’, ‘Wilderness’ means different things to different people, but the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary has this to say:
“(1): a tract or region uncultivated and uninhabited by human beings. (2) : an area essentially undisturbed by human activity together with its naturally developed life community.”
On My first trip to Australia (to Tasmania in 1988), I heard about Aboriginal opposition to the creation of ‘wilderness areas’ (in regard to the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area). I guess I came from a naïve New Zealand background, where declaring some areas to remain free of human impact, and, as far as possible, to remove human impacts, could only be a good thing. But it was just that — naïve. The response of Aboriginal people is ‘what you’re calling ‘wilderness’ what was our ‘home’ for thousands of years, a ‘wilderness’. Not only that, but the landscape you’re looking at (or at least would have looked at a couple of centuries ago), is the result of thousands of years of our management” (Once again, see Thomas et al., 2010).
Aboriginal fire management, or cultural burning, has a lot going for it. Put frankly, as ‘Fire Country’ documents, it appears to work. Although ‘Cultural Burning’ is often set in opposition to Western concepts of ‘Hazard reduction burning’, they still both include an aim to minimise fuel to reduce the likelihood of destructive fires. But as the local results of global warming become more intense, a sad fact is that these techniques will become relatively less important (for instance, as the scale of climate change simply overwhelms the ability of these methods). However, they will remain as indispensable ‘tools’.
Putting People into Wilderness
But here’s the point. To do Cultural Burning effectively, you have to really, really know your country. Steffensen’s ‘Fire Country’ is full of examples of the level of ‘full situational awareness’ that is needed:
“The first ecosystem ready to burn on Awu-Laya country is the boxwood tree system… He pointed out the bloodwood trees’ first flower of the year, which told him when the boxwood country was ready to burn… He then grabbed a handful of the long grass and ran it through one hand to feel the moisture, to see if it was ready to burn. If the grass felt cold, there was too much moisture. If it felt warm and dry, it was ready… Then he showed me how to visually read the curing of the grass and when it was ready to burn. The grass was about half green and half dry when it was ready…. If the grass didn’t have all of those signs, he wouldn’t even bother striking a match.”
“The old man started explaining that you have to wait for the first or second rain before you can burn that country. You need to make sure there is plenty of moisture in the soil. ‘If you burn it when it is dry, nothing will grow again for a long time.”
So you have to know your soils in detail and also their seasonal changes in soil moisture, how much dead plant material is building up, what is flowering, the topography, the local weather. That kind of intimate knowledge is only gained by living there. In that sense, to preserve some of our wilderness (not all) it makes good sense to put people back into them. That first Merriam-Webster definition of ‘Wilderness’ just won’t work in Australia. For some areas we’ll probably have to settle for ‘cultivated’, ‘inhabited’, but go easy on some of the other signs of human activity.
References
Bond, W.J., and Keeley, J.E. 2005. Fire as a global ‘herbivore’: the ecology and evolution of flammable ecosystems. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 20:387–394. doi:10.1016/j.tree.2005.04.025.
Bowman, D.M.J.S. and M.J. Brown. 1986. Bushfires in Tasmania: a botanical approach to anthropological questions. Archaeology in Oceana, 21:166–171.
Flannery, T. 1994. Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People. New Holland Publishers.
Gammage, B. 2012. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia’. Allen & Unwin.
Horton, D. 2000. The Pure State of Nature. St Leonards, NSW, Allen and Unwin.
Jones R. 1969. Firestick farming. Austalian Natural History, 16:224–231.
Miller, G. H., J. W. Magee, B. J. Johnson, M. L. Foegl, N. A. Spooner, M. T. McCulloch and L. K. Ayliffe. 1999. Pleistocene extinction of Genyornis newtoni: Human impact on Australian megafauna. Science, 283: 205–208.
Mooney, S. D., S. P. Harrison, P. J. Bartlein, A.-L. Daniau, J. Stevenson, K. C. Brownlie, S. Buckman, M. Cupper, J. Luly, M. Black, E. Colhoun, D. D’Costa, J. Dodson, S. Haberle, G. S. Hope, P. Kershaw, C. Kenyon, M. McKenzie and N. Williams. 2011. Late Quaternary fire regimes of Australasia. Quaternary Science Reviews, 30: 28–46.
Pascoe, B. 2018. Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture. Magabala Books.
Sweeney, F., Turnbull, J., Jones, M., Letnic, M., Newsome, T.M., and Sharp, A. 2019. An Australian perspective on rewilding. Conservation Biology, 33:812–820. doi: 10.1111/cobi.13280.
Steffensen, V. 2020. ‘Fire Country: How Indigenous Fire Management Could Help Save Australia’. Hardie Grant Travel.
Stewart, O.C., Lewis, H.T., and Anderson, M.K. 2002. Forgotten Fires. Native Americans and the Transient Wilderness. University of Oklahoma Press.
Thomas, I., Cullen, P. and Fletcher, M.-S. 2010. Ecological drift or stable fire cycles in Tasmania: A resolution? Terra Australis, 32: 257–268.
Vale, T.R. (Ed.) 2002. Fire, Native Peoples and the Natural Landscape. Washington, DC: Island Press.
