Indigenous burning in the Box Ironbark country

In June 2020, the  Paradoxa Collective and the Nillumbik Shire Council hosted an online forum on traditional burning and botany.

It featured Uncle Dave Wandin, Wurundjeri elder and traditional firestick farming expert and David Cameron, Senior Botanist at the Victorian Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning in conversation. They wandered around the Bunjil Reserve at Panton Hill to discuss their incredible wealth of knowledge around cultural and traditional burning, botany and more.

This brief post focuses on one part of the presentations: what Indigenous burning in Box Ironbark country might look like:

The following is based on notes taken from the talk by Dave Wandin.

 

Climate change is nothing new for us. We have lived through it before. Human habitation here goes back at least 120,000 years. We were scientists – we collected data, and the elders (our scientists) analyised it. Our data was based on things like movement of animals, certain plants being in flower, etc.

Based on the data supplied, they would then apply ‘medicene’ to the land: fire. Dave says that Fire lives in the landscape in Australia. ‘We learnt to live with it. We were never fire fighters, we were fire managers.

Fuel reduction is a by product of fire management, not the end point. The key thing is to understand that fire makes landscape healthy.

If you pay attention, ‘You understand how to burn country when it tells you when it needs fire, and you use the right fire. There is no one type of fire – there are many different types, applied at different times of the year, depending on where you are.

‘This is Box country. You expect to find certain types of grasses, hear particular birds and frogs. If I don’t hear the right things, then I know the land is sick, and will require a burn. Frequency is important. Once you start to look after country you burn every year until it is healthy again. You need the right fire for right country at the right time.

We need to understand that the land is now sick. Previous land uses, like the mining that happened during the Gold Rush disrupted the land. Aboriginal fire has been missing from the landscape since the 1850s. Fire, applied properly, can make it healthy again.

When we do a burn, we assess the right time to burn. We need to understand that some parts of the landscape don’t need fire to be healthy. Water is important – it moves through land, and that’s how you want fire to move through the land.

You need to work out where to burn.

We would never burn more than 50% of the area that is meant to be burnt. Protect the threatened species, the burn will move around different types of soil, it will react in different ways in different parts of the area. Cool burns will leave areas of habitat that displaced animals can move into immediately.

The intensity of fires are increasing. Confronted with this, we should do more small fires, in winter, in a way that reduces fuel load and increases biodiversity.

Box forests – normally these forests are the first system to be burnt because they dry out first, then stringybark forests, and then onto the Gums along the rivers – the last ecosystem to burn, as they grow on the darker soils along streams.

Soil moisture is really important – if its too dry, fire destroys the humus. You want to clean the forest floor, not get into the soil.

Our burning window starts when the government’s burning finishes. Fire season runs through the cool months, from late April until August.

There is a dilemma for traditional owners who want to burn with government programs (via DELWP) – they need to be trained firefighters, which undermines the value of traditional knowledge. There are too many weeds now, and so much soil disturbance to revert just to cultural burning. We need a mix of the two methods.

I think one of the things that struck me in this conversation was the understanding that if we want to apply fire to landscape, we need to take the time to understand the land first.

As noted by Shaun Hooper, a Wiradjuri man, Fire Behaviour Analyst, volunteer fire fighter, and Cultural Burning practitioner,  ‘Aboriginal Cultural Burn(ing); does not generally look like a hazard reduction. This is because it is not. An Aboriginal Cultural Burn is not guided by a prescription, it is guided by the close relationship that the Aboriginal Cultural Fire Practitioner has with Country and everything in it.

This relationship based approach allows for the involvement of other than human beings such as bettongs, bandicoots, lyrebirds, wombats and brush turkeys who all assist with Cultural burning by turning over and reducing the leaf litter.

Cultural Burning is a landscape wide approach unlike the more strategic hazard reduction approach. It provides for emergent outcomes for a range of species who contribute in various ways to the implementation, Cultural Burning in its true sense is not just people driven, this is important as it respects the relational requirements of Aboriginal Cultural Practice”. (source).

Faced with the threat of fire, we have systamatised our response by trying to implement ‘firestick farming’ without understanding exactly what that means, and how our work might influence the ecology or long term flammability of the land. We burn in autumn rather than winter. We have targets and budgetary constraints. We have political pressures to burn more. We haven’t yet been here long enough to really understand what the land needs. We have a politicised perception influenced by Culture War frames: either a ‘burning is good’ approach or a ‘without fire the landscape will find balance’ approach. We simply haven’t been here long enough, or payed enough attention to truly understand how fire can, and should, be applied to landscapes. Paying attention, and taking a long view, is fundamental if we are going to develop a proper approach to fire.