How Australia’s Indigenous people can help the country fight fire

Fire plays a central role in indigenous life and could hold the key to better management of bushfires in Australia. “We know from research we’ve done, from over 200-plus years of documentation, that fire was actually in our landscape.” Nelson describes how Aboriginal people would move through the bush, systematically setting undergrowth alight, in order to promote the growth of new plants, rid the bush of flammable materials such as bark and leaf litter and attract animals to hunt. Nelson leads a small team of Aboriginal park rangers in northern Victoria whose aim is to reintroduce what he describes as “cultural burning”; traditional techniques using fire to manage the landscape. He says he was introduced to cultural burning by elders from Cape York in 2010, and that it was “unlike anything I’d ever done in a professional capacity.” “That’s when I realised that what I’d been doing as a professional firefighter – lighting up the bush with torches and doing hazard reduction – was not even close to what traditionally the approach was.” Bush as fuel Barber also maintains that the use of cultural burning could contribute to a reduction of large-scale bushfires. Barber – like Nelson – acknowledges cultural burning is not the “silver bullet” to avoid such fires in the future, but he is convinced that tapping into the knowledge of the Aboriginal people who have lived on the land for generations will help modern-day Australia better manage its unique landscape.