Can Aboriginal fire-management techniques tame Australia’s “orange-yellow monster”? scarschwartz investigates
ustralia is the world’s most fire-prone continent. When temperatures rise and the hot winds blow, a lightning strike or cigarette butt tossed thoughtlessly out of a car window can spark a flame that rapidly burgeons into a panorama of hell. Dense smoke obscures the sun, which glows apocalyptically red, and the bush descends into near darkness.
The first people to arrive on the southern continent some 60,000 years ago developed techniques that not only allowed them to live alongside frequent bushfires but to turn the flame’s awesome power to their benefit. They observed how plants responded to burning and deliberately lit fires to make the landscape more habitable for humans.
A psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane once stood on this spot. After it closed in the 1990s, the surrounding bush grew wild: locals dumped rubbish there; teenagers drank. Later the community claimed the land under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, which allows indigenous people to take ownership of unused public land as compensation for colonial dispossession.
On a Monday morning at 9am, the trainees and I waited for Steffensen on a dirt road that ran through a thick gum forest. The students, who ranged in age from their early 20s to their 70s, wore high-visibility gear and work boots. When Steffensen arrived he had a felt hat on, a brown shirt, cargo trousers, socks and sandals – casual attire that reflected his philosophy. A prescribed burn should never become so hot that safety gear is necessary.
His mother couldn’t tell him much about his ancestry. She knew that the family was descended from the Tagalaka people who once lived in the Gulf of Carpentaria in north-east Australia. They had been forcibly removed from their land a few generations earlier. Steffensen was in awe of their knowledge. “Growing up without access to elders I wanted to learn from these old people,” he said. “They had expertise that I was never going to learn in a classroom.” Sensing this eagerness, the brothers took Steffensen under their wing. They instructed him in bushcraft and land management, especially the role of fire. The brothers explained that, as children, they had observed their elders regularly burning the landscape to keep it “healthy”.
It would take years for Steffensen to assimilate the brothers’ knowledge. Unlike many of their generation, the brothers had grown up in communities that still followed pre-colonial traditions. A white, cattle-station owner had hidden Musgrave and George in postbags when police came to visit, so they avoided being removed from their parents.
The brothers and Steffensen did their best to remain on good terms with the park authorities. One year, Steffensen was invited to join a hazard-reduction burn with the rangers. It was a hot October and the landscape was full of dry grass and leaves. The rangers had been instructed to incinerate all the land on one side of the road. They told Steffensen to sit on the back of a utility van with a flamethrower. As the head ranger drove, he instructed Steffensen to spray the bush with fire.
Successful fire management requires a deep knowledge of the bush that can come only from prolonged acquaintance There was a moment of reckoning in 1939. Catastrophic fires burned almost 5m acres in the state of Victoria, destroying townships and killing 71 people. A subsequent Royal Commission called on state authorities to change their strategy and “recognise the necessity of protective burning”. The commission made no reference to indigenous burning methods, which could have provided a useful template.
This academic debate was part of a bigger culture war within Australian society. Aboriginal-rights activists invoked the use of sophisticated fire management as evidence of their title to native lands. In response, conservatives argued that the firestick hypothesis was motivated by a “black-armband view of history”, which sought to exaggerate the harm colonialism had done and make hyperbolic claims about the technical advancement of indigenous culture.
Steffensen realised that cool burning would have a future only if ordinary Australians could be convinced of its value. “If more people saw how good our fire was then there would be pressure to let us keep going,” he said. He began posting videos on his website of the brothers tending the land. These caught the attention of Peta-Marie Standley, who asked if she could study the burns as part of herin environmental science.
At some point in the mid-afternoon, we heard the wail of sirens in the distance. Shortly afterwards three fire engines arrived at the burn site: nearby residents, concerned about the smoke, had alerted the fire service. Steffensen offered to take the firefighters on a tour of the burn. He showed them that the soil was still cool to the touch, the trees hadn’t burned down to the roots and their canopies remained intact. The firemen, decked out in protective gear, listened and nodded.
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