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Cultural burning in Australia

In Australia, cultural burning is the preparation and controlled burning of vegetation over land based on, and using methods informed by, traditional indigenous knowledge. It involves the reading of country and the application of fire as a management tool for the health of country. It is not simply fire hazard and fuel load reduction. It maintains habitat niches and biota.

Cultural burning is used to revitalise and heal degraded country. By its inclusion of indigenous communities it is also contributing to the healing of those communities and their reconnection to country. Land management by fire is rooted in ancient indigenous traditions. There is a fear that this knowledge will be lost if effort is not made to keep and propagate the knowledge. The re-establishment of cultural burning includes workshops within indigenous communities and combined with state fire authorities.

Cultural burning produces a balanced ecosystem, and a safe place to live. Indigeous traditions make flammable dangerous environments much safer.

Overview

Cultural burning is a form of land management. It is not done only to reduce fire hazard and fuel load. Cultural burning deliberately favours one class of biodiveristy over another, minimising naturally invasive species.

Today, cultural burns are a form of cultural exchange, with state fire services also learning from indigenous people, and allow indigenous peoples to reengage with cultural practices and traditional lands.

History

Historically, traditional land owners worked against wildfires. For them to not do so would have been to do nothing to stop their home from burning down.

Indigenous people have been using fire management in Tasmania for at least 41,000 years.

Pyrology and fire management

Cultural burning will include reburning in short time frames after bigger burns to control vegetation type and biodiversity. It is more labour intensive then simple hazard reduction burning, but creates a more even cycle within the landscape, allows the application of thousands of years of landscape knowledge, and supports community connection to country.

The burns are referred to as "low and slow". Typically a burn will only impact the undergrowth in an area. The slowness of the burn gives animals a chance to escape. Cultural burns use a lot of ground fuel, and can be used alongside hazard reduction, making a wildfire less likely.

Burning the canopy creates thick black smoke. A cultural burn will produce white smoke, and it will be largely dissipated as it rises through the tree canopy.

Traditional fire management is aware of moisture content and wind conditions, and the avoidance of rare plants.

Types of burning

Patch burning is a form of cultural burning.

Traditionally, indigenous fire management is ground based, but it is now also being done utlising helicopters.

Ecology and biodiversity

Cultural burning deliberately favours one class of biodiveristy over another, minimising naturally invasive species. It is a form of cool burning, which mitigates against cycles of hot burns and species that favour hot burns.

Cultural burns are used to bring degraded country back to health, and are able to remove weed species and encourage desirable endemic species.

Different ecosystems, containing different mixes of plants and animals, should be burnt at different times. People look at the landscape to determine a burning strategy for each type of country because the grasses and vegetation in that system mature at different times of the year.

Hot fires will cook the in-soil seed bank. Hot fire burnt country can stay dormant for years.

It is against indigenous lore to burn the tree canopy.

Cultural burns are used to heal the land and restore country to its natural state.BUT what is natural

In the Tasmanian northern highlands, ecological burns do not burn everything. They trickle through the landscape and remove some of the grass material and makes space for some of the wildflowers. It creates a mosaic of areas which have different fire histories, which increases the diversity.

Cultural identity and context

Ongoing cultural burning activity helps sustain cultural identity within indigenous communities.

Elders of indigenous communities can be keen to share traditional knowledge with non indigenous people because they want the land to be properly cared for. Cultural burning is considered as a marriage of science and cultural knowledge.

Cultural burning sees people as part of the land and of the ecosystem. Burning is not something people do to the land.

Current activity

Cultural burning is being reintroduced within communities. This can be initially in conjunction with modern fire support and services, bringing about the inclusion of traditional indigenous fire practices within an over all land management regime.

Collaboration occurs between diverse cultural groups. Cultural burning practice ideas and methods are exchanged between Australian indigenous peoples and North American indigenous peoples.

Positions are being created within state fire authorities specifically to incorporate traditional expertise. The approach is to build capability within indigenous communities and allow them to take charge of the landscape.

Training courses in cultural burning, sometimes referred to as firestick workshops, are formally organised.

History of anthropogenic fire in Australia

Subdivisions of the Quaternary Period
System/ Period	Series/ Epoch	Stage/ Age	Age
Quaternary	Holocene	Meghalayan	0	4,200
		Northgrippian	4,200	8,200
		Greenlandian	8,200	11,700
	Pleistocene	'Upper'	11,700	129ka
		Chibanian	129ka	774ka
		Calabrian	774ka	1.80Ma
		Gelasian	1.80Ma	2.58Ma
Neogene	Pliocene	Piacenzian	2.58Ma	3.60Ma
Notes and references Subdivision of the Quaternary Period according to the ICS, as of January 2020. For the Holocene, dates are relative to the year 2000 (e.g. Greenlandian began 11,700 years before 2000). For the beginning of the Northgrippian a date of 8,236 years before 2000 has been set. The Meghalayan has been set to begin 4,250 years before 2000. 'Tarantian' is an informal, unofficial name proposed for a stage/age to replace the equally informal, unofficial 'Upper Pleistocene' subseries/subepoch. In Europe and North America, the Holocene is subdivided into Preboreal, Boreal, Atlantic, Subboreal, and Subatlantic stages of the Blytt–Sernander time scale. There are many regional subdivisions for the Upper or Late Pleistocene; usually these represent locally recognized cold (glacial) and warm (interglacial) periods. The last glacial period ends with the cold Younger Dryas substage.

People have been living in what is now called Australia from at least the middle of the Tarantian (Upper, or Late, Pleistocene) geological period, fifty thousand to sixty thousand years ago, with some speculation perhaps earlier from near the beginning of the Tarantian period, one hundred thousand years ago.

A core sample taken from a remote Tasmanian island suggests indigenous people were using fire management on the island at least 41,000 years ago. The core sample showed fire regimes on lungtalanana (Clark Island) had changed substantially over that period. Part of that change was due to the landscape management activities of indigenous people. Over most of the period of the record, frequent and low-intensity fires occurred on the island through regular burning of the vegetation, most likely because of people lighting those fires and managing the landscape.

Glacial period/s

The second significant arrival of people in Australia began over two hundred years ago, in 1788, with the colinisation of Australia by people from Great Britain.

When indigenous people left Clark Island, the fires became more intense. With European arrival there is a change in the fire regime and there are many very strong fires, and in many cases catastrophic fires occurred in the recent past. Those fires are a result of changes in land management strategy.

Sometimes, when Europeans moved into an area, they copied the practice of the indigenous people, for example the Vale of Belvoir in the Tasmanian northern highlands, where cultural burning had been used for centuries, to boost the health of local ecosystems. Indigenous people actively managed the area using fire to promote new growth in the grasslands, which in turn improved the condition for game species like wallabies.

Traditional owners and state institutions are now working together combining traditional knowledge and scientific research for fire management.

Pyrology and fire management

Indigenous people developed the skills and knowledge to sustainably coexist in a very flammable environment. Indigeous traditions make flammable dangerous environments much safer.

Types of burning

Burning by the Yugul Mangi starts off with patch burning, which involves finding small areas of savannah grass to burn. The traditional way of using burning is mainly with lots of wind. It only burns until the afternoon when the wind drops, and then the fog comes overnight and extinguishes it. The correct conditions for this are from April through to July. Burning outside of that window runs the risk of starting a wildfire.

Ecology and biodiversity

Lanscapes have evolved with fire, but the appropriate type of fire, the appropriate intensity of fire, and the appropriate frequency of fires need to be determined to improve the health of the landscape.

According to Pickup, post European arrival flora and fauna extinctions in Australian spinifex grasslands have been contributed to by the cesation of cultural burning resulting in the loss of vegetation mosaics.

In the spinifex grasslands, which are the most extensive rangeland vegetation type and cover 22% of Australia, Aboriginal people manipulated vegetation patterns and animal populations by burning (Griffin 1984). This activity created a mosaic of vegetation in various stages of recovery since burning. The mosaic was fine grained close to waters and other inhabited areas and coarser further out, eventually merging with the very coarse wildfire-generated pattern in waterless, infertile areas. The fine-grained pattern disappeared as Aboriginal land use declined and most spinifex areas are now swept by large wildfires. The resultant change in patterning would have severely affected species with a limited range but requiring a diversity of habitats. This loss of habitat, coupled with the loss of drought refuges and increased predation, was probably enough to produce the extinctions (Pickup et al. 1994b).

Cultural identity and context

There are seven tribes in the Yugul Mangi collective, and who lights which fire is an important part of traditional burning. They will choose the right people to light the fire for a particular area, part of culturally connected burning on country, which maintains cultural practices and boundaries. Participation in burning, is part of passing on cultural practices to new generations.

Current activity

Firesticks Alliance is an indigenous organisation that runs programs with communities across Australia to build recognition of cultural fire management, and to reintroduce it onto lands owned and run by indigenous people. The practice has caught the attention of National Landcare Programs which has helped fund a joint workshop hosted by the Northern Tablelands Local Land Service and the Banbai Aboriginal Corporation.

Cultural burns rely in training, indigenous knowledge, coordination with ecologists and local fire services, and are done in accordance with state regulations and fire permits.

A challenge for modern land holders wishing to utilise traditional indigenous knowledge, is how to reconcile the typical current requirement to limit private burns to title and tenure boundaries, whereas traditional burns would follow types of country.

Cultural burning has been maintained in some parts of Australia:

• Traditional owners of Jawoyn country have rejuvenated their country with fire for thousands of years in the southern end of Kakadu National Park, and now work together with Parks and Wildlife rangers to combine traditional burning techniques with modern technology to reduce the number of hot fires at the end of the dry season. Fire management traditions, knowledge and practices are still passed from generation to generation.
• Yugul Mangi Rangers, representing the collective indigenous peoples of the South-East Arnham Land (SEAL) Indigenous Protected Area (IPA), have produced a calendar detailing their profound knowledge of the seasons, and when and how to burn to best manage the land and avoid wildfires. Working with non-indigenous scientists to document traditional knowledge in combination with scientific research, they identify bio-cultural indicators, so when the seasons are changing, what things they notice in the environment that are important, and indicate that it is either a good time or bad time to start lighting fires. The calendar, Yugul Mangi Faiya En Sisen Kelenda (Yugul Mangi Fire and Seasons Calendar), contains seven indigenous languages from the different tribes in the SEAL IPA, as well as Kriol and English.

Cultural burning has been reintroduced and is now occuring in:

• Tathra by the Bega Local Aboriginal Land Council
• Central Victoria by the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation. It had been 170 years since cultural burns were done on Dja Dja Wurrung country. Cultural burns are done on both public and private land.
• Shoalhaven - Falls Creek, New South Wales
• Tasmanian Midlands private land holders with local indigenous people are working with the academia to reintroduce patch burning using a scientificly controlled process. The indigenous community historically conducted these burns and they shaped the landscape in the first place.

To do

Distinguish from:

• Slash-and-burn
• Slash-and-char