Deep Time and Disaster: Black Saturday and the Forgotten Past (original) (raw)
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Catastrophic Bushfires, Indigenous Fire Knowledge and Reframing Science in Southeast Australia
Fire, 2021
The catastrophic 2019/2020 Black Summer bushfires were the worst fire season in the recorded history of Southeast Australia. These bushfires were one of several recent global conflagrations across landscapes that are homelands of Indigenous peoples, homelands that were invaded and colonised by European nations over recent centuries. The subsequent suppression and cessation of Indigenous landscape management has had profound social and environmental impacts. The Black Summer bushfires have brought Indigenous cultural burning practices to the forefront as a potential management tool for mitigating climate-driven catastrophic bushfires in Australia. Here, we highlight new research that clearly demonstrates that Indigenous fire management in Southeast Australia produced radically different landscapes and fire regimes than what is presently considered “natural”. We highlight some barriers to the return of Indigenous fire management to Southeast Australian landscapes. We argue that to ade...
Fire in the Forests? Exploring the Human-Ecological History of Australia's First Frontier
Environment and History, 2019
In his landmark book The Biggest Estate on Earth, historian Bill Gammage argues that before the arrival of white settlers, the whole Australian continent was a manicured cultural landscape, shaped and maintained by precise, deliberate and repeated fires. In Aboriginal hands, fire made the entire country ‘beautiful and comfortable’, and so Australia was one vast ‘estate’, a giant ‘park’, a series of ‘farms without fences’. These words imply that Aboriginal rights to land are closely tied to universal fire regimes. Gammage’s book has been well-received and celebrated. But it has also polarised debates on fire regimes, especially the extent to which fire really did shape every corner of the continent, and the related assertion that contemporary ecologies are the result of the cessation of fire since 1788. This paper integrates ethnographic history and archaeology with geography, soil science and ecology in order to set Gammage’s model against a particular ecological zone – the dense River-flat Forests that once lined Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury-Nepean River in New South Wales, Australia. Dyarubbin was occupied by Aboriginal people for perhaps 50,000 years, and from 1794 it became the site of the first major settler farming frontier. Paying attention to the local and the particular, this paper asks: was this fiercely contested country a tidy mosaic of open forests, water and grasslands created by cultural fire? Was Aboriginal burning here extensive or limited? What aspects of human and ecological history might be obscured by the universalising model in which cultural fire dominates above all other factors? Did the Aboriginal landscape in turn shape the settler one, and what were the consequences for land and people?
Bushfire in settler colonial Australian literature is discussed as a plot device that highlights the gendered and racialised spaces of 19th century Australian bush life, and emphasises social and national unity through crisis (Moore, 2011). This research accounts for literature that features bushfire as the predominant event in the narrative, but fails to take into account literature that features bushfires as background events and metaphoric or linguistic references. Through the use of digital mapping and other quantitative methodologies, I attend to the diversity of representations of bushfires by analysing hundreds of Australian colonial serials and short stories published in Australian newspapers. Specifically, I employ a critical toponymic approach to examine the vexed symbolism of the homestead recurrent in bushfire narratives. Settler authors frequently invoked Indigenous and Anglo-Indigenised language in the naming of homesteads. While some of these place-names are geo-rectifiable through reference to historical gazettes, others seemingly only approximate Indigenous sounding words. This paper will analyse this literary phenomena, and argue that through the threat of destruction, bushfire narratives make clear the synecdochic proto-national status of the homestead as property. This form of literary territorialisation consolidated the imposition of colonial rule and contributed to a unique, albeit appropriated and stolen, settler Australian cultural identity. — Moore, G. (2011). the Heavens Were on Fire: incendiarism and the defence of the settler Home. Antipodal Homes; Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand, 63-73.
There is an ethnographic and historical record that, despite its paucity, can offer specific insight into various contextual matters (Purpose, motivations, acknowledgement) relating to how and why fire was being used by Victorian Aboriginal people in the nineteenth century. This insight is essential to developing cross-culturally appropriate land and fire management strategies in the present and into the future. This article demonstrates the need for further research into historical accounts of Aboriginal burning in Victoria.
Fire in the Australian Landscape
Australia is a fire prone landscape which has been subjected to wild and planned fire for millennia. The European settlement of Australia changed fire regimes in the landscape by imposing European landscape values to very different ecosystems. Prescribed burning can provide key aspects of the natural disturbance regime under human management (Boer et al 2009). In the last century, land managers have learnt the importance of prescribed burning to protect people, property, and to regenerate fire-prone ecosystems. This review will examine the historic fire regime in Australia, especially Mediterranean-climate regions, and the precedent for fire from Aboriginal management. It will broadly include contrasting management values of Aborigines, early Europeans, conservationists and foresters. Prescribed burning must be used effectively and efficiently to protect things we value; a summary of the literature which discusses these issues will be presented. Finally, limitations and suggested improvements for prescribed burning practices will be discussed and evaluated.
Fire
Protecting “wilderness” and removing human involvement in “nature” was a core pillar of the modern conservation movement through the 20th century. Conservation approaches and legislation informed by this narrative fail to recognise that Aboriginal people have long valued, used, and shaped most landscapes on Earth. Aboriginal people curated open and fire-safe Country for millennia with fire in what are now forested and fire-prone regions. Settler land holders recognised the importance of this and mimicked these practices. The Land Conservation Act of 1970 in Victoria, Australia, prohibited burning by settler land holders in an effort to protect natural landscapes. We present a 120-year record of vegetation and fire regime change from Gunaikurnai Country, southeast Australia. Our data demonstrate that catastrophic bushfires first impacted the local area immediately following the prohibition of settler burning in 1970, which allowed a rapid increase in flammable eucalypts that resulted...