.jpg)
Fire-stick farming, also known ascool burning, is acultural burning practice wherebyAboriginal Australians regularly use fire to burn vegetation, a management technique which has been utilized for thousands of years. There are a number of purposes for doing this special type ofcontrolled burning, including to facilitatehunting, to change the composition of plant and animal species in an area, weed control, hazard reduction, and increase ofbiodiversity.
While it had been discontinued in many parts of Australia, it has been reintroduced in the 21st century by the teachings ofcustodians from areas where the practice is extant in continuous unbroken tradition such as theNoongar people'scold fire.
The term "fire-stick farming" was coined by AustralianarchaeologistRhys Jones in 1969.[1] It has more recently been calledcultural burning[2][3][4][5] and cool burning.[6][7][8]
Aboriginal burning has been proposed as the cause of a variety of environmental changes, including the extinction of theAustralian megafauna, a diverse range of large animals which populatedPleistocene Australia.Palynologist A. P. Kershaw has argued that Aboriginal burning may have modified the vegetation to the extent that the food resources of the megafauna were diminished, and as a consequence the largelyherbivorous megafauna became extinct.[9] Kershaw also suggested that the arrival of Aboriginal people may have occurred more than 100,000 years ago, and that their burning caused the sequences of vegetation changes which he detects through the late Pleistocene. The first to propose such an early arrival for Aboriginal peoples was Gurdip Singh from theAustralian National University, who found evidence in his pollen cores fromLake George indicating that Aboriginal people began burning in the lakecatchment around 120,000 years ago.[10]
Tim Flannery believes that the megafauna were hunted to extinction by Aboriginal people soon after they arrived. He argues that with the rapid extinction of the megafauna, virtually all of which wereherbivorous, a great deal of vegetation was left uneaten, increasing the standing crop of fuel. As a consequence, fires became larger and hotter than before, causing the reduction of fire-sensitive plants to the advantage of those that were fire-resistant or fire-dependent. Flannery suggests that Aboriginal people then began to burn more frequently to maintain ahigh species diversity and to reduce the effect of high intensity fires on medium-sized animals and perhaps some plants. He argues that twentieth-century Australian mammal extinctions are largely the result of the cessation of Aboriginal "firestick farming".[11]
ResearcherDavid Horton from theAustralian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, suggested in 1982, "Aboriginal use of fire had little impact on the environment and... the patterns of distribution of plants and animals which obtained 200 years ago would have been essentially the same whether or not Aborigines had previously been living here".[12]
A 2010 study ofcharcoal records from more than 220 sites inAustralasia dating back 70,000 years found that the arrival of the first inhabitants about 50,000 years ago did not result in significantly greater fire activity across the continent[13] (although this date is in question, with sources pointing to much earlier migrations).[9][10] The study reported higherbushfire activity from about 70,000 to 28,000 years ago. It decreased until about 18,000 years ago, around the time of the lastglacial maximum, and then increased again, a pattern consistent with shifts between warm and cool climatic conditions. This suggests that fire inAustralasia predominantly reflects climate, with colder periods characterised by less and warmer intervals by morebiomass burning.[13]
Regular firing favoured not onlyfire-tolerant or fire-resistant plants, but also encouraged those animals which were favoured by moreopen country. On this basis, it is clear that Aboriginal burning, in many areas at least, did affect the "natural" ecosystem, producing a range of vegetation associations which would maximise productivity in terms of the food requirements of the Aboriginal people. Jones goes so far as to say that "through firing over thousands of years, Aboriginal man has managed to extend his natural habitat zone".[14]
Most of these theories implicate Aboriginal use of fire as a component of the changes to both plant and animal communities within Australia during the last 50,000 years, although the significance of the effect of their burning is far from clear. Some have suggested that the intensive use of fire as a tool followed, but was not directly a consequence of, the extinction of the megafauna. If the megafauna remained in some areas until theHolocene, evidence is needed from within the last 10,000 years for changes induced by new Aboriginal burning patterns.[15]
Another factor to be considered is the likelihood that Aboriginal population density increased rapidly and dramatically over the last 5,000 to 10,000 years.[16][pages needed]
The stone technology which Aboriginal people had been using with little modification for over 40,000 years diversified and specialised in the last 5,000 years.Spear barbs and tips peaked about 2,000 years ago, and then completely disappeared from the archaeological record in south-eastern Australia. They were replaced by technologies associated with the exploitation of smaller animals – shell fish hooks and bone points along the coast for fishing, axes for huntingpossums across the woodlands, andadzes for sharpening digging sticks along the banks of the larger rivers where theyams were abundant. The intensive and regular use of fire was an essential component of this lateHolocene shift in resource base.[17]
Cultural burnings were slowly eradicated after European settlers began to colonise Australia from 1788 onwards.[18] Studying the layers ofpollen and other organic matter from samples ofsedimentary layers of earth from the around the Bolin Bolinbillabong in Victoria in 2021 revealed that colonisation brought about the biggest changes in around 10,000 years. The samples show a lack of plant biodiversity since then, with huge forests of highly combustible species ofeucalypt replacing plants which were less flammable and burn at lower temperatures. An early result of the disruption of cool burning was the devastatingBlack Thursday bushfires in February 1851, which burnt 50,000 square kilometres (19,000 sq mi) of thecolony of Victoria.[19]
There are a number of purposes, including to facilitate hunting, to change the composition of plant and animal species in an area,[20][5] weed control,[20][5] hazard reduction,[2][5] and increase of biodiversity.[20] Fire-stick farming had the long-term effect of turningdry forest intosavanna, increasing the populations ofgrass-eating animals such askangaroos.
While it has been discontinued in many parts of Australia, it has been reintroduced to some Aboriginal groups[20][2][4] by the teachings of custodians from areas where the practice is extant in continuous unbroken tradition,[21][20] such as theNoongar people's cold fire.
Cultural burnings were reintroduced in parts of Australia during the early twenty-first century, and some Australian states now integrate them with other fire-prevention strategies. State investment in Indigenous fire planning strategies has been most widespread in northern Australia.[22] In 2019 the Darwin Centre for Bushfire Research atCharles Darwin University released data suggesting that the reintroduction of traditional burning on a large scale had significantly reduced the area of land destroyed by wildfires.[22]
The2019–2020 Australian bushfire season led to increasing calls by some experts for the greater use of fire-stick farming. Traditional practitioners had already worked with some fire agencies to conduct burns on a small scale, with the uptake of workshops held by the Firesticks Alliance Indigenous Corporation increasing each year. Farmers and other landowners were interested in learning how traditional fire practices could help them to preserve their properties. Former Emergency Management Commissioner for the state of Victoria,Craig Lapsley, called on theFederal Government to fund and implement a national Indigenous burning program. Firesticks Alliance spokesperson Oliver Costello said that a cultural burn could help to preventwildfires, rejuvenate local flora and protect native animal habitat.[23]
In the final report of the 2020Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements, the Commission found that "The weight of research into the effects of fuel reduction on the propagation of extreme bushfires indicates that as conditions deteriorate, fuel reduction is of diminishing effectiveness". It distinguished between ordinary and extreme bushfires, saying that fuel reduction could be used to reduce risk: "Reducing available fuels in the landscape can also slow the initial rate of fire spread and fire intensity, which can provide opportunities for fire suppression and thereby reduce the risk of fires escalating into extreme fire events."[24]
On 14 May 2021, a scheduled cultural burn took place in theAdelaide park lands by representatives of theKaurna people, in a highly symbolic moment after years of preparation to restore the ancient practice. The project, called Kaurna Kardla Parranthi, was undertaken with the support of theCity of Adelaide.[25] The burn was part of the ecological management plan for a key area of biodiversity inCarriageway Park / Tuthangga (Park 17).[26][27]
A series ofaerial photographs taken around 1947 reveal that theKarajarri people practised fire-stick farming in theGreat Sandy Desert ofWestern Australia for thousands of years, until they left the desert in the 1950s and 1960s. When fires swept the desert in the decades following their departure, they caused widespread destruction, "losing 36 to 50 per cent of 24,000 square kilometres (9,300 sq mi) of desert to just a couple of fires every year". Since the establishment ofnative title over the area and the proclamation as anIndigenous Protected Area in 2014, Karajarri rangers have reintroduced the practice of burning.Traditional owners and scientists are studying the flora and fauna in the area to see how the fires affect individual species. While some species prefer more recently burnt vegetation, others favour areas burnt longer ago, so it is important to have a diversity of different fire ages, to encourage biodiversity.[28]
In 2017, the Bega LALC began a cultural burning program as part of the management strategy for their landholdings.
The cultural burns use a lot of ground fuel in fire-prone areas, making a bushfire less likely if cultural burns are regularly carried out.
"I find myself following on from those old people who have passed and continuing the journey of educating and teaching the younger people just like I was taught," said Mr Steffensen an Indigenous fire practitioner from Cape York.
Seniortraditional owner, Bessie Coleman, has had a long connection with fire management on Jawoyn country, at the southern end of Kakadu, spanning back in her family for generations. "From our family, they pass the knowledge down, it stays with me all the time," she said. "It's passed from generation to generation, right up to the new generation and now I'm doing it with my grand kids, working on country, burning on country."