Among Ancient Flames
In Australia's Kakadu National Park, Aborigines are reigniting traditional methods of managing the land. But their regular burn-offs have also fired up new questions
July 15, 2002
By Lisa Clausen

Sandra MacGregor deftly peels the water lily just picked from the lagoon. Chewing on its fleshy stem, savoring its celery taste, she looks out across the wetlands of Kakadu. This 20,000-sq.-km national park is a wonderland to the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit each year, but to MacGregor, it's her backyard and supermarket, the wild place where she grew up among the stories and bush lessons of her Aboriginal mother and grandmother. Here they taught her how to hunt turtles hidden in the mud, how to cook magpie geese and how to find the insect larvae that her own children love to eat. And she watched as they torched the floodplains and woodlands, shaping the landscape with fire.

Australia's Aborigines have used fire for thousands of years to flush out animals, coax vegetation into regrowth and clear overgrown country. In the Top End, all that fell away in many places when white settlers came and Aborigines were moved off their lands. Today, in tribes like MacGregor's, the passing of such knowledge from old to young is failing. Which is why MacGregor and her partner Peter Christophersen, along with other Aborigines across northern Australia, are trying to revive traditional burning. By taking youths and elders out bush to burn, the pair hope to inspire their people to take up again the practice that they call "our expression of ownership."

In southern Australia, bushfire is a catastrophe that can kill and destroy. In northern Australia, where the tropical savanna woodlands make for less severe fires, it's a familiar part of the seasonal cycle. Roughly half the Top End burns every year, and most fires are deliberately lit. Land managers prefer to burn around now, during the early part of the dry season, causing what Northern Territory University ecologist David Bowman calls a "predictable tide that washes over the landscape." At this time of year, the Top End is littered with fires smoldering on roadsides, and tracts of blackened earth. Plumes of smoke hang on the horizon, and in Darwin the air smells acrid.

But despite being an annual and widespread event, fire remains controversial here. Scientists and land managers are unsure about the long-term ecological impact of different burning regimes, including Aboriginal burning. The issue is not whether to burn--failure to do so makes savanna grasslands vulnerable to fiercer fires late in the dry season--but when to burn, and how often. Burning for conservation and burning to preserve traditional customs are not always compatible. That, says CSIRO ecologist Alan Andersen, makes fire management "the most contentious land management issue in the Top End today."

There are still large gaps in our knowledge of fire's ancient role in the Australian landscape. What is clear, says NTU's Bowman, is that when Aborigines arrived some 50,000 years ago, they "colonized a country on fire." Blazes sparked by lightning strikes raged across the uninhabited landscape. Plant and animal species adapted to fire, or moved to places it didn't reach. Aborigines harnessed the flames--to drive kangaroos toward waiting hunters or clear dead grass in time for the first rains of the monsoon season. "Fire is for making new plants," says western Arnhem Land man Adrian Garnarradj.

The effect Aboriginal burning practices had on the continent is still widely debated. Some say they contributed to the disappearance of certain plant and animal species. Others say fire underpinned a sophisticated land management system. Still others argue that both are true. The interruption in burning patterns caused by the dispersal of Aboriginal tribes means it's hard to say whether Aboriginal burning today is truly traditional, says the CSIRO's Andersen: "We don't know exactly what those traditional ways of burning were--we don't know exactly what the environment might have been like 100 years ago."

Old ways of burning--in which people walking through their territory created mosaics of small burnt and unburnt patches and observed kinship rules about who could burn where--fell into disuse as tribes quit their lands. It was the death two years ago of MacGregor's uncle, a clan elder, that set her and Christophersen thinking about the knowledge lost with the passing of aged relatives. MacGregor's mother and aunt burned widely through Kakadu until the 1980s, but over time more and more clan elders died or fell out of the habit. Many younger people, says Christophersen, are reluctant to resume burning because Kakadu is a national park--managed jointly by local people and the Federal Government--and they are unsure how tourists would react.

Which is why a year ago he and MacGregor, who's a member of the management board, sought--and won--Parks Australia support for a project to involve their clan in managing a tribal area of roughly 700 sq. km in central Kakadu. Now the couple take clan members out on week-long burning camps, where elders share their knowledge of fire and hunting with young people. "We don't want our kids to have to go to the library to read about what our people did," says Christophersen. "We want them out there on the land, learning about it and about their obligation to look after it when they grow up."

Three hours to the south, on a roadside near Katherine, Greg Lyons throws a lit match from his four-wheel-drive vehicle. His six passengers do the same, and soon the dead grass ripples with flame. Two years ago, Lyons and Katherine's Jawoyn Association started a ranger program in the small Aboriginal community of Barunga. Now about a dozen men and women are working on weeds, rubbish and fire use. At this time of year--before the grasses, which can grow several meters high, become more flammable during the long dry--fire is their focus. "If we don't burn every year, someone else will do it for us, or nature will," says Lyons, as two of the rangers roar off among the trees on quad bikes, boxes of matches in hand.

For the people of Barunga, fire is hunting and culture intertwined. "In our way, fire cleans up our homeland," says ranger Wayne Kala-Kala. "When we start our early burning, that means we take out all our day-to-day things, like goannas, and then we leave it until the next rain, which brings up the new shoots and all the bush tucker." Lyons' plan is to expand the program through the area's five communities, restoring a burning regime to a vast swathe of uninhabited country.

The methods of white and black are blending. This year, traditional owners worked with the Northern Territory Bushfires Council to create a 130-km-long firebreak through a now depopulated stretch of Arnhem Land using incendiary devices dropped from aircraft; the elders pointed out sacred areas along the way. Like his grandfather before him, 30-year-old ranger Dimitrious Anderson is one of the area's traditional owners. "We got a law," he says, walking through the honey-colored savanna, pointing out billygoat plums and the leaves that flavor cooked emu. "It's our cultural law and burning is part of that."

In Barunga, under the hot afternoon sun, elder Phyllis Nynjorrotj remembers fires lit when she was a child more than 60 years ago. The Jawoyn woman's family were nomads, moving from one water source to the next in the country around Katherine. They caught fish in billabongs with poison from leaves and slept under paperbark and furs. "Everywhere they burn, when I was a little girl, all around," she says. "We would walk this way and burn, walking along the railway line and burn for blue-tongue lizard and for goanna. We would camp halfway and the women would look for bush tucker. It was a long time ago. The men would have spears. We would look up and watch them. They would make fire with sticks."

The fire-sticks and long journeys on foot have mostly been replaced with windproof matches and four-wheel-drive vehicles. But the practice of walking through country while burning it has not entirely vanished. In some parts of Arnhem Land, an Aboriginal-owned area of some 97,000 sq. km to the east of Darwin, walking to burn has begun again in long depopulated areas. The revival's aim is partly cultural affirmation, but burners also want to reduce the number of uncontrollable wildfires that currently break out later in the year in areas not under fire management.

At the small settlement of Kunbarlanjnja (Oenpelli), in western Arnhem Land, 19 men made an eight-day walk last month, burning and hunting across the escarpment. Many had never been to the area before, and elders were flown in at various places to share what they had learned traversing that country as young men half a century ago. "There are very few old men left now with that knowledge," says Danyel Wolff, land management coordinator of Kunbarlanjnja's Demed Association, which supports western Arnhem Land's eight outstations. Their knowledge of burning is "like an art form of picking country, of knowing when it's right to burn and how to get a good burn that reduces the fuel load but doesn't scorch the tree canopy," he says.

A burning program began formally two years ago, and one team of 10 men now burns regularly on the plateau. Such country was managed with fire for thousands of years before the dispersal of the population gave free rein to the damaging late dry-season wildfires that can wipe out flora and fauna. "There's a saying here," says Wolff, "that people need the country and the country needs people." But exactly how the country needs people--and their burning--is still unclear. The CSIRO's Andersen, who led an experiment that studied the impact of fire on flora and fauna at nearby Kapalga over a five-year period, says no one can say what long-term effect the widespread reintroduction of traditional burning would have on biodiversity. "And do we mean biodiversity as it was before humans appeared, or as created by Aboriginal burning?" he says. "To me, working out what the goals are is the greatest challenge of fire management."

Burning for conservation--which may involve, for instance, burning less regularly in areas containing fire-sensitive plant species--and burning for hunting can find common ground, says the Jawoyn Association's Greg Lyons: "I provide the environmental input, and they provide the cultural input, and between us we work out what's mutually acceptable." But while Lyons works on Aboriginal land, Kakadu--with its joint Aboriginal and Federal Government management--is subject to different dilemmas, says Andersen. While burning to travel through overgrown country is traditional practice, for example, is it good practice in a national park? "Things that are perfectly reasonable for people living off the land are not the sorts of things that nowadays would drive national parks management," he says.

Aboriginal burning at places such as Kunbarlanjnja undoubtedly has modern influences. But that's not a problem, say Wolff and others: there's no reason why fire breaks, helicopters and planes cannot be combined with Aboriginal people's knowledge of country, vegetation and seasonal changes. "There are two different tool boxes," Wolff says, "and we should use both."

Peter Christophersen and Sandra MacGregor--whose burning-education project will continue to be funded by Parks Australia until at least the end of this year--adopt a similar mix, using helicopters but also drawing on their clan's stores of knowledge. While their children move happily from eating biscuits around the campfire to scrambling for the rich seeds of the water lilies, the couple discuss their plans for the wetland before them. When they burn the thick grass there soon, they will open up habitat for more animal and plant species and at the same time clear an old hunting area that has long been overgrown. That, they say, will promote both ecological diversity and good hunting. "There's still a lot of knowledge here that doesn't have to die," says Christophersen. "It will change from generation to generation--but we can still use it."