Fire-stick farming, also known as cultural burning and cool burning, is the practice of
Aboriginal Australians
Aboriginal Australians are the various Indigenous peoples of the Mainland Australia, Australian mainland and many of its islands, such as Tasmania, Fraser Island, Hinchinbrook Island, the Tiwi Islands, and Groote Eylandt, but excluding the T ...
regularly using fire to burn vegetation, which has been practised for thousands of years. There are a number of purposes for doing this special type of
controlled burn
A controlled or prescribed burn, also known as hazard reduction burning, backfire, swailing, or a burn-off, is a fire set intentionally for purposes of forest management, farming, prairie restoration or greenhouse gas abatement. A contro ...
ing, including to facilitate hunting, to change the composition of plant and animal species in an area, weed control, hazard reduction, and increase of
biodiversity
Biodiversity or biological diversity is the variety and variability of life on Earth. Biodiversity is a measure of variation at the genetic ('' genetic variability''), species ('' species diversity''), and ecosystem ('' ecosystem diversity' ...
.
While it had been discontinued in many parts of Australia, it has been reintroduced in the 21st century by the teachings of custodians from areas where the practice is extant in continuous unbroken tradition such as the
Noongar peoples'
cold fire.
Terminology
The term "fire-stick farming" was coined by Australian
archaeologist Rhys Jones in 1969.
It has more recently been called cultural burning
and cool burning.
History
Aboriginal burning has been proposed as the cause of a variety of environmental changes, including the extinction of the
Australian megafauna
The term Australian megafauna refers to the megafauna in Australia during the Pleistocene Epoch. Most of these species became extinct during the latter half of the Pleistocene, and the roles of human and climatic factors in their extinction ...
, a diverse range of large animals which populated
Pleistocene
The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the '' Ice age'') is the geological epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was finally confirmed ...
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 largely
herbivorous
A herbivore is an animal anatomically and physiologically adapted to eating plant material, for example foliage or marine algae, for the main component of its diet. As a result of their plant diet, herbivorous animals typically have mouthpart ...
megafauna became extinct.
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 the
Australian National University
The Australian National University (ANU) is a public research university located in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Its main campus in Acton encompasses seven teaching and research colleges, in addition to several national academies and ...
, who found evidence in his pollen cores from
Lake George indicating that Aboriginal people began burning in the lake
catchment
A drainage basin is an area of land where all flowing surface water converges to a single point, such as a river mouth, or flows into another body of water, such as a lake or ocean. A basin is separated from adjacent basins by a perimeter, th ...
around 120,000 years ago.
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 were
herbivorous
A herbivore is an animal anatomically and physiologically adapted to eating plant material, for example foliage or marine algae, for the main component of its diet. As a result of their plant diet, herbivorous animals typically have mouthpart ...
, 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 a
high 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".
Researcher
David Horton from the
Australian 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".
A 2010 study of
charcoal records from more than 220 sites in
Australasia
Australasia is a region that comprises Australia, New Zealand and some neighbouring islands in the Pacific Ocean. The term is used in a number of different contexts, including geopolitically, physiogeographically, philologically, and ecolo ...
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
[ (although this date is in question, with sources pointing to much earlier migrations).] The study reported higher bushfire activity from about 70,000 to 28,000 years ago. It decreased until about 18,000 years ago, around the time of the last glacial maximum, and then increased again, a pattern consistent with shifts between warm and cool climatic conditions. This suggests that fire in Australasia
Australasia is a region that comprises Australia, New Zealand and some neighbouring islands in the Pacific Ocean. The term is used in a number of different contexts, including geopolitically, physiogeographically, philologically, and ecolo ...
predominantly reflects climate, with colder periods characterised by less and warmer intervals by more biomass
Biomass is plant-based material used as a fuel for heat or electricity production. It can be in the form of wood, wood residues, energy crops, agricultural residues, and waste from industry, farms, and households. Some people use the terms biom ...
burning.
Regular firing favoured not only fire-tolerant
Fire ecology is a scientific discipline concerned with natural processes involving fire in an ecosystem and the ecological effects, the interactions between fire and the abiotic and biotic components of an ecosystem, and the role as an ecosystem p ...
or fire-resistant plants, but also encouraged those animals which were favoured by more open 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".
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 the Holocene
The Holocene ( ) is the current geological epoch. It began approximately 11,650 cal years Before Present (), after the Last Glacial Period, which concluded with the Holocene glacial retreat. The Holocene and the preceding Pleistocene togeth ...
, evidence is needed from within the last 10,000 years for changes induced by new Aboriginal burning patterns.
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.
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 hunting possums
Possum may refer to:
Animals
* Phalangeriformes, or possums, any of a number of arboreal marsupial species native to Australia, New Guinea, and Sulawesi
** Common brushtail possum (''Trichosurus vulpecula''), a common possum in Australian urban ...
across the woodlands, and adzes for sharpening digging sticks along the banks of the larger rivers where the yams were abundant. The intensive and regular use of fire was an essential component of this late Holocene
The Holocene ( ) is the current geological epoch. It began approximately 11,650 cal years Before Present (), after the Last Glacial Period, which concluded with the Holocene glacial retreat. The Holocene and the preceding Pleistocene togeth ...
shift in resource base.
Cultural burnings were slowly eradicated after Britain colonised Australia from 1788 onwards. Studying the layers of pollen
Pollen is a powdery substance produced by seed plants. It consists of pollen grains (highly reduced microgametophytes), which produce male gametes (sperm cells). Pollen grains have a hard coat made of sporopollenin that protects the gametop ...
and other organic matter from samples of sedimentary
Sedimentary rocks are types of rock that are formed by the accumulation or deposition of mineral or organic particles at Earth's surface, followed by cementation. Sedimentation is the collective name for processes that cause these particles ...
layers of earth from the around the Bolin Bolin billabong 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 of eucalypt
Eucalypt is a descriptive name for woody plants with capsule fruiting bodies belonging to seven closely related genera (of the tribe Eucalypteae) found across Australasia:
''Eucalyptus'', '' Corymbia'', '' Angophora'', '' Stockwellia'', '' Allo ...
replacing plants which were less flammable and burn at lower temperatures. An early result of the disruption of cool burning was the devastating Black Thursday bushfires in February 1851, which burnt of the colony of Victoria.
Purposes
There are a number of purposes, including to facilitate hunting, to change the composition of plant and animal species in an area, weed control, hazard reduction, and increase of biodiversity. Fire-stick farming had the long-term effect of turning dry forest
Dry or dryness most often refers to:
* Lack of rainfall, which may refer to
**Arid regions
**Drought
* Dry or dry area, relating to legal prohibition of selling, serving, or imbibing alcoholic beverages
* Dry humor, deadpan
* Dryness (medical) ...
into savannah, increasing the population of some nonspecific grass-eating species like the kangaroo
Kangaroos are four marsupials from the family Macropodidae (macropods, meaning "large foot"). In common use the term is used to describe the largest species from this family, the red kangaroo, as well as the antilopine kangaroo, eastern ...
.
Current use
While it has been discontinued in many parts of Australia, it has been reintroduced to some Aboriginal groups by the teachings of custodians from areas where the practice is extant in continuous unbroken tradition, such as the Noongar peoples' 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. In 2019 the Darwin Centre for Bushfire Research at Charles 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.
2019–2020 bushfires
The 2019–2020 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 the Federal Government to fund and implement a national Indigenous burning program. Firesticks Alliance spokesperson Oliver Costello said that a cultural burn could help to prevent wildfire
A wildfire, forest fire, bushfire, wildland fire or rural fire is an unplanned, uncontrolled and unpredictable fire in an area of combustible vegetation. Depending on the type of vegetation present, a wildfire may be more specifically identi ...
s, rejuvenate local flora and protect native animal habitat.
In the final report of the 2020 Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements
The Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements, also referred to as the Bushfires Royal Commission, was a royal commission established in 2020 by the Australian government to inquire into and report upon natural disaster manag ...
, 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."
2021 Adelaide park lands cultural burn
On 14 May 2021, a scheduled cultural burn took place in the Adelaide park lands by representatives of the Kaurna people
The Kaurna people (, ; also Coorna, Kaura, Gaurna and other variations) are a group of Aboriginal people whose traditional lands include the Adelaide Plains of South Australia. They were known as the Adelaide tribe by the early settlers. Kaur ...
, 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 the City of Adelaide. The burn was part of the ecological management plan for a key area of biodiversity in Carriageway Park / Tuthangga (Park 17
The Adelaide Park Lands are the figure-eight of land spanning both banks of the River Torrens between Hackney and Thebarton and separating the City of Adelaide area (which includes both Adelaide city centre and North Adelaide) from the surro ...
).
Examples
A series of aerial photograph
Aerial photography (or airborne imagery) is the taking of photographs from an aircraft or other airborne platforms. When taking motion pictures, it is also known as aerial videography.
Platforms for aerial photography include fixed-wing airc ...
s taken around 1947 reveal that the Karajarri people practised fire-stick farming in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia
Western Australia (commonly abbreviated as WA) is a state of Australia occupying the western percent of the land area of Australia excluding external territories. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Southern Ocean to ...
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 of desert to just a couple of fires every year". Since the establishment of native title over the area and the proclamation as an Indigenous 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.
See also
* Native American use of fire in ecosystems
* Biochar
*Fire regime
A fire regime is the pattern, frequency, and intensity of the bushfires and wildfires that prevail in an area over long periods of time. It is an integral part of fire ecology, and renewal for certain types of ecosystems. A fire regime describes t ...
* Shifting cultivation
* Slash-and-burn
* Slash-and-char
*Terra preta
''Terra preta'' (, locally , literally "black soil" in Portuguese) is a type of very dark, fertile anthropogenic soil ( anthrosol) found in the Amazon Basin. It is also known as "Amazonian dark earth" or "Indian black earth". In Portuguese its ...
Notes
References
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Further reading
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* The role of Indigenous rangers in fire management in Australia's deserts.
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{{Indigenous Australians
Australian Aboriginal bushcraft
Agriculture in Australia
Bushfood
Wildfire ecology