Living with fire

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Video: Has southeast Australia always burned so hot?

December 6, 2023

AuthorsMichael Joiner
Multimedia Editor, 360info

Suzannah Lyons
Senior Commissioning Editor, 360info

ContributorsMichael-Shawn Fletcher

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00:00:00:24 - 00:00:22:10
Michael-Shawn Fletcher
The 2019-2020 catastrophic bushfires at that time impacted an enormous area of south east Australia. The narrative around these fires that are actually increasing in time is that they are inherent feature of the Australian landscape. It's something that we need to deal with and that are being exacerbated or made worse by climate change and we really want to interrogate whether that was true or not.
00:00:22:12 - 00:00:49:15
Michael-Shawn Fletcher
The understanding that I have, both from my cultural background as a Wiradjuri person, but also in my research with and for Aboriginal communities is that landscapes and country in Australia was very different prior to the British invasion and that it's quite possible that these catastrophic fires have been made more frequent and more severe, not only through climate change but more deeply through the lack of care and management of country.
00:00:49:18 - 00:01:21:01
Michael-Shawn Fletcher
There's a whole bunch of different kinds of information we can glean as use of the past from and what country was like or what landscapes will lock in Australia prior to the British invasion and the removal of Aboriginal care management. There's writings of settlers and farmers and colonists. There's the paintings from realist painters such as Eugene von Guérard whose paintings are considered so accurate that they've revegetated landscapes based on being able to identify species within his paintings.
00:01:21:03 - 00:01:43:15
Michael-Shawn Fletcher
And there's the empirical, scientific data that I collect, which is essentially microscopic remains that are produced by plant communities and by fires and all of these kinds of processes that happen that are blown around in the atmosphere and they land on lakes and on some boats and they settle and build up over years and years and years and sometimes millions of years, much like an ice core that's on land.
00:01:43:17 - 00:02:31:12
Michael-Shawn Fletcher
But piecing these various fragments together to build up a whole picture of of how a country has changed, we know that there was a strong narrative that Australian landscapes, particularly in the southeast, were open. So we can glean from that that the landscape has changed a lot. We've got sites ranging from Bundjalung country, which is a little south of Byron Bay, right through to what are own country, which is to the west of Melbourne in the southwest, and they are all from within contemporary forest ecosystems and they all show a significant increase in eucalyptus trees occurring immediately following the removal and suppression of Aboriginal care management in the mid 1800s.
00:02:31:17 - 00:03:01:03
Michael-Shawn Fletcher
We see this increase in eucalypts and why that's important is what we know is that eucalypts are incredibly flammable, they're fast growing and flammable. So this increase in eucalypts is associated almost uniformly, once again with an increase in charcoal like the products of fire being deposited, the eucalypts increase and then fire increases. And we see this as a uniform pattern right up to the east coast of Australia and through the south east.
00:03:01:05 - 00:03:29:24
Michael-Shawn Fletcher
And really importantly, this happens prior to the onset of anthropogenic climate change. And now we're in this situation where we have overloaded forests that are not cared for, managed as they have been for millions of years, sorry, thousands of years. We readily conserve or protect, but we don't return the kind of care and management that these forests need and to keep them safe to live in.
00:03:30:01 - 00:03:56:10
Michael-Shawn Fletcher
The the approach to to looking after Country that dominates now the conservation that the national park ideology is based on a fundamental lie which was that this landscape was uninhabited was that Aboriginal people were intelligent parasites who had no discernible impact on the environment. All they did was happened to glean their vegetable and animal sustenance where it arose.
00:03:56:12 - 00:04:21:00
Michael-Shawn Fletcher
And this lie perpetuates. It stems from those early colonists’ ideas about Country. They would write these open landscapes, the splendor of these open landscapes that we know ecologically if we leave them alone, tending the forests. So the fact that they were open and grassland meant that there was some intervention happening. So right at that foundation, the founding document, the ‘terra nullius’ is based on was an occupied land, ‘terra nullius’ so nobody's land.
00:04:21:02 - 00:05:05:02
Michael-Shawn Fletcher
And that myth and that lie is perpetuated right through to the present day. In terms of solutions, it's multifaceted. We need to address that deep fundamental cultural schism that is perpetuating this problem, that is setting up things like our firefighters, they are incredible people. But the fundamental paradigm that you need a paramilitary organisation to fight fire in a landscape that is incredibly flammable and has been cared for and managed with fire for at least 60,000 years is one of the the systemic things or at least representative of the systemic schism, the split between reality and where we're existing today that exists in this continent.
00:05:05:06 - 00:05:29:20
Michael-Shawn Fletcher
And I see societies sitting now in a very simplified spectrum between this narcissistic view that environments in the world is there for us. And we take, take, take, take, take. You see this in the mining sector, logging sector, all this, that everything's there for us. That has given rise to this misanthropic, the human-hating group. The antidote to that is to lock humans out and keep them out, and it misses the whole appropriate engagement
00:05:29:24 - 00:05:55:14
Michael-Shawn Fletcher
With Country and the very fundamental principle of healthy Country, healthy people that Aboriginal people, because we are a part of it. We need to get inventive if we're not happy with handing over the reins to Aboriginal people and letting them take control, and in many cases that's that's not very possible because we've let these systems get so wild and so sick that converting them back to healthy Country with fire becomes too dangerous.
00:05:55:16 - 00:06:19:03
Michael-Shawn Fletcher
So do we have to go in and intervene? Selective logging follow up with some burning? There's resistance to that, but let's try it. Let's try these these different things. We have to get inventive. We’re in this moment of almost chaos or uncertainty, and we have to start trying different things. But the one fundamental thing that needs to underpin it all is engaging traditional owners.
00:06:19:05 - 00:06:33:12
Michael-Shawn Fletcher
This isn't an us or them situation. We all live on this country now, this continent, and we all live on Country. This is about empowering Aboriginal people to reconnect and bring their enormous reservoirs of knowledge to solve the wicked problems that we have now.

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Both historical and scientific records show an increase in the number of fires since the mid-1800s.

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Video: Has southeast Australia always burned so hot?

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