WfHC - cover page (not to be used with pre-printed report ... - CSIRO

As a result of such conditions, at Oriners the cattlemen would pursue the opposite strategy
from one on the Coleman described by Philip (early wet season fires and wet season
mustering). At Oriners they would burn at the end of the wet season (2.6.3) to encourage
regrowth and concentrations of cattle in the early dry, the do the main mustering between
May and October, depending on the season.
Oriners was largely destocked when it was sold to the Kowanyama people, and aside from
some mustering activity in the late 1990s, cattle have been allowed to wander and breed
freely. The current number of cattle on the property is unknown, and an estimate of their
numbers and/or additional mustering effort may be a useful exercise to undertake in the
coming years. What is noticeable in the above section is how human residence was heavily
tied to the seasonal location and presence of cattle on the landscape. This relationship has
effectively been decoupled since 1990, with cattle no longer being the main priority in human
presence. Instead, road access is the primary determinant of where human beings are in the
landscape, and the motivations for that presence include through-traffic, NRM work and
recreational pig hunting and fishing.
2.6.3 Fire regimes
Fire management at Oriners requires careful attention to the timing, location, intensity, and
purpose of the fire. Many fires are accidentally lit, but fire management by Indigenous people
is one of the most well known forms of Indigenous land management, and was an important
part of cattle management and mustering. Strang (1997: 89) describes how Indigenous
people express concern when country remains unburnt for several years, thereby becoming
„wild‟ and „dirty‟ and vulnerable to hot bush fires. The following comments relate to both past
and present fires and uses of fires at Oriners:
The grass, [when] the grass starts drying up, that‟s it. The wet is nearly over. That is when
we are supposed to start burning. When it‟s still got a lot of moisture so the grass can grow
back again.
Philip Yam
---------------------------------------
Cecil Hughes: The sand ridge country is very poor but if you burn the country at the right
time you get the regrowth and it takes the cattle through the winter months anyway.
Marcus Barber: So what is the right time?
Cecil Hughes: It depends on when the wet finishes. As soon as the country will burn, you
get out there and burn it. As soon as the fire will do it and you can control your burn,
because if you do it at the right time, the fires go out at night. So you can burn a certain
area and know it will go out at night [because] there‟s dew and that country is still half
green. If a creek goes down there, you burn this side of the creek [and] you know it won‟t
go across. If you leave it too late it will jump the creek and keep going.
Marcus Barber: Are there other things that you needed to do each year to keep that country
going, to keep it healthy?
Cecil Hughes: The key to it is to burn at the right time, that‟s the main thing.
---------------------------------------
Marcus Barber: Were there still fires burning when you arrived [at Oriners homestead] or
was it too late for the fires?
Ezra Michael: Too late for the fires. We could not burn it, the grass was all dry. When I got
there, sometime in the winter, June or July somewhere around June I think, the grass was
there. There was burning grass, not round the [station] a long way out. Out on the cattle
yards where we were mustering- Jewfish yard, Bull yard, Horseshoe,
Working Knowledge at Oriners Station, Cape York
109