Heritage 0308_Bushfire.pdf - Australian Heritage Magazine

had been regularly burning dry
sclerophyll forest for thousands of
years. Though fire was very common,
leading Captain James Cook to
poetically describe Australia as “this
continent of smoke”, it was not
capriciously started by the
Aboriginals. It was part of a system
termed ‘fire-stick farming’, where the
timing, extent and location of burns
were carefully controlled, usually by
tribal elders. In middle to late
summer, a small area that had been
left to grow for between three to five
years was burnt under close
supervision, as John Lort Stokes
observed during the Beagle’s survey of
the Australian coast between 1837
and 1843.
On our way we met a party of natives
engaged in burning the bush, which
they do in sections every year. The
dexterity with which they manage so
proverbially dangerous agent as fire is
indeed astonishing. Those to whom
this duty is especially entrusted, and
who guide or stop the running flame,
are armed with large green boughs,
with which, if it moves in the wrong
direction, they beat it out.
It used to be thought that fire-stick
farming was employed principally as a
means of flushing game towards
hunters. Though doubtless fire was
used for this purpose, regularly
burning the bush had other, longerterm
benefits for the Aboriginal
people.
By opening the bush canopy and
returning the nutrients trapped in
leaf litter to the soil, fires encouraged
the growth of plants which
Aboriginal people liked to eat,
particularly the perennial herbs
whose bulbs and tubers formed an
important part of their diet. Burning
also made hunting easier, both by
promoting the grasses that their game
ate and by keeping the forest open,
which gave a hunter a clearer shot
with his spear.
The general effect of Aboriginal
fire-stick farming was to create a
patchwork forest made up of areas at
various stages of recovery from fire.
Leaf litter was never allowed to build
up, so the fires were low enough in
intensity for established trees to
survive, though young saplings were
often killed. As a result of the grazing
provided by the understorey of herbs
and grasses and control through
regular hunting, many animals had
relatively small, but stable,
populations.
Captain Cook said more than he
knew when he compared the
Australian bush to “plantations in a
gentleman’s park”, for it was no more
natural than a plantation or an
orchard. Like those European
artificial habitats, if the management
system was removed, the bush would
rapidly fall to weeds. This is exactly
what happened in uncleared areas
when Aboriginal people were
displaced and no longer exerted their
influence on the forests.
As the seedlings of trees and bushes
were left to reach maturity, the open
forest gradually closed, and
understorey plants were deprived of
light and drowned under a sea of leaflitter.
In some places she-oaks were
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