
We’re working with the Ngadju people to help empower their efforts to re-engage in the management of Western Australia’s Great Western Woodlands. This picture shows a fire training day Buldania Rocks. (Image: Suzanne Prober, CSIRO)
Show descriptionHide descriptionFire has influenced the way Indigenous people live with their land for millennia. Over this time, Indigenous Australians have skilfully used fire to manage their environments. These practices are referred to as Indigenous cultural burning.
Indigenous and ranger groups have initiated and engaged in a diverse array of Indigenous burning activities and partnerships. From the Tiwi Islands to Tasmania, we’ve been supporting cultural burning partnerships, projects and activities for more than a decade.
So, how can Australia support Indigenous cultural burning knowledge and practices in future fire management?
Here are three key ways we’ve supported effective cross-cultural partnerships to manage Australia’s landscape through fire.
1. Caring for Country through fire
We support projects that use Indigenous understandings of country and western science. These projects help to look after plants, animals and entire habitats. For example, we supported the Bundjalung people of Byron Bay (Arakwal) to do their first cultural burn in 30 years. Their cultural burning helps to look after the special plants in the Arakwal National Park, including the yellow Byron Bay orchid.
2. Protocols for non-Indigenous partners to support Indigenous landscape burning
We’ve worked with Indigenous leaders and fire management groups to develop six protocols. These protocols can guide non-indigenous partnerships in how they support Indigenous landscape burning activities.
3. Accounting for the many benefits of Indigenous landscape burning
Indigenous fire management practices can provide win-win outcomes for Indigenous people and the environment. Understanding the benefits achieved from these activities and partnerships is important. They can help to maximise the multiple social, cultural and environmental benefits of appropriate landscape burning.
This post is a short summary. Read the full feature article on ECOS: Three practical ways to support Indigenous landscape burning in Australia
5 comments
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2nd April 2020 at 1:34 pm
Appreciate regional & local feed back on our croun land
6th March 2020 at 3:26 pm
Oh another fictitious myth perpetrated, on behalf of the indigenous population.Fires were instigated to flush out small game and reptiles to enable access for food , not as a controlled undergrowth burn off.
28th February 2020 at 6:15 pm
The Australian continent has changed greatly since pre-colonial times. As much as I admire the farming strategies of the Indigenous people there has been so much wholesale land clearance and general warming up of the environment it makes the older farming techniques dangerous to the extreme.
27th February 2020 at 7:24 pm
As long as Indigenous Advisors are being paid same as CSIRO advisors am ok. Their land management practices exceed European and English settlers.
27th February 2020 at 1:16 am
CSIRO
Climate patterns have changed. Question: Have fire patterns changed also? And if so, are indigenous methods still relevant?