Fire Country

One of the communities The Nature Conservancy works with is the Ngarinyin people, the Traditional Owners and custodians of Wilinggin Country, in the far northern reaches of Western Australia.

Like much of the continent, Wilinggin begs for a wide-angle lens. Vast, undulating plateaus are punctuated by steep escarpments and dissected by deep, meandering canyons that evoke giant primeval snakes.

However, epic as the scenery is, the distinctive character of this place best reveals itself through a narrower perspective, in the striking, bottle-shaped Boab trees with their branches reaching skywards like a thousand arms and the knee-high grass gently swaying in the warm breeze; but perhaps most of all in the Ngarinyin people, who have called Wilinggin home for time immemorial.

Across Australia, indigenous peoples have formed a unique relationship with their environment that was unbroken for millennia. To many of them, people and country are one. They have not just managed their land but formed it. In Wilinggin, one of the key tools the Ngarinyin have used to shape the landscape is fire.

“Fire is very important for Wilinggin Country. In my language, we call it Wudu. The old people who travelled across this land knew what to do. They carried fire sticks with them, in their hair or in a Coolaman”, says Donald Campbell, the senior Ngarinyin elder.

He recounts how during the cooler months at the end of each wet season, his ancestors would set small, controlled fires as they went about their day, burning grass and small bushes to create openings in the landscape and allow the soil to rejuvenate. These fires would burn at low temperatures, doing no damage to the Boabs or other larger trees and bushes – but burning off enough flammable material to prevent larger, hotter and much more destructive fires from engulfing the landscape later in the dry season.

Over the course of many centuries, plant and animal species in Wilinggin Country adapted to this land management of fighting fire with fire. Many species came to rely on controlled seasonal burns to clear new habitats for them to colonize or to feed in.

With the arrival in Australia of the first colonisers in the late 18th century, this finely tuned ecological balance was upended. Over the course of two centuries, indigenous people were increasingly forced off the land across the continent, to be replaced by farmers and other settlers who brought their own ideas of land management from Europe. This not only did untold damage to indigenous families and their cultures, but to the environment of Australia as well. The introduction of invasive alien species such as rabbits, red foxes or cane toads has profoundly transformed ecosystems and contributed to the extinction of around 100 endemic species of plants and animals. But the radical shift in how fire was managed may have been just as impactful. With the disappearance of traditional controlled burns in most of Australia, dry grass was able to build up each year and provide fuel for larger, much hotter bushfires – often resulting in the catastrophic conflagrations we have become all too used to witnessing across the continent.

However, important changes are once again underway down under.

“Today, we are in the middle of another shift, but this time it is a shift back towards the old ways, back towards an indigenous approach to land management and especially to fire”, says Luke Preece, Specialist for Indigenous Landscapes at the Nature Conservancy (TNC) Australia, a Cartier for Nature partner.

Since the early 1990s, when the decades-long struggle of Australian Indigenous Peoples for land rights resulted in the granting of so-called Native Titles to indigenous organisations by the government, more and more initiatives have emerged that aim to revive traditional indigenous fire management methods, with significant benefits for people, climate and nature. One such initiatives is led by the Wilinggin Aboriginal Corporation (WAC), which holds the Native Title for Wilinggin Country and represents the interests of the Ngarinyin people.

Luke Russ is a Fire Manager for the WAC. In this role, he works with Traditional Owners to plan and manage controlled burns in the landscape.

“I’ve seen some terrible fire events and I’ve seen what happens with good fire management that prevents them”, he says. “If we do no burning just after the wet season, by the time the end of the drier season comes, one little ignition of a lightning strike or a wayward campfire will all of a sudden take out huge sections of country. But now that we do our early burning in a strategic way, those larger fires don’t take out as big an area and therefore we release less carbon annually.”

TNC has been among the first conservation organisations in the country to strategically support Indigenous communities such as the Ngarinyin people in their efforts to reconnect and restore the health of their lands. This includes lending technical assistance to communities and representative bodies to develop so-called Healthy Country Plans, which define land management objectives together with social and cultural values. One key component of these plans is controlled burning, which combines ancient indigenous knowledge with new insights from fire science as well as the latest technology, such as remote sensing, e.g. via satellite imagery.

Today, with the support of Cartier for Nature, TNC works with 42 indigenous communities across Northern Australia, all of which run controlled burning programmes. Together, these programmes have helped avoid more than a million tonnes of CO2 emissions annually. Ten communities are currently able to translate this work into carbon credits, through which they generate an estimated AUD $60 million per year in income.

“We do what we can to bring in tools and technologies that allow them to manage their land in their way. There is a lot of knowledge that is still retained, and we are trying to see how we can best recover that knowledge, so that the right people can manage the right place in the right way. We’ve still got a long way to go, and having the support from Cartier for Nature allows us the flexibility and the time to have those conversations and build those partnerships”,  Luke Preece says.

Words: Matthias Fiechter/Cartier for Nature       Photos: Ben Buckland/Cartier for Nature