Indigenous burning: fire circles and cool fire
Indigenous burning is very distinctive, in purpose and method.
While Western cultures tend to focus on aftermath, its focus is on prevention: managing fuel loads and reading the land to ensure flora and fauna stay healthy.
Each year rural fire services across the country carry out vast swathes of backburning and hazard reduction, but Steffensen says this is entirely the wrong approach: the fires tend to burn inward, creating an inferno from which animals cannot escape and a heat so strong it burns both undergrowth and canopy.
Indigenous burning, on the other hand, is cool: temperatures remain low so flames never reach the canopy.
“The canopy is whole other world,” says Steffensen. “The canopy is so important to us because that's the life of the flowers, the fruits, the birds, the animals … that top canopy is very, very sacred and the simple rule is that it never burns.
“If you burn the canopy, then you have the wrong fire. Fire [should] behave like water, trickling through the country [so] it doesn't burn everything.”
Fire should behave like water, trickling through the country.
Traditional burns are also started from ‘fire circles’ and patterns that allow the fire to spread out in a 360 degrees radius. This allows animals to escape as they smell the smoke and keeps temperatures down, with only one fire front to manage.
Steffensen says this kind of fire knowledge has been lost over the centuries, both as a result of colonisation – the diffusion of knowledge throughout the stolen generations, the introduction of non-native weeds that spring up when the canopy burns – and of our migration towards cities. Even European pastoralists knew how to manage the land with fire, he says.
Through his teaching practices – at both community and state government level – he is hoping to educate people on the need for more fire in the land and shift the relationship from one of fear, to one of appreciation.
“We're educating the community and involving the residents and involving communities in understanding fire. Not in its vicious form or its threatening form but in its nurturing [mode].”
