Aboriginal fires like this

one on Rostron family land

offer powerful protection

against catastrophic dry-

season blazes.

WINTER 2005 OE 15

FiresB Y S H A R O N L E V Y

In Australia’s remote Northern Territory,traditional Aboriginal burning practices hold

vital lessons for the American West

s the sky darkens, the outlines of the savanna trees vanish into blackness. Cyrus and Lind-

say Rostron, our two Aboriginal guides, aged 13 and 11, respectively, hold firesticks in

their hands. They touch the burning branches to the grass, and flames spread around us.

P H O T O G R A P H S B Y G L E N N H U N T

DownUnderA

F or three days I’ve been walking with Bowman and the Ros-tron boys through remote country along the upper CadellRiver. We’ve covered miles through flatland forests that lie

between ledges of gnarled sandstone. Along the way we’ve explorednooks that hide rock paintings of file snakes,goannas (colorful lizardsthat can grow longer than a man’s leg), and spirits. The stone of thecaves, formed from ancient seabed, contains ripples produced bylong-extinct tides. These patterns, Cyrus says, were created by pow-erful beings during the Dreamtime, the mythic era when the Abo-riginal world was made. He flops down to rest in a flat spot, wornsmooth by endless generations of his ancestors who have shelteredthere from sun and rain.

The walking is easy through these charred woodlands, kept free ofundergrowth by frequent blazes. I’ve stepped around many smol-dering logs, but until tonight I have not witnessed the joyous, casualway in which Aboriginal people start their fires. There are no formsto file or agonized consultations before the Rostrons strike a match,no sign of the gear-laden troop of firefighters required for land-man-agement burns in white society.The flames creep through the grassesand shrubs, rarely reaching high enough to scorch the tree canopy.Standing right next to the fire, I feel safe.

In the blackened grass, Miko and Cyrus lean together, watching asthe fire moves off at a sedate pace. Lindsay has no use for Balandagizmos such as Global Positioning System (GPS) units, water filters,and satellite phones, but he loves Bowman’s digital camera. He bor-rows it to snap a photo of Miko and Cyrus, and the electronic flashsends a beam of alien white light into the darkness.

Lindsay is absorbed in the camera’s workings when a shrub he’sstanding on bursts into flames that shoot up his leg. He jumps awaywithout uttering a sound, his face set in an expression of endurance.Convinced he must have a serious burn, I consider the complexities

16 OE WINTER 2005

Joshua Rostron, whose family has set fires in Arnhem Land for generations,

uses bark from the paper-bark tree to start his low-intensity blaze.

The boys dance barefoot in the orange glow, silhouetted againstthe tall, weirdly beautiful shapes of termite mounds. Their grown-up brother, Miko, who wears a sooty bowler hat, eases his muscularbody off a rock that’s too close to the fire. He gives Lindsay an en-couraging slap on the shoulder, then stands back to admire the blaze.

“Fantastic, isn’t it?” says David Bowman. A tall, wiry man with ahawkish nose, he grins in the firelight, his face streaked with sweatand charcoal. Bowman, a fire ecologist at Charles Darwin University,is learning how indigenous people use fire to shape their home-lands and keep the land healthy. He is one of the first scientists tostudy traditional burning practices by working directly with nativepeople. Today he is on the Rostrons’ home turf in Arnhem Land, anAboriginal “designated land”that stretches from the edge of the Ara-fura Sea deep into the stark landscape of the Top End of Australia’sNorthern Territory.

Near the tiny settlements or “outstations”that serve as home basesfor native people who have traded town life for full-time residenceon their traditional land,Aborigines still burn on a regular basis, andwildlife thrives. Plant and animal diversity is as great as, or greaterthan, in some ecologically similar areas of nearby Kakadu NationalPark, a World Heritage conservation site. Within weeks of the firesset by outstation residents, scorched areas sprout carpets of newgreenery and attract numerous kangaroos, which fatten on thenew growth and can later be hunted. Species such as the partridgepigeon and the northern quoll, a meat-eating marsupial about thesize of a cat, have declined or disappeared throughout most oftheir range but remain abundant near the settlements. Wild fruittrees flourish. The Bininj, as native people here call themselves, ac-complish all this in ways that most white, or Balanda, fire man-agers believe to be impossible.

The Rostrons are among the few Aboriginal families who havebeen able to carry on their burning traditions without interruption.“There’s a research emergency out here,” says Bowman.“This is thelast chance to truly understand native burning.”

of getting medical help. But Lindsay goes back to studying the cam-era, hardly missing a beat.“Are you okay?”I ask. The stern expressionvanishes, like a blade of grass burning away, and Lindsay flashes adazzling smile. “Yah, mon,” he answers.

C aptain James Cook,who in 1770became the first European to sailalong the east coast of Australia,

saw so many fires that he called it “thiscontinent of smoke.” Adapted to light-ning and dry heat,many native Australianplants need fire and can’t reproduce with-out it. Most eucalyptus trees, for exam-ple, drop seeds only after they’ve beenscorched, and their seedlings grow bestin a bed of ashes. Some have evolvedefffective ways of spreading flames: Thecandlebark eucalyptus, when ignited,drops flakes of burning bark that float onthe wind and can start new “spot” firesseveral miles away. Aborigines thrived in this fiery land by learninghow and when to burn it.

When white settlers reached the Northern Territory in the mid-

nineteenth century, many native people died from introduced dis-eases or in violent confrontations with the newcomers. AncientAboriginal societies collapsed, and the survivors began to drift awayfrom their ancestral lands, toward the fringes of towns like Darwin.Arnhem Land,which covers more than 37,000 square miles,was oncehome to clans of native people who lived scattered at regular intervalsacross the landscape.Today that wide swath of country is mostly empty.Arnhem Land’s total population is about 17,000, two-thirds of it in-digenous, and most of the people live in overcrowded government-issue houses in towns that have sprung up in the years since colonization.

With or without Aboriginal management, Arnhem Land and therest of the Top End will burn—the lightning storms that come withthe start of the monsoons every year make that a certainty. Before the

Europeans arrived, Aboriginal people set frequent small fires. “Theparadox,”says Bowman,“is that they used fire to make the landscapefireproof.” When they lived in small groups scattered throughout theTop End, native people started blazes so often that the flames seldomspread far or grew too hot. The result was a patchwork of firebreaks,

areas cleared of flammable grass and trees.Fires would peter out at the edges of pre-viously burned areas, so that even in thescorching heat at the end of the dry sea-son, they would not flare out of control.

The Top End is a place of extremes.Months of heavy rain follow a long stretchof dry heat.During the wet season,densegrasses grow taller than a man’s head. Inthe dry, the plants turn to brittle, flam-mable straw. Nowadays, 50 percent ormore of the Top End landscape will burnlate in the dry season, ignited by light-ning or by ranchers managing their graz-ing lands. In the flat terrain, these fires

spread fast, growing hotter as they expand, and they can burn forweeks—a drastic change from traditional native fires.These more in-tense blazes can have devastating effects on everything from parrots

to palm trees. The same pattern echoes throughout Australia and thewestern United States, where indigenous people no longer burn theland. Understanding how they used fire to keep the ecosystem in bal-ance, Bowman believes, is an essential step in finding new ways tomanage today’s catastrophic blazes.

Few ecologists have studied the use of fire by modern Aborigines,perhaps assuming that contact with newer technologies such as thematch, the bullet, and the jeep has severed them from the knowledgeof their ancestors. Most studies have focused instead on ancient de-posits of charcoal or fossilized pollen, or on older trees scarred by

WINTER 2005 OE 17

The flames creep

through the

grasses and shrubs,

rarely reaching high

enough to scorch the

tree canopy

By burning out the forest’s flammable understory, the Aborigines of

Arnhem Land’s Cadell River ensure an abundance of healthy cypress pines.

18 OE WINTER 2005

Cyrus Rostron holds

a branch of gum

leaves that he uses to

fan the flames.

ing graduate work in Tasmania, where the indigenous populationhad been drastically reduced and traditional burning completelyhalted.“There are trees in Tasmania called King Billy Pines,”he says,“and massive stands of them have died off in the last hundred years.You’ve got vast tracts full of the skeletons of these trees, testifying toa change in fire regime.” Here in the Northern Territory, wildfireshave grown so intense that the cypress pine is experiencing a similar

decline. It was the plight of this species that drew Bowman to Arn-hem Land in the first place. “If cypress pines were people,” he says,“we’d talk about an epidemic. If you go to nearby places where noAboriginal people have been living for 50 years or so,you can fly alongin a helicopter and count dead cypress pines. They’re just scatteredall over the landscape.” Here on the Cadell River, however, he hasfound an abundance of healthy cypress pines, evidence of the Abo-rigines’ skillful use of fire.

Outside his brick and cinder-block house in the tiny outstationof Korlorbirrahda, Tom Rostron tries to suppress a look of disbelief.Bowman is explaining to him that in America, where I come from,people who light wildfires are thrown in prison. Tom, who de-scribes himself only as an “old bloke,”is one of the leanest people I’veever seen.One wrist hangs stiff at his side,badly swollen from a sprainor a cracked bone. He accepts a spare dose of the painkillers Bow-

past blazes. Anthropologists have interviewed native elders aboutburning traditions but have not conducted field studies to show theireffects on vegetation.Bowman is the first scientist to undertake a con-trolled study comparing Aboriginal and unmanaged landscapes, us-ing modern tools such as satellite imagery and GPS technology todemonstrate the continued power of ancient management techniques.

Conducting a scientific study with the Bininj on their remoteArnhem Land turf is a daunting prospect for any outsider. English isa third or fourth language for Aboriginal people here, who are morecomfortable speaking one of the many native languages,such as Guneior Gundjeihmi. Yet the language barrier is easier to bridge than thegulf between Bininj and Balanda points of view. In Aboriginal soci-ety, direct questions on such personal topics as the way a man burnsthe land can seem rude. The response can range from silence to longdiscourses on apparently unrelated topics, such as the nature of cloudformations in monsoon time or the mating habits of kangaroos.

It’s impressive, then, that Bowman, a fast-talking, hyper-scheduledBalanda, has formed deep ties to the Rostron clan, who have adoptedhis family into their complex kinship system. Bowman’s two sons,aged 4 and 10, are considered to be among Cyrus’s many “fathers.”

Bowman’s humility helps him to straddle the cultural divide—hemakes no bones about the fact that Aboriginal people here under-stand far more about the life of the bush than the most distinguishedecologists in Australia’s universities. What he shares with the peoplewho live along the Cadell River is a sense of urgency, a drive to makesure that traditional knowledge is understood and recognized in bothBalanda and Bininj societies while members of a fading generationof elders are still alive to pass it on.

E arly one morning, when the shadows of the eucalyptus treesare still long,Bowman and I follow Cyrus and Lindsay througha forest that burned just the day before.Amid acres of charred

ground we see a stand of cypress pines, untouched by the flames.Low-intensity fires, explains Bowman, will often die out at the edgeof a patch of these graceful trees, which cast enough shade to stiflemost of the undergrowth that feeds the flames.

Bowman’s fascination with native burning began when he was do-

WINTER 2005 OE 19

BL

UE

MA

RB

LE

MA

PS

Rock paintings in the Cadell River area can depict crocodiles, turtles, fish,

lizards, snakes, or, below, kangaroos. At a corroboree, right, an Aboriginal

festival of singing and dancing, a man plays a traditional didgeridoo.

T H E T O P E N D : L A N D O F F I R E

man offers, but he’ll let the injury heal on its own. He runs the fin-gers of his good hand through his hair and nods politely despite hisskeptical expression.

Tom speaks in a mix of English and Gunei that’s difficult for meto follow. When I ask how he decides when and where to burn, hejust shrugs. The fires set by the Bininj are everyday events that hap-pen when someone like Tom looks around and senses the countryis ripe for burning, ready to be cleaned up.

Tom has retired to the quiet of his house, where no one is talkingand the only sound is the deep thrum of a didgeridoo, the indigenouswind instrument made from hollowed-out branches of eucalyptus.“Ridiculously hot, eh?” says Bowman, setting up a camp chair in theshade of Tom’s eaves.We’re marooned here until some indefinite timewhen one of the Rostrons will be available to guide us. In the mean-time, my heat-addled brain struggles to absorb Bowman’s explana-tion of the most controversial and surprising results of his research.

To translate the patterns of indigenous burning into the language

of science, Bowman has followed 23-year-old Joshua Rostron as hewalks through his family’s land. While Joshua uses all his senses todecide where to burn and hunt, Bowman uses his GPS, measuringtape, and calculator to determine the size of charred areas and thescorch heights on trees. He also uses satellite imagery to compare thepatterns of fire here with those of uninhabited areas nearby.

Bowman has found that the Rostrons and their neighbors set thegreat majority of their burns late in the dry season.Yet even in theseextreme conditions, their fires remain small and typically die outwithin a day. This flies in the face of accepted dogma among Balandaland managers, which holds that the only way to keep fires low in in-tensity is to light them early in the dry season, before the hottestweather turns the vegetation to tinder. Bowman’s data show thatthe long-term pattern of Aboriginal burning is more powerful pro-tection against intense flames than any army of firefighters modernAustralia can hope to muster.

If Native Americans in California, trying to keep their ancestral cul-tures alive, could meet the Rostrons, they might feel an instant kin-ship. Members of several California tribes, including the Karuk, theYurok, and the Miwok, are working to revive ancient practices of fire

LAST FALL, MORE THAN A CENTURY AFTER HISMiwok ancestors were driven off their land in cen-tral California, Don Hankins set fire to a forest there.

Hankins, a graduate student at the University ofCalifornia–Davis, is experimenting with new ways of rein-troducing traditional Native American burning as a con-servation tool. Native Americans in the West have alwaysseen fire as an essential way of keeping the land healthy.During the long decades since native management ended,fire suppression has contributed to some devastatingchanges in California’s landscape.

In the remnants of streamside forest that have sur-vived a blitz of urban and agricultural development, wil-lows are gnarled with galls caused by heavy parasiteinfestations. Higher on the hillsides, oaks are dying,shaded out by conifers and hit by diseases that thrivein the absence of fire. To California Native Americanpeople who have studied their traditional culture, theseare signs that the woods need a good burn.

“Too many researchers put native people in the pasttense,” says Hankins. “Even though Indian peoplehave not been able to burn the landscape for a hun-dred years, there’s a valuable body of indigenousknowledge, passed on through oral tradition, thatWestern science has neglected.”

Modern conditions demand changes in the old waysof using fire, however. The long-standing policy of firesuppression has led to heavy accumulations of fuel thatcan burn dangerously hot. So Hankins and other vol-unteers had to clear out decades’ worth of dead woodbefore they could create the kind of low-intensity firethat native people set routinely in the days before whitesettlement.

Though Hankins’s experimental fires have been small—only about two acres in size—he’s already seen somedramatic results. The willows in his burned areas arethriving, free of the parasites that cause galls and stuntthe growth of willows in unburned control areas. Thescorched willows grow back tall and straight, produc-ing stems that can be used to make traditional baskets.Native Californians struggle to continue tribal arts likebasketry, which require materials from fire-dependentplants including beargrass and willow.

On a recent visit to Kakadu National Park in Aus-tralia, Hankins spent time with Aboriginal people whowere burning their land. “Like native people here, theAborigines say they burn to clean up the country, torenew the landscape,” he says. “They lit cool, slow-moving burns—you could watch the fire front for halfan hour before it moved out of sight. To see indige-nous people burn on a landscape scale was amazing,like looking back at how fire was done here in Califor-nia 150 years ago.” —S.L.

“Coming here to see an Aborigine light a fire,” says fire ecologist David Bow-

man, “is like traveling to New York City to see someone catch a bus.”

20 OE WINTER 2005

CALIFORNIA BURNING

management that once guaranteed an abundance of plants used forfood and toolmaking. After a century-long policy of fire suppres-sion,the state is more vulnerable than ever to wildfires,and fire-adaptedplants such as beargrass—used in Indian basketry—are dwindling.

O n our way to Korlorbirrahda, Bowman and I had stoppedto visit with Otto Campion Bulmaniya of the Djelk Rangers.The Rangers program was started a decade ago, part of a

movement of Bininj people seeking waysto keep traditional culture alive while be-coming economically self-sufficient. Bul-maniya, a soft-spoken man with deep,worried eyes, has a tough job. His aimis to integrate Bininj and Balanda waysof burning to rehabilitate abandoned sec-tions of Aboriginal land. But no one hasyet found a reliable way to restore areaswhere Aboriginal burning has lapsed, sohe must learn by trial and error.

When Bowman and I arrive at the DjelkRangers’headquarters—little more thanthree walls and a roof of corrugated metalstanding on a stretch of dusty earth—several Aboriginal men are chatting inside. Even in the shade of theroof, the heat stuns.

Bulmaniya leads us into the air-conditioned chill of a small officethat is partitioned off in one corner. He sits at his computer and pullsup photos of himself and other Rangers leading groups of teenageboys through the woods. The Rangers teach high-school kids aboutthe bush and when to burn it. As they see it, the best hope for thefuture health of both the land and the people is to encourage as manyBininj as possible to return to their ancestral homelands.

Bowman shares that belief and admires the Djelk Rangers. But heworries that the federal agencies that supply the group’s shoestringbudget may impose a white vision of fire, even in places where localpeople still live on their land. Early in this dry season, for example,the Rangers used helicopters to drop incendiary devices—airbornefireballs—on some remote areas.

Explaining this to me on our last afternoon in Korlorbirrahda,Bowman sighs and settles his sweat-stained bush hat lower on his

brow.“It’s all very complicated,”he says. That phrase has become themantra of our visit to Arnhem Land.

I wander away to Korlorbirrahda’s “schoolhouse,” a large awningthat keeps out the rain during the wet season and today offers a pre-cious refuge from the sun. A paper banner, curling at the edges, dis-

plays the English alphabet: A is for anteater,B for bandicoot,C for crocodile.The placelooks as if no classes have been taughtthere for a long while.

In a corner, Cyrus plays ethereal mu-sic on a battered electronic keyboard that’swired to a car battery. A quarter of theplastic keys have broken off, but the mu-sic still sounds like a Windham HillCD.Beside him,Lindsay leans on a spear,wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with theimage of a monster pickup and the leg-end “American Trucker.”

While Cyrus’s music floats on the stillair, firefighters in Montana and Califor-

nia are battling a series of wildland infernos that have raged for weeks.The hundred-year campaign of fire suppression in U.S. forests hasled to heavy accumulations of dry vegetation that burn hot, causingbigger blazes than at any time in recorded history.Some Native Amer-icans still pass on stories of the ways their ancestors once burned theforests and prairies, but in my homeland there is not one place likeKorlorbirrahda, where people who have grown up with traditionalburning can offer guidance on a way out of the fire dilemma.

As Bowman and I fly out of Arnhem Land in a cramped turbo-prop plane, I hold one of Otto Bulmaniya’s photos in my lap. Thepicture shows an Aboriginal burn, the flames low along the trunksof eucalyptus trees, whose leaves are still intact.

As we move west, across country that has been emptied of nativepeople, thick smoke plumes rise from the savanna below us. Soonthe ground becomes invisible, hidden beneath the haze fromdozens of out-of-control late-season fires that rule a landscape nolonger protected in the way of the Bininj.

WINTER 2005 OE 21

The hundred-year

campaign of fire sup-

pression in U.S. forests

has led to bigger blazes

than at any time in

recorded history

Tom Rostron, who lives in the outstation of Korlorbirrahda, finds it hard to

believe that Americans who set wildfires are treated as criminals.