CREMATING THE FUTURE
THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPLICATIONS OF
NORTHERN WOODLAND BURNING
Tony Ryan
The subject of burn-offs, in a context of Northern Australia, is more complex than orthodox science and the various mandated authorities for fire management have hitherto recognised. A growing number of Australians question the theories of bio-fire integrity and so-called fire-stick farming; pointing to more logical and evidence-based sequences and scenarios.
Introduction
Bush fires in the tropical north of Australia have little in common with the raging infernos of the south.
In the southern 75% of the land mass, under certain extreme conditions Eucalyptus species pump sufficient oil into the foliage and adjacent atmosphere to support explosive firestorms. This means that policies of minimal ‘interference with nature’ in the south can result in considerable loss of life and property (wildlife as well as human).
If substantial regional fire breaks and access corridors are not constructed and maintained, and if fuel loads in strategic areas are not reduced during winter, management of summer fires, once started, becomes impossible.
The temperate climate southern three-quarters of Australia is subjected to lightning-caused fires, something that is rarely an issue in the north (and, some claim, is considerably exaggerated in the south).
Therefore, it should be stressed that the following text applies specifically to the tropical north; although many factors are common to both regions.
Proposals to not winter burn or back-burn in southern regions are tentatively supported only on the proviso that they are not applied to maintained firebreak corridors or to urban or village buffer zones.
In all parts of Australia, there are landholders, including Aborigines, who set fire to the bush or grasslands as part of a confused and recently emerged belief system.
Then there are the environmental pragmatists who ‘control burn’ to prevent fire in later high risk seasons.
There are farmers and others who burn-off from their own property borders and with no consideration for their neighbours; and there are pyromaniacs who start fires with little in the way of rationale or justification. Some of these have been found to be part of the fire-fighting establishment and this has been identified as a problem around the world, in urban as well as rural locations, suggesting the need for pre-employment psychological profiling of fire fighters.
Overall, the central problem has been the unwillingness of State Governments to fund satellite bush fire monitoring, or a helicopter-mobilised firefighter/police force to spot fires as soon as they are lit, and to capture perpetrators and extinguish containable blazes. Reluctantly, it must be said that nationwide endemic state political corruption tends to divert solutions to the Federal realm; but subsequent devolution to regional control would enable management to accommodate idiosyncrasies of local climate, resources and flora. Obviously, corruption must be ended before satisfactory state and regional solutions can be applied.
In fundamental contrast to the south, Northern bushfires are grass-based, as opposed to tree-based, are less intense than in the south, and they occur in predominantly unsettled areas. Statistically, this is because in the NT, for example, less than 2% of the land is populated. But where there is urbanization burning is 100% of all woodland and grasslands.
This means that loss of human life is unusual and that, as a consequence, public interest in rural fire management has been minimal. This attitude is slowly changing as settlement of the north intensifies and the cost of property destruction, and property protection, rises accordingly.
Unfortunately, with Chief Minister Michael Gunner allocating political PR value of July First firecrackers above fire containment and the risk to human lives, deaths will occur sooner rather than later.
Northern bushfires
Although it is an almost completely unrecognised environmental issue, but one which may be having an inestimable impact on our health and that of all life in the vicinity of the Australian continent, it should be of serious concern to all Australians that almost the entire north of Australia (70-100 %) is deliberately burned off every year, resulting in damage which includes:
Twenty-five years of observation and monitoring in the Northern Territory’s Top End (1971-96) had been unable to identify evidence of combustion on a single tree which had been struck by lightning, when the strike had occurred on lateritic soil types (ref. "Kakadu Burning", 1996). This is not to say that such evidence may not eventually be found, but it does demonstrate that the presumption of natural fire being caused by lightning is seriously overestimated.
As an issue of practical bush survival, when Top End clouds threaten lightning, the Stringybark (Eucalyptus tetrodonta) woodlands are healthy places to avoid; or, at the very least, shelter should be sought more than 50 m from the nearest Stringybark. This is because this tree is normally the tallest of the upper canopy and therefore is most likely to attract a strike. Up to 3 metre long shards of wood can be driven a metre or more into the ground, thirty or more metres from the explosion site, indicating the destructive power of the explosion. The belief that such wood will not burn is a popular rural myth, but its post-explosion porosity harbours atmospheric moisture and otherwise makes it mildly unsuitable for primary kindling wood.
Spontaneous combustion does not occur in the north of Australia and most certainly not in the Top End. Peat fires are entirely unknown, there being no peat swamps. There are undoubtedly occasional lightning-caused fires but these appear limited to the sandy coastal regions, black soil plains, and to sandstone, limestone and dolomite regions. Furthermore, prevailing SE winds tend to drive fires towards the northern coast, not inland, even at night.
Finally, and most significantly, there is no lightning during the dry season when almost all fires occur.
The inescapable conclusion is that the permanently burning northern landscape of the dry season is the result of deliberate human-lit fires. To all intents and purposes, lightning or other natural causes must be excluded from the equation.
Although it is still a matter of pure speculation, some scientists consider that bush fire convection may drive particles high into the atmosphere and precipitate reactions which may be connected to overall ozone depletion, or to localised ozone layer disturbances. While the veracity of speculations cannot be commented upon in this paper, it would be remiss of us not to consider the possible health implications, especially as this might explain a strange phenomenon which occurred in Darwin around June, 1974. It is not widely known that on this day, the exposed skin of hundreds of Darwinites blistered in less than a couple of hour’s exposure to the late morning sun, and many of these victims were well-tanned open air workers. Although ozone-measuring equipment was immediately installed (as it had been in other parts of Australia since 1966), a tight-lipped Federal Government explained nothing. Cyclone Tracy destroyed the equipment some months later and this was not replaced for some twenty years.
Was this strange occurrence due to spontaneous emergence of an ozone gap, or was this the result of localised impact by widespread and intensely burning ground fires? Clearly, the Federal Government is required to initiate appropriate research, if this hasn’t already been undertaken; and to provide some kind of explanation. But, in these times of abysmal government credibility, will we be able to believe the explanation?
Experience strongly suggests to us that all government pronouncements on public health and environmental issues must be treated with deepest suspicion. And, as part of the globalization of science, funding now drifts only in the direction of useful propaganda or industrial profit. Consequently there are two kinds of scientists; employed potboilers, and unemployed people of integrity or proven incompetence. Both are tarred with the same brush.
A Federal Government study, released in 2003, reported that a reduction in fauna species throughout Australia means that many of these animals will soon become extinct. This was blamed largely on deforestation due to land clearing; mostly certainly, in many parts of Australia, a serious issue in itself.
However, there has been relatively little land clearing in the NT’s Top End (much less than 1%) yet wildlife species depletion is also evident there, and at similar rates to elsewhere on the continent. This indicates the existence of a different cause and fire should be an immediate suspect. (The NT observations were made pre-cane toad migration).
Considering the evidence, it is reasonable to speculate that there is probably inestimable damage to the northern natural environment ranging from degradation:
Powerful national and international environmental organisations also prefer to look the other way. Although many of these were once grass roots movements, one-time enthusiastic but now disillusioned supporters now regard these as cynical hierarchical corporations which have become corrupted by their own executive power and by compromising sources of funding and banking.
Three loosely-related lobbies in particular have outlawed all discussion about the fire issue because each is partly reliant for its mandate on the support on the other two, and all would be embarrassed by the release of reliable and objective scientific research.
In other words, individual bush fire-promoting careers are at stake.
When environmental lobbies and organisations obtain funding, the automatic conditions of funding demand the employment of acceptably qualified professionals (often a mistake in the first place). These professionals, once ensconced, would be unlikely to endorse views which might place their employers in positions of national disrepute. This would threaten funding, and hence their jobs, not to mention their professional reputations.
With, according to reports, something like ninety-five percent of qualified bio-scientists not employed in their specific field of training, those so employed are perennially and compulsively defensive.
This basic fact of life impinges on all organisations, from small conservation foundations all the way through to the Federal Government’s nature conservation agency (which changes its name so frequently that reference here would be counterproductive, and one wonders if this chameleon-like quality is also a defense mechanism); state national park authorities, the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Wilderness Society, World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace. All have a great deal to lose. Two of these organisations are also linked to the greatly rejuvenated and immensely influential Eugenics movement, which views wild flora and fauna as suitable replacements for 85% of global human population.
Another source of pessimism is the top-heavy preponderance of PhDs:
Decisions are the jealous prerogative of minds that are incapable of practical, prioritized, and coordinated implementation of knowledge, let alone the accommodation of data not presented in esoteric language and resonating suitably in their sectarian enclaves.
Policies are justified in tomes that are, what observers of normative intelligence would describe as unreadable and pedantic gobbledegook; which is of course, the reason for all jargon… the alienation and distancing of likely critics, concomitantly creating an aura of unchallengeable superiority of knowledge around the user.
Behind such professional arrogance, even the silliest decisions can be delivered with supreme confidence. Indeed, in one year alone, 1989, ANPWS/ANCA (the federal agency then responsible for management of Kakadu National Park) eliminated approximately one third of all Northern Cypress in the Park with its ill-advised burn-off programmes (the celebrated and lyrical "mosaic of fire"). However, an internationally audible “oops!” could not be permitted, and it is simply pretended that this blunder never happened.
Visitors to the North during the dry season see the official burning and invariably have one question, why? Most visitors are skeptical about official explanations; as would be any normal human being who retains a vestige of commonsense.
The genesis of broadacre burning
The origins of what we might call broadacre burning may be found in the cattle industry so, quite naturally, pastoralists who are already bruised over other environmental and political bun fights, are also reluctant to discuss the issue in the hearing of an intemperate media, or within cooee of conservation groups with little appetite for social and economic realities.
Pastoralists are not alone in their reticence.
What has now become cynically known in rural north Australia as the ‘Aboriginal Industry’ has reinvented itself for the profitable public relations value that this presents. One of the fabricated aspects of new-age synthetic Aboriginal culture has been Firestick Farming.
This originated from a book written by European author Rhys Jones in 1969 and consisted largely of poetical and remote speculation.
As far as is known, Jones had not interviewed Aborigines who were familiar with traditional (pre-pastoral) burning practices; the title Arnhem Lander being sufficient for credibility. The fact that at the time of his interviews almost all such people who spoke English language with culturally corresponding meanings, were young and had no comprehension of earlier traditional living. Nor, for that matter, had Kakadu officers or scientists of ANPWS/ANCA taken traditional experience into account. The last traditional Aborigines, that is, people of pre-pastoral times in this region, had died some thirty years before the National Park was declared. The term ‘pre-pastoral’ is all-important.
Pastoral burn-off practices
As what should be a historical issue of critical relevance, the pastoral component of northern fire regimes, appears inexplicably to have dropped out of the equation altogether. What people in Kakadu call traditional burning practices are in fact techniques of purely pastoral origin.
The few surviving former cattle station managers who understood these burn techniques are less than impressed with today’s destructive practices and do not understand why their own very qualified knowledge has not been sought (as of the time of research, 1985-88). Perhaps this has something to do with rapidly changing and foreign ownership of cattle stations, but more likely the reason is distaste for inconvenient evidence.
The history and reasons for pastoral burning provide otherwise inaccessible insights and are worth recounting here:
Cattlemen of the late nineteenth century, lured into the north by explorer’s reports of vast pastures, quickly realised that if they did not burn the dry grass every year; (dry because the six-month dry season is invariably without rain) their cattle would starve and die. Thus began an annual rotational technique of pastoral burn-offs:
A few weeks after burning, new grass would emerge and, progressively engaged, this practice would feed stock until the following wet season rains triggered fresh normal growth.
This practice continues today but not in the finely tuned chain formation of small planned evening fires of a former era, lit by Aboriginal ringers as part of their clearly-defined station employment roles:
These former fire regimes led cattle through the low lands as the Dry Season progressed, diverting the animals to higher ground as the Wet Season approached, avoiding floods and stock losses from drowning and crocodile attack. This managed-cattle-herd-movement terminated where grazing patterns ensured that end-of-Wet preferred pasture was close to where mustering was convenient, when the following Dry Season evaporated surface water sufficiently.
It was, admittedly, an environmentally sacrificial practice, but it was executed on a carefully planned strategic scale. In all, it incorporated bush tick eradication, stock yard cleaning and muster pre-tracking. A price paid in pastoral regions was the eventual elimination of Beech and Cypress trees, and many low-canopy leafy shrub species and rainforest pockets, except in ‘fire islands’ and creek beds. (Fire islands are small locations which prevailing topography, winds and fuel load become convergent factors which cause a fire front to flow in a wide circular formation and then burn back on itself, eventually petering out. They are often demarcated by creek beds and billabongs. These land form-generated occurrences were repeated annually, protecting localised dense canopies and ground litter, the latter of which retained moisture which successively resisted night and morning fires, should these eventuate. Fire islands in the Top End can be identified by atypical stands of Canarium australianum and Syzygium forte, and shrub cover which includes Gardenia megasperma, Ixora tomentosa, the vine Jasminium aemulum, and native woodland ferns).
As a skilled pastoral management programme, this practice ceased when well-intended southern-inspired Aboriginal equal award wages were introduced in February,1968.
(Historical speculation is relevant here: It is difficult to say if Aboriginal station employment cessation was due entirely to economic and logistical factors, or also to some extent, outrage on the part of poor rural whites at being ‘equalised’ with blacks (as the song goes: "everybody has to have someone to look down on").
Perceptions of the time are important for historical reasons, but also because these may impinge on future rural developments. The truth is, it is doubtful if equal award wages on northern stations were ever sustainable given that only about five years in seven produced sufficient profit to justify a fully manned muster by ringers. In some years, none; and many station managers were lucky to be paid directly at all during these hard years).
In historically comparative terms, today’s pastoral burning is a massive over-kill, resulting in regions of scorched earth covering several hundreds of square kilometres, sometimes cumulatively many tens of thousands.
In terms of effects, burning is now vast and indiscriminate and has been adopted by national park rangers and by semi-acculturated Aborigines, in the belief that this is ‘traditional’. It is traditional pastoral, not the ancient practice of traditional Aborigines; an assertion that most urban white romantics and urbanised Aboriginal activists will now be unable to confront.
Neither Reece-Jones, nor most other bio-scientists, had considered what part our fire-sensitive trees would play in their cherished and shallowly conceived ‘multi-millennia burning regimes’, nor how seedlings and saplings would fare. In northern records, only Kym Brennan, then of the Office of the Supervising Scientist (OSS), Jabiru, in Kakadu National Park, appears to have read the bush with the eyes of both scientist and bushman.
To quote the observant Mr Brennan:
One of the most contentious issues concerning the maintenance of forest and woodland plant communities in the (Kakadu National) Park is the use of fire. Pastoral activities in the region, before the Park was established, replaced the small, ‘controlled’ fires, characteristic of traditional Aboriginal burning regimes, with more widespread, uncontrolled burning patterns. This was done to stimulate the growth of "green pick" for stock.
Although most mature shrubs and trees in woodlands are adapted to tolerate frequent exposure to fire, their seedlings are not, and unless recruitment occurs then the woodland communities slowly decline through natural wasting. The Cypress Pine Callitris intratropica is a tree known to be sensitive to fire and has vanished from most lowland forests.
In the Park today Aboriginal people continue to burn many areas, but the use of four-wheel-drive vehicles and safety matches is hardly traditional style and therefore mainly serves to perpetuate pastoral habits.
Park managers also conduct extensive early dry season ‘cool’ burns to minimise the destruction caused by ‘hot’ fires later in the year. In most years, 80 - 90% of the lowlands in the park are burned and it is arguable whether this is desirable. A fire management policy for the park is being developed and involves consultation with the Aboriginal people in Kakadu who are still conversant with traditional fire practice.
-Wildflowers of Kakadu, 1986.
Kym Brennan’s reference to ‘consultation with Aboriginal people in Kakadu’ requires some qualification. These people had been exposed to adjacent cattle station practices for almost a century and had not engaged in traditional burning practices since arrival of the first missionary, who provided access to guns for hunting.
Their knowledge of burning is now restricted wholly to highly degraded adaptations of former pastoral burn-offs, and are completely uncontrolled. This latter statement is meant to be taken literally. The oft-used term control burns implies to interested readers that the authors of fire control its spread. They do not. What is meant by control burns is simply that a landscape which has been incinerated cannot catch fire again until the following year. And yes, one must question the logic of this in terms of environmental protection. The option of fire prevention is never seriously engaged.
Another factor demands clarification. Although Kakadu National Park managers make constant allusions to ‘consultation with Kakadu traditional owners’, in fact there are no ‘traditional’ people in Kakadu, in the sense implied. The last traditional Gagadju man passed away around 1985 and his burial ceremony (baparu bunggal) remains unfinished to this day for the simple reason nobody remembers the Songlines or ceremonial protocols. The phrase ‘consultation with Kakadu traditional owners’ is nothing but cunning use of words and ambiguity to create an impression to achieve a political end.
While Aboriginal languages are retained, few if any have a complete knowledge of social and family relationship structures and rules, or of ceremonies, and most ignore them anyway. Outsiders from the north-east, the only people who have the necessary knowledge, must complete funeral ceremonies.
The last significant painting done in Kakadu was by a Galpu man, Mathuman Gurruwiwi, from Galiwin’ku, some three hundred kilometres away. He did this at the behest of one of the more celebrated ‘elders’ of Kakadu, Bill Neidjie, justified because the Galpu man’s clan songlines extend into Kakadu and he (hopefully) had the required knowledge (something other Morning Star bungal participant leaders actually dispute).
(Of possible significance, Mathuman was also the longest-serving guide on my 4WD Far North Safari, which operated in Kakadu National Park from 1987 to 1995. As the reader might well speculate, we discussed Aboriginal culture of that region to considerable depth. Others of our guides included Sophia Garrkali, who later sang for Yuthu Yindi and became senior field officer for the Department of Territory Families; and Mawuyul of multiple movie fame; all of these genuinely traditional people and respected for their knowledge).
Sadly, what most of the Gagudju people now have in common is alcoholism and greed, which is nurtured by royalties from uranium mining, National Park entry fees, unearned salaries, and a broad range of welfare, CDEP (now CDP) and development payments.
As with all people, everywhere, the receipt of money without contributing effort is invariably destructive and stifles initiative (compare with studies of the fates of lottery-winners in all countries and cultures). Few Aborigines in Kakadu have genuine jobs. A handful work as rangers but their roles are tokenistic, generally emptying rubbish bins and lighting the destructive ‘traditional’ fires, invariably at the worst possible time; the heat of mid-day.
This ‘consultation’ process referred to by rangers is essentially a ploy that makes Park management a delightfully unaccountable exercise, all questionable practices and decisions being deflected to their “traditional advisors”, linguistic comprehension of whom, by visitors or agency investigators, is neither expected nor required…a sort of cross-cultural adaptation of the Emperor’s New Clothes.
Nobody dares question the almost childishly obvious absence of authenticity. (That this increasingly out of control façade would inevitably precipitate bizarre behavior was, inexplicably, not anticipated. Now, the unthinkable has finally happened and ‘traditional owners’ have decreed that swimming in tropical Kakadu National Park’s crystal clear sub-escarpment lagoons must cease forthwith. Kakadu ‘leader’ Jonathan Neidjie stated that tourists will have to use conventional swimming pools, sprinkled presumably throughout the national park. Clearly, links with reality have finally been severed).
Contrary to public relations images, Gagadju people have little interest in participating in tourism or in any other source of earned income. As one ‘traditional owner’ said to me, “It doesn’t matter if tourism is finished because the Federal Government will look after us”. A similar attitude devoid of social responsibility or even genuine interest in the fate of the environment, is reflected in burn-offs. This must come as a shock to southern whites who cherish the belief that Aborigines are nature’s forestalls who are custodians of Mother Earth.
From what has been discussed so far in this article, it should be apparent that no serious examination of the issue of fire in the north of Australia can proceed without final clarification and resolution of the Aboriginal component; especially historical, but contemporary aspects as well. This comprehensive analysis should finally end the fanciful speculations and pseudo-anthropological hypotheses, which have so confused fire management authorities, government conservation agencies, and scientific and academic communities.
Aboriginal hunting fires
Only Aborigines living in non-pastoral regions would be able to recall traditional burning techniques, and even then only as verbally passed-on descriptions.
During the mid nineteen seventies, one elderly man, then living on an outstation outside of the small community of Gapuwiak (NE Arnhem Land), recalled how he had witnessed a hunting fire when he was about 17 years old. Such practices, he said, became obsolete when missionaries gave Aborigines guns to hunt with. The following is his description (barring possible errors of interpretation):
A hunting fire target zone encompassed about two to eight hectares and was a curved strip no more than seventy to a hundred metres in width, a distance any greater being beyond accurate spear throw.
The convex side faced upwind, which was always south-easterly. Covering themselves with soil, crushed cathedral termite internal nest material, and leaf-litter, hunters lay in the concave side bush perimeter in wait for early morning foraging by wallabies and kangaroos eating the newly emergent grass which follows three weeks after the fire.
In most regions, the practice was only engaged during times of dry season (April/May) population-intensive ceremonies such as Madayun (eastern tribes) / Kunapipi (western and central tribes) and, in respect of each clan, only at two to seven year intervals, with hosting alternately by opposite moieties. In other words, even though this was an annual event, individual hunters would only be required to use hunting fires once every several years.
Apparently, only in the Bamyili / Beswick / Goyder River region was this a geographically fixed annual event, up until about 1980. Such areas are marked by Kunapipi poles and any person venturing too close to these is warned they will be killed. Even the use of the word Kunapipi is proscribed, so it is not hard to imagine why non-Aborigines are rarely aware of associated practices.
It is curious how the idea of hunting fires caught on in western consciousness. The image of animals fleeing the flames had its origins in Walt Disney’s cartoon Bambi. Elsewhere, animals either stroll out of the way of flames (ie veldt grass fires in Africa) or in Eucalyptus forests, get burned to death.
In Australia, the concept of using fire to flush animals out for easy killing would be restricted to desert country, and then only since Aborigines had access to rifles. Hunting with a spear and spear-thrower is infinitely easier without the fire factor. The gullibility of rangers and anthropologists, when regaled with contemporary claims of “culture”, is unbelievably childlike. Even Aborigines are now incredulous at how far the boundaries of absurdity can be pushed.
From the viewpoint of Aboriginal hunting and gathering, in the open savannah woodlands of the north, fire would have serious counter-survival effects. It would:
· Remove all foliage cover, making stalking of game difficult, if not impossible.
· Convert previously grassed terrain into fire hardened stubble, spikes that resemble large syringe needles which would puncture the feet of any Aborigine foolish enough to run after a speared kangaroo (always presuming he was fortunate enough to get close to a kangaroo under such inopportune circumstances). For a hunter a foot injury would have been seen as the worst of possible injuries.
· Remove much-needed shade in the entire burned area.
· Burn all accessible fruit off the trees.
· Burn all yam vines and with these, visibility access to yams, the main dry season form of carbohydrate; and the prime source of energy. Long yams are found by sighting the bunches of triple-winged seedcases in the foliage of trees above, tracing the vines to the ground, then digging. Fire would burn the fragile dried-out vine rendering it impossible to locate. Consequently, to all intents and purposes, this critical energy source would no longer exist; no small catastrophe.
· Burn all leaves, leaving nothing with which to roof shelters; nothing to lay food on, which would mean tooth-eroding sand in the food; and nothing to sleep on except spiky and uncomfortable burned earth.
· Kill small animals and reptiles that live in hollow logs and trees; much sought after for food.
There is not one element here that enhances survival.
Among the spiritual new-age set, it has become fashionable to envisage Aborigines ‘burning the bush’ as some kind of Holocene Land Care project. Even the word Aborigine has been abandoned in favour of Indigenous, implying special status (and hilariously ignoring the same status of Finns, or Irish, or Sami, or Scots). Aborigines are now seen by these people as Tolkienesque custodians of the environment, not daring to harm a leaf without apologising to the spirits.
The reality is the opposite; that Aborigines were taught as children to break branches off bushes and shrubs as they walked, so as to keep annual food cycle walking trails clear, and to make it easy for adults to find children when they play in the bush. Only children have such energy to waste, and this behavior was encouraged.
A more recent reputation as ‘natural environmentalist’ has also taken hold amongst urban white Australians, especially Greens, and Aborigines are now expected to support all environmental initiatives. When it is found that Aboriginal camps are covered with accumulations of litter, the hypothesis is that this is a result of white man’s corruption. While this is a view which could be sustained by selective interpretation, the real reasons are more historical.
In pre-European times, when a camp was vacated, litter was left where it fell (but not human excrement, which was deposited secretively, everyone being aware of how this could be used in magic to harm or kill the depositor).
Being entirely organic, this accumulation of rubbish was of no concern. It would be long gone before the family returned the following year. The existence of shell maddens several metres high is well-known evidence of this practice. Today, the litter is inorganic; cans, bottles, plastic bags and wine cask bladders are testament to any Aboriginal camp site. Conservation was never a feature of Aboriginal culture; there was simply no need for such an ethic. (Not strictly germane to this topic, it nevertheless should be mentioned that the traditional casual attitude to rubbish has had a deleterious impact on Aboriginal health; coupled with the surviving belief that sickness is the result of sorcery or malignant spirits).
The application of conservation practices whilst collecting food, also was not a cultural ethic, as so many romantics contend. Collecting food was hard work. Only a lunatic or a fool would work harder than was necessary and collect more than could be consumed. (It has been estimated that about one third of the energy value of a long yam was used in locating, digging, cleaning, cooking and digesting the yam in the first place; a serious consideration in a carbohydrate-deficient continent). Avoiding unnecessary work was the sensible preservation of difficult-to-obtain energy, which had nothing to do with conservation ethics in the contemporary western crusaderesque sense.
The only actual example of ‘conservation’ cited has been the re-burying of a tiny vine-attached portion of yam, whereupon this site will be remembered and re-exploited the following year. Once again, this simply avoids unnecessary work effort (a survival imperative which is manifested cross-culturally to Europeans as laziness).
Other fires
Arguably, the largest fire type was the signal fire, much-recorded by early explorers. It is curious that these explorers failed to comprehend that they and their strange animals and craft were the subjects of the signals, leaving them to speculate in their journals, on other possible reasons.
Immediately following European contact, contagious disease severely reduced populations in some regions by up to 80 or even 90 % and the remnants of some bands had to join together to form viable mobile communities. An outcome of this was that, in desert country, ceremony-beckoning smoke signals had to be immense to be visible to other intending participants who might now be fifty kilometres away. Most explorers would not have comprehended this, although one making a return journey through the Western Desert did make such an observation.
Apart from the still used June/July mosquito-control burns which might cover a few square kilometres upwind of camp, large fires (other than accidental, of which nowadays there are many) were abandoned when people moved into mission stations early in the mid-twentieth century; the last small group giving up the food cycles around 1953.
There was virtually no movement of Aborigines back to tribal homeland areas until the early 1970s. By this time the knowledge of traditional burn practices had died with its practioners, except for the tiny handful of ‘nephews’ who had gone against the international trend of ignoring old-fashioned beliefs, and these few clung to the ancient ways.
And here, Aboriginal sensitivities come into play: For them it would be unthinkable to humiliate their peers by criticising or directly correcting their contemporary techniques. There being no available Aboriginal protocol to resolve this situation, out-of-control burns have now become the norm, even in southern NE Arnhem Land, the last (partly) traditional area.
It is either naïve, or possibly fraudulent, for bio-scientists and anthropologists to talk about ‘traditional practices’ of any kind when what in fact we witness today are tattered remnants of a former culture, open to wide misinterpretation. Even to Aborigines, quite recent events quickly become ‘ancient’. Examples of this are ceremony components that incorporate Macassan knives and flags, and boat shapes in the sand, quoted by ceremony leaders as dreamtime, yet the earliest Macassan presence was 1710 (or so it is claimed. Actually, some senior men say the contacts go back way further, as do some Indonesian experts).
With a unique combination of naïveté and racism, virtually anything said by Aborigines is taken as gospel, a throwback to the noble savage ethic of The Enlightenment era and of 19th century romance genre, to be found in Chums Book of Adventures and Splendid Stories of the British Empire: “Black man not think like white man. Black man not speak with forked tongue”.
Of course they do, just like any other people. In fact, in genuine Aboriginal culture, truth and fact have little or no differentiating meaning at all, and these factors are subservient to the desire to protect the feelings of the recipient in dialogue. The Aboriginal culture portrayed in the media today, throughout the southern part of Australia, is a concoction. Remnants of genuine culture survive in rural Northern Territory, The Kimberley and Far North Queensland. The rest is pure theatre.
That it has taken thirty years for two members of the academic community to challenge the preposterous and unsupportable positions adopted by self-serving anthropologists and their historian colleagues should cause all concerned Australians to re-evaluate their confidence in scientific and academic integrity.
Retired Senior Lecturer in Anthropology in Sydney University, Roger Sandall, recently published his book The Culture Cult, in which he perceptively demonstrates the destructive consequences of misrepresenting the positions of so-called primitive and tribal peoples. Simultaneously, historian Keith Windschuttle, in his The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, gave the same treatment to the once adulated but now widely discredited ‘black-armband brigade’; those pot-boiling historians who so profitably provide ammunition for the Aboriginal Compensation Industry.
Now that these few academics have made a stand, we may anticipate a plethora of exposés made by people who were successfully intimidated by UN/university proselytised political correctness throughout those decades.
Balancing this observation, the same expose authors have delivered other assertions that are significantly less plausible. The position adopted here is that objective research has a long way to go.
Legitimate reference to ‘traditional’ today is simply to differentiate Aboriginal-language-speaking people from Europeanised acculturated people.
This reflects the obvious and just requirement for government to accommodate the language(s) of Aborigines in any exercise of meaningful communication, especially in respect of issues of consultation, health, education, employment and future empowerment.
Obviously, if the majority of people in an Aboriginal community speak English only as a third, fourth or even seventh language, consultation in English is pointless. Thus, it may be reflected upon and recognised that throughout Australia’s European contact period of history, there has never been meaningful consultation with Aborigines by government.
There is every reason why Aborigines should complain loudly about this deliberately contrived obstacle to communication and democratic process, and one might reasonably ask why this hasn’t happened?
The reason it hasn’t is that the only Aborigines who fully comprehend the disadvantage that this imposes, are the very people who benefit most from this deliberate act of disenfranchisement; so-called Aboriginal leaders. These are the Aborigines who oppose government /community dialogue in local languages. Were this to happen they would lose their lucrative incomes, their dubious status, and the corruptive power which can be so advantageous in a contemporary Aboriginal environment.
In the ‘traditional’ setting, any Aborigine with a modicum of English language knowledge is in a position of power. He or she can tell the rest of the community whatever he likes, using this knowledge to best personal advantage. This happens in all Aboriginal communities.
Moreover, nepotism is the rule. In Aboriginal culture, not only is this not seen as criminal, the perpetrator is liked and admired by all as a person who looks after his family. On the cultural interface this is what tribal really means. Family is the ultimate value. This is difficult for experienced government field officers to criticise or to accommodate, both responses being unjust, so they turn a blind eye.
Government can pretend that it has been unaware of these cross-cultural problems but existing ministerial and departmental files prove otherwise. Discussion about the problems of cronyism, nepotism and the cultural incapacity for financial accountability began as far back as 1976, and were raised by the anthropologist Elkin before WWII, whereupon he demanded that government representatives learn Aboriginal languages. (Elkin has since been vilified by that school of anthropology which is so closely allied to the pot boiling ‘orthodox’ historians).
It is time we all grew up.
If an Aboriginal person claims to be authoritative on cultural issues, it is imprudent to accept this on face value, especially if this refers to a practice from a bygone era, such as fire regimes.
Essentially, this is what has been happening, with destructive results. Being genetically Aboriginal does not necessarily denote credible knowledge; anymore than we would expect every Australian of European origin to be knowledgeable in our own cultural anthropology.
Likewise, the use of the word elder to denote tribal authority, is a classic European grope for comprehension and labeling. The reality is, to be older is as likely to deserve the epithet ‘silly old fool’, as ‘wise old man’; and in Aboriginal culture this applies, as in all other cultures. Southern, urban part Aboriginal claims to being an elder of their tribe, are laughable and transparent pretentions, which equally mock those gullible enough to believe it.
However, traditional speakers of Aboriginal languages are really at a communication disadvantage; as are the outsiders trying to communicate with them.
Even discounting the impracticality and disenfranchisement of expecting traditional Aborigines to articulate in English language, there is another obstacle to communication which every Australian should understand: The cultural imperative of traditional Aboriginal culture is to avoid conflict (traditionally, conflict with spirits, with nature and with people). Thus, it is the overriding intention to please a questioner by providing answers that the questioner wants to hear. No genuinely traditional person wishes to upset another person with an answer that is unwelcome or which might embarrass or displease.
In any event, no Aborigine would ask the sort of direct questions that non-Aborigines ask. Aborigines do not understand why we have to ask so many questions anyway and why we can’t use the more polite and subtle conversational mode of nuance, representation, oblique suggestion and subliminal overtone; or as some people describe the process, delivering a ‘sideways story’.
So, when anthropologists, politicians, tourists or government officials ask traditional Aborigines if they favour a certain proposal, they will always answer yes, unless clothing fashion, uniform, occupation, known attitude or body language, indicates that the desired response will be no. The more that they like us as individuals, the less likelihood there would be of what we would call an ‘honest’ answer.
This is the inconvenient reality of cross-cultural communication. If we are European, we must identify Aboriginal attitudes by observing Aboriginal behavior and, even then, by not interpreting this in typical European terms. Even then, there is never any guarantee that the interpretation will be accurate.
The supreme irony is, much of this concern over accuracy of feedback is irrelevant. At the end of the day, most people believe what they want to believe and scientists and academics are just as inclined towards this proclivity as everybody else; some would say, more so.
Thus, the immense lyrical appeal of the phrase firestick farming ensured that it has won a place in the hearts of upper middle-class city-dwelling academics. It has infiltrated school literature, and joined the other popular myths about the Australian bush so cherished by urban armchair environmentalists and other worshippers of kitsch Australiana.
Other new word-fashions have emerged and these are used like medieval incantations, making certain meanings and implications mandatory by rite of political correctness. Among these are bio-diversity, which if it has a meaning at all can mean that more is better than less, even if part of the more is in the wrong habitat; and mosaic of fire must automatically be a good thing.
That Aborigines did not burn as extensively as is claimed, has been proven conclusively by competent bio-scientists. Several species of fire-sensitive tree could not exist in Australia today if this had been the practice. That these scientists later recanted at the hands of the PC Inquisition, is yet another concern.
The fire / seed germination myth
The belief that certain plants require fire for regeneration is but one in a tiresome list of examples of how plant biologists should restrict themselves to scientific pursuits and leave the application of broader implications to people who are dedicated generalists.
The fact that some seed cases will not germinate until cracked by fire, or some other agent, is merely evidence of well-known natural processes, entirely unrelated to fire.
In the normal course of events such hard seedcases will survive on the woodland floor until two conditions coincide. The first condition is, following ten or even twenty years of weathering, the outer case eventually decays allowing the entry of moisture, thus precipitating germination. The second condition is, should there be a convenient gap in the foliage canopy allowing the sunlight to reach the new seedling, a gap usually availed by the parent or other tree dying and falling to the ground; then a new tree will replace the old. This is the typical regeneration path of the Melville Island Beech and the Macadamia; both of which have similar nuts.
That such a seed would also crack prematurely under the influence of fire, is purely incidental and coincidental. A Macadamia shell would weaken or even crack following contact with fire as well but this does not mean that Macadamia trees require fire for regeneration. Similarly, horticultural texts often recommend grinding or the application of acid prior to attempting germination of some seeds. Are we now to accept that acid rain is natural and desirable?
(Science has recently plunged itself into an orgy of absurd projections, and the Australian public is asking itself why impoverished taxpayers should be funding manifestly counter-productive university faculties and research units. The outrageous assertion that there is scientific consensus on AGW and that the nation should therefore rescind its right to self-determination, accepting instead rule by scientists, may already have launched funding reprisals in the future).
A tree species popularly quoted in school textbooks, as requiring fire for seed germination is the Black Wattle or Acacia auriculaformis.
One researcher, obviously skeptical about the whole theory, experimented with the seedlings and subsequent fires in natural circumstances.
He found that fire did indeed result in prodigious germination, but subsequent fires killed all the seedlings. His conclusion was that the environment would need to be free of fire for at least three years for the trees to survive. Given that in the areas where (nowadays) fire commonly occurs, incidence is usually annual, or at least every two or three years; the seedling would not survive (apologies to the unknown author of this research).
In other words the fire / plant regeneration theory simply does not stack up.
Nevertheless, people believe what they want to believe and even those scientists who originally produced the evidence that effectively disproved the firestick farming proposition (in 1985 & 1991), have evidently found compelling reasons not to rock the boat.
There is no condemnation here. As we have noted elsewhere, when one has a family to nurture a responsible parent does not sacrifice his/her babies for the lesser principle of scientific integrity. Other, less vulnerable single colleagues should undertake this role.
Unfortunately they haven’t.
Senior bio-scientists who now have administrative roles within Australia’s major nature conservation departments (a mistake in itself) have put ambitions before ethics and honesty, and this has conformed to a now painfully obvious pattern.
But, individuals are one thing; whole organisations are another.
Three informally affiliated groups of people are prepared to stand by and see environmental degradation on a vast scale, rather than embarrass themselves with inconvenient truths. These are:
· Aborigines and part Aborigines, many of whom pretend to possess a culture that time deprived them of more than a century ago, and
· Environmental organisations (including Greenpeace; and that organisation for well-heeled environmentalists and parlour activists, the Wilderness Society, also are unwilling to be embarrassed. This is especially as they now embrace the logically challenged bio-diversity theory that “fire is a good thing”.
This genuine Australian ‘export’ has resulted in the recommendation that Yellowstone, Yosemite and other American national parks should be left to burn…“because fire is natural, man” (as is death by bubonic plague, but most of us would want to avoid that like, well… the plague). Gullible Americans accepted this child-like conclusion even though the circumstances upon which this theory is based ceased to exist since we removed most of the world forests, thus rendering any significant forest loss as something of a bio-disaster).
It is evident that northern bushfires, far from being remote events of negligible significance, could well prove to be one of Australia’s more serious environmental catastrophes; albeit one developing in slow motion. Most certainly, in the north, it overshadows land clearing as a cause of faunal and floral depletion, contamination of water and degradation of marine habitats. All of these impinge on human health in one way or another.
As we may have concluded, human health in its widest context can be a vast and complex subject, and our traditional compartmentalised view of the world is seriously challenged. Circumstances now urge us to adopt a more holistic vision. Perhaps we do not do this because we feel that we will become overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the tasks that confront us.
Implications for human health
Some familiarity with both primary and secondary determinants is required before we are able to appreciate the full implications for human health posed by northern fires:
· Degraded food-producing environments due to soil erosion and soil sterilisation
· Degraded or destroyed fish-breeding environments and reduced cacheable fish stocks due to suspended or sedimented silt
· Impacts on plant growth and health, and seed fertility
· Effects on drinking water management in catchment reservoirs and wells (has anyone researched the excessive flow of potash into water environments?)
· Expansion of shallow mosquito breeding environments (especially salt marsh and anopheles mosquito-breeding zones) due to creek and estuarine sedimentation
· The loss of fish, bird and animal species, which may have unforeseen effects in terms of the integrity of ecosystems.
Looked at this way it is now apparent that what we formerly thought were fires of distant and inconsequential significance may in fact be responsible for a wider environmental crisis.
At the very least, if these contentions cannot be immediately disproved, we have reason enough to initiate a major study. This must be transparent and independent; which is to say, public input must influence research, conclusions, and recommendations at all stages. The long-criticised ivory tower has never been more lofty; nor its inhabitants more insular.
We may also now appreciate that the present compartmentalised attitude to human health and to environmental issues inevitably leads to gaps in our vision. By holistically bridging these gaps we are more easily able to appreciate that, subjectively speaking, environmental health and human health are essentially the same thing, or at the very least, overlap or interrelate significantly.
The other advantage of adopting a holistic approach is that, by formally and immediately recognising all related issues we are more quickly alerted to the true magnitude of given problems.
Those who believe that the current form of autocratic government will address this issue need to explain why this hasn’t happened already?
According to the evidence, the Federal Government has been aware of the damage generated by northern fires since 1996, but continues to ignore the entire range of issues. The then Chief Minister and later Liberal Party President, Shane Stone, stonewalled several attempts to have the 1996 publication tabled, or even to have its existence recognised at all. Yet NT fire management authorities privately and unreservedly supported the booklet’s findings and recommendations.
We are not being unduly pessimistic when we conclude that under the current regime of non-accountability lodged in Canberra, action will not take place at all, or if it does, it will be a matter of too little, too late.
It may already be too late.
Even if Australia moves swiftly to resolve our macro-environmental issues, it would be at least a decade before the damage is finally halted and the continent’s northern topsoils, only ever some 70 mm deep in most regions but now reduced to 15-30 mm, or entirely eroded altogether, are finally stabilised. Even then, it would take an estimated 35 years (ref. Bowman & Brown) of strict fire control to restore some semblance of ecological balance (eventually, fuel loads and reestablished lower canopies combine to provide higher ground-surface / litter moisture retention, lower ambient temperatures and reduced access to wind, thus inhibiting intensity of fire and its capacity to spread other than during the high temperature / fresh breeze environment of mid to late afternoon).
After more than a century of annual burning, the soils of entire regions have already disappeared, leaving sterile lateritic pebble; often mistaken as a naturally-occurring soil unit. It may take hundreds of years of careful management and tree planting to make this land productive again.
Following the earlier recommendation regarding Goyder’s survey plinths, once average erosion levels have been associated with specific land units, which themselves can be quickly and accurately identified by their typical floral habitats, it will be simple to assess the likely degree of degradation at any comparable sites across the north of Australia.
As a not entirely inappropriate aside, it must be said that the first step in restructuring management of Australia’s environment must be democratisation of government, entirely replacing the present system of government by globalist edict.
Only a genuinely democratic government, one which reflects the informed concerns of the Australian people, will invest willingly and adequately in this direction. Had this always been the operative mode of government, the land-healing methods pioneered by NSW farmer Peter Andrews (with the essential support of retail leader Gerry Harvey) would have been adopted decades ago; salinity and land-clearing issues would now be chapters of history, and there would never have been the need to prepare this paper.
For those who imagined that Australia is already democratic: three-yearly surveys by Ryan Research since 2001 have demonstrated that approximately 90% of government policies are opposed by 80% of the electorate. This in no way relates to Democracy as understood by the finest political minds in human history: Thucydides, the Irish Monks, the Finnish Philosophers, Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, and Lord Acton.
Evidently, a campaign to preserve and repair the Northern Australian environment from cremation, will become part of a wider war against entrenched elitism and oligarchy.
References for fire study: (1) Firestick Farming, Rhys Jones, 1969; (2) Bushfires in Tasmania, DMJS Bowman & MJ Brown, 1986; (3) Wildflowers of Kakadu, K Brennan, 1986; (4) Response of a Monsoon Forest – Weipa, DMJS Bowman, BA Wilson & RJ Hooper, 1988; (5) On pastoral burn-off techniques, Anecdotal evidence, Reg. Wilson, NT, 1995; (6) Verbal evidence about history of fire and NT aviation, ‘Ossie’ Osgood, pioneer pilot, 1995; (7) Aboriginal fire use, verbal evidence, Timothy Buthiman Dhurrkay, 1975-1996. (8) The experimental booklet Kakadu Burning, Tony Ryan, 1996.
FOOTNOTE FOR ACTIVISTS: What has been written above will conflict sharply with almost every urban reader’s general understanding of Australia’s ecology; and, if seriously considered, will certainly damage faith in the integrity of our scientists, academic institutions and environmental organisations. This wake-up is long overdue.
Concerned readers may prudently give themselves some time to absorb and come to terms with the implications, but what then? Academics and scientists will find spirited direction through researching the above references; and some kind of sanguinary fallout is expected. But this, in itself, will not bring about change.
Without exploring further details, it is evident that the pivotal remedial issue is the non-responsiveness of our governments. Our surveys show that the ordinary citizen is not apathetic at all… just voiceless. People are worried indeed, and would support any and all measures to reverse ecological decay. We all need to understand clearly that this disaster is not a failure of mankind per se. What we are witnessing is environmental destruction wrought by vastly powerful corporate entities, many of them with economies greater than those of most countries. Their apparent motivation is profit at any cost, but their CEOs are engaged in a blindly neurotic race to become the ultimate monopolistic corporation.
Manipulating from behind are the giant investment banks, who own the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the WTO; and who through the Rothschild’s Bank for International Settlements (BIS) control all of the world’s reserve banks, including the US Federal Reserve; and who carry more influence with governments than any body of voters.
They also provide, directly or otherwise, the most strategic proportion of funds which pay for political party election campaigns; fought, ironically, with media owned by moguls who are part of the same banker cabal. These observations are not in the realm of conspiracy theories, but thanks to the Internet are now very basic knowledge possessed by any serious student or observer of politics or geopolitics.
So, if the destroyers of our environment effectively own our governments, what power do we have for change? The answer is, plenty. At the risk of being trite, the answer is People Power. But non-violent expression of people power is not possible while 70% of the Australian media is owned by Rupert Murdoch and all of it under his control, including the ABC and SBS.
The good news is that print newspapers are facing collapse through advertising starvation, and the UK News of the World saga makes it clear that Murdoch has very powerful enemies. An on-line contextualized news service is planned that will provide a reliable and independent alternative source of information, and as an uncensored conduit for national expression. This modest site is the embryonic genesis of such a resource. Because this site will be unpopular with Government leaders, discretion is an essential part of our development strategy.
WILDFIRE CONTAINMENT IN THE TOP END
Should the utopian dream of democratic goverment in the NT ever come to pass, the following is recommended as a containment strategy for rural and remote wildfires.
Goverment needs to invest in geo-stationary satellite monitoring of wildfires.
Any fire larger than a campfire can immediately be recognised by satellite. As virtually all damaging fires are man-made, a helicopter crew can be delivered to the site and the lighter of the fire arrested and, if conditions are favourable, the fire extinguished.
Penalties for illegal fires need to be substantial and custodial, to be taken seriously.
Larger fires during the heat of day can be extinguished as follows:
(1) Two graders need to be stationed every hundred kilometres along rural highways; housed at secure locations.
(2) Two graders can pursue the fire's flanks, commencing from the initial already-burned source zone, and moving towards the fire-front in inverse V-formation.
(3) The graders should be followed by water tank crews preventng lateral spread of the fire, either directly or by back-burning; especially targeting pandanus and grass types that are rapidly exploited by fire and spread aerially through convection winds.
(4) As the graders approach the convergent point, some hundreds of metres ahead of the fire's front, backburning will eliminate forward fuel load, concluding extinguishment.
When not in demand for firefighting, the graders can eliminate corrugations on regional dirt roads, thereby removing an expensive cause of community and government vehicle damage and accidents. In rural NT, road corrugations are the most significant cause of vehicle damage, either through vibrational damage, front end distortion from potholes, or loss of control on bends leading to accidents; sometimes fatal.
The grader compounds can also double as housing for noxious weed equipment stations, highway garbage collection vehicles, burm grass-cutting machinery, and emergency communications relay facilities. First Aid equipment and water may value-add these compounds.
Some may even support permananent populations of workers, attracting formation of village infrastructure and facilities.
The grader use for fire control concept was unreservedly supported by the 1996 NT Fire Chief.
Tony Ryan
© Copyright Tony Ryan 1996; 2018; 2022.
Tony has a fifty year association with the Aborigines of North East Arnhem Land and Kakadu, speaks Dhuwal and Dhangu languages, and has also written extensively on geopolitics, democracy, health consumerism, Aboriginal development, environmental issues, and cross-culltural communication. He has worked in a plethora of industries, including cattle, education, journalism, social research, road construction, publishing, rail, public service, tourism, landscaping, and real estate.
THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPLICATIONS OF
NORTHERN WOODLAND BURNING
Tony Ryan
The subject of burn-offs, in a context of Northern Australia, is more complex than orthodox science and the various mandated authorities for fire management have hitherto recognised. A growing number of Australians question the theories of bio-fire integrity and so-called fire-stick farming; pointing to more logical and evidence-based sequences and scenarios.
Introduction
Bush fires in the tropical north of Australia have little in common with the raging infernos of the south.
In the southern 75% of the land mass, under certain extreme conditions Eucalyptus species pump sufficient oil into the foliage and adjacent atmosphere to support explosive firestorms. This means that policies of minimal ‘interference with nature’ in the south can result in considerable loss of life and property (wildlife as well as human).
If substantial regional fire breaks and access corridors are not constructed and maintained, and if fuel loads in strategic areas are not reduced during winter, management of summer fires, once started, becomes impossible.
The temperate climate southern three-quarters of Australia is subjected to lightning-caused fires, something that is rarely an issue in the north (and, some claim, is considerably exaggerated in the south).
Therefore, it should be stressed that the following text applies specifically to the tropical north; although many factors are common to both regions.
Proposals to not winter burn or back-burn in southern regions are tentatively supported only on the proviso that they are not applied to maintained firebreak corridors or to urban or village buffer zones.
In all parts of Australia, there are landholders, including Aborigines, who set fire to the bush or grasslands as part of a confused and recently emerged belief system.
Then there are the environmental pragmatists who ‘control burn’ to prevent fire in later high risk seasons.
There are farmers and others who burn-off from their own property borders and with no consideration for their neighbours; and there are pyromaniacs who start fires with little in the way of rationale or justification. Some of these have been found to be part of the fire-fighting establishment and this has been identified as a problem around the world, in urban as well as rural locations, suggesting the need for pre-employment psychological profiling of fire fighters.
Overall, the central problem has been the unwillingness of State Governments to fund satellite bush fire monitoring, or a helicopter-mobilised firefighter/police force to spot fires as soon as they are lit, and to capture perpetrators and extinguish containable blazes. Reluctantly, it must be said that nationwide endemic state political corruption tends to divert solutions to the Federal realm; but subsequent devolution to regional control would enable management to accommodate idiosyncrasies of local climate, resources and flora. Obviously, corruption must be ended before satisfactory state and regional solutions can be applied.
In fundamental contrast to the south, Northern bushfires are grass-based, as opposed to tree-based, are less intense than in the south, and they occur in predominantly unsettled areas. Statistically, this is because in the NT, for example, less than 2% of the land is populated. But where there is urbanization burning is 100% of all woodland and grasslands.
This means that loss of human life is unusual and that, as a consequence, public interest in rural fire management has been minimal. This attitude is slowly changing as settlement of the north intensifies and the cost of property destruction, and property protection, rises accordingly.
Unfortunately, with Chief Minister Michael Gunner allocating political PR value of July First firecrackers above fire containment and the risk to human lives, deaths will occur sooner rather than later.
Northern bushfires
Although it is an almost completely unrecognised environmental issue, but one which may be having an inestimable impact on our health and that of all life in the vicinity of the Australian continent, it should be of serious concern to all Australians that almost the entire north of Australia (70-100 %) is deliberately burned off every year, resulting in damage which includes:
- Large volumes of polluting smoke, which impacts on human health, the quality of sunlight, and integrity of the atmosphere.
- Absolute destruction of once plentiful tree species such as the extremely fire-sensitive Northern Cypress (Callitris intratropica) and the Melville Island Beech (Canarium australianum).
- A gradual reduction of tree height, size and density. Saplings die but new shoots from the roots or lignotubers mean several new trunks rather than one, survive. This makes them more vulnerable to the next fire and, even if one trunk finally dominates, it is weakened by fire-scars caused by the burning of close-proximity dead lesser trunks, exposing it to invasions by micro-organisms and termites and, again, by repeat fires. These are the portal-shaped scars seen at ground level, often further degraded into cathedral hollows. It is noticeable from even a casual glance at eucalyptus woodlands that few living trees reach the size or height of still-standing dead forebears.
- Gradual metamorphous to negative bio-diversity (woodland / forest reverts to lower-story Acacia savanna, imported noxious weeds, and grasslands; ultimately and inexorably, to desert)
- The destruction of hollow log and hollow tree-dwelling fauna (including birds; ie the now rare Gouldian Finch): Whenever the upper chambers of ground level portal scars connect with upper trunk cavities, thus hollowed trees turn into blast furnaces; and the thump as these victims fall to the woodland floor amidst a rising cloud of sparks and embers, is a part of the northern fire scenario. Likewise, most ground-level hollow log savannah animal shelters are Ironwoods (Erythrophleum chlorostachys) which, when they burn do so at very high temperatures leaving only a trail of fine white ash. Bones and teeth of victims are also reduced to ash, leading wildlife experts to conclude, incorrectly, that no wildlife has died.
- Danger to local aircraft as dense smoke reduces visual distance to 100 m or less sometimes up to a height of 3000 m, making safe landing hazardous or impossible. (Pioneer pilots such as the Top End’s ‘Ossie’ Osgood, have reported that fires have increased, both intensively and extensively, since the 1970s, especially over Aboriginal-controlled land).
- Defoliation lasting months, which results in severely impaired oxygen production and an absolute reduction in carbon dioxide absorption. The reduced rate of global oxygen production, although currently slight, should be monitored carefully because respiration can tolerate only slight changes. The increasing percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is generally regarded by embracers of Anthropogenic Global Warming theory as a source of concern. In point of fact, such increase is the only known benefit of bush fire, promoting as it does, all plant growth. However, to destroy flora in order to benefit the growth of flora manifests dubious logic at best. In some parts of Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Javanese-occupied Western Papua New Guinea (Irian Jaya), Papua New Guinea and Brazil; each dry season areas of forest are permanently burned out, to be replaced with palm oil plantations and soy, which are questionable contributions to human welfare. It is not known to what extent the southern 70% of Australia is burned but it is contended that it vastly exceeds what should be permissible. Moreover, claims that wildfire is always caused by lightning, are often disputed.
- In the North, there is an annually enhanced proliferation of spear grass (Sorghum intrans, the main carrier of northern fires). As locals have pointed out sardonically, “the more fire, the more spear grass; the more spear grass, the more fires”. This is because fire eliminates the grass’s competition, but not the grass seeds, which drill into the safety of the soil. The 3 M tall grass tends to smother all emerging plants. A more recently introduced grass, Gamba, which is double the height of spear grass will, if not eradicated now, elevate woodland scorch levels to the top of the canopy, probably with expedited destruction of woodland. The NT Government has chosen to not eradicate this weed and it is spreading exponentially, echoing the failure to halt the spread of Mimosa Pigra in 1972.
- Loss of exposed topsoils due to the action of wind and, with the onset of the wet season, heavy downpours and flooding (the calculated loss has been an average of 0.5 mm of soil per year which, with an average original topsoil of 70 mm, adds up to a significant loss of top soil since pastoral burns commenced in the 1880s). In 1880, frontier surveyor Goyder laid ferro-concrete plinths at the junction of every 320 acre block in the wider Darwin region of the Top End, and at a uniform depth. These and their replacements can (and should) be measured by scientists for rate of plinth exposure and hence soil erosion.
- Fire regimes also eliminate litter and organic matter from the soil surface, leaving nothing for worms, insects and small fauna to transfer below, which ultimately causes a reduction in the soil’s organic content. This leads to the demise of essential soil bacteria, a rise in the now-naked ground temperature and, for both of these reasons, a failure of the soil to retain moisture. Ongoing erosion of fine soil particles causes a proportionate increase in the soil’s pebble content, exacerbating already reduced moisture-retention capacity. These factors culminate in overall reduction of soil fertility and altered pH; as fixed minerals, normally converted to an unfixed state through the action of bacteria, are no longer plant-assimilable. The argument that potash added to the soil by fire acts as a fertiliser, is spurious. Without the presence of other balancing assimilable nutrients, the presence of potash is useless to plants.
- Actual soil sterilisation occurs, due to progressive and concomitant elimination of all organic matter, soil bacteria, mineral residues, sand and silt, unfixed minerals and other topsoil components.
- Wind and water-caused erosion of naked top soils takes place and, eventually, even erodes sub soils; leading to sedimentation of creeks and rivers and to the flow of excessive quantities of suspended particles, resulting in the smothering of estuarine habitats. Creek sedimentation also causes flooding which then washes more layers of soil away. In exercises of hasty scientific exorcism, much of this has been blamed unfairly on buffalo rather than feral pigs as the real culprits.
- There is a suspension of excessive ultra-fine silts in sea water beyond the estuaries, causing a reduction in light penetration to deeper corals, and a rising of water temperature as light rays strike the particles in the upper levels.
- The settling of suspended silts on coral regions causes species depletion and upsets bio-balance. On the (Qld) East Coast of Australia this is added to by land disturbance (arable cultivation, dirt roads, road construction and excavation for dwellings and buildings), and by leaching of chemical fertilizers. (Of parallel and corroboratory interest in this regard was the early 1970s construction of a mountain hotel on the Malaysian Island of Penang. The construction site caused the muddying of the mountain’s creeks and rivers and this was visible for many kilometres out to sea. The west coast Penang fishing industry, famous over millennia throughout south Asia for its blachan (fermented prawn) product, was destroyed. An entire village economy became extinct. Subsequently, the village beaches, especially Bhatu Ferringhi, were littered with abandoned and rotting fishing boats; monuments to globalised tourism).
- Natural causes of north Australian fire are negligible. Lightning strikes are common during the onset of the early wet season, but these are associated with heavy rainstorms which douse the fires almost as fast as they occur.
- Secondly, lightning never starts fire on regions with lateritic (iron-rich) subsoils, which describes most of the Top End’s high-standing dry woodland units. With each strike on a tree (almost always a Stringybark), depending possibly on the presence of water in the air, on the tree, or the extent of saturation of the bark, combined with soil moisture; or the presence of actual laterite stratas, lightning may have one of the following effects:
- Total shredding of the tree’s bark; or
- Explosion of all timber between the tree’s roots and as far up the trunk as the junction of the first branch. Fragments range from toothpick size to 3 metre shards, and these are sometimes spread over a radius of 50 m (8,000 m²); or
- Shear a branch, or even the trunk; or
- Leave the tree almost entirely intact but completely dead, with a tiny chip of bark missing on a high branch, the only evidence of lightning strike.
Twenty-five years of observation and monitoring in the Northern Territory’s Top End (1971-96) had been unable to identify evidence of combustion on a single tree which had been struck by lightning, when the strike had occurred on lateritic soil types (ref. "Kakadu Burning", 1996). This is not to say that such evidence may not eventually be found, but it does demonstrate that the presumption of natural fire being caused by lightning is seriously overestimated.
As an issue of practical bush survival, when Top End clouds threaten lightning, the Stringybark (Eucalyptus tetrodonta) woodlands are healthy places to avoid; or, at the very least, shelter should be sought more than 50 m from the nearest Stringybark. This is because this tree is normally the tallest of the upper canopy and therefore is most likely to attract a strike. Up to 3 metre long shards of wood can be driven a metre or more into the ground, thirty or more metres from the explosion site, indicating the destructive power of the explosion. The belief that such wood will not burn is a popular rural myth, but its post-explosion porosity harbours atmospheric moisture and otherwise makes it mildly unsuitable for primary kindling wood.
Spontaneous combustion does not occur in the north of Australia and most certainly not in the Top End. Peat fires are entirely unknown, there being no peat swamps. There are undoubtedly occasional lightning-caused fires but these appear limited to the sandy coastal regions, black soil plains, and to sandstone, limestone and dolomite regions. Furthermore, prevailing SE winds tend to drive fires towards the northern coast, not inland, even at night.
Finally, and most significantly, there is no lightning during the dry season when almost all fires occur.
The inescapable conclusion is that the permanently burning northern landscape of the dry season is the result of deliberate human-lit fires. To all intents and purposes, lightning or other natural causes must be excluded from the equation.
Although it is still a matter of pure speculation, some scientists consider that bush fire convection may drive particles high into the atmosphere and precipitate reactions which may be connected to overall ozone depletion, or to localised ozone layer disturbances. While the veracity of speculations cannot be commented upon in this paper, it would be remiss of us not to consider the possible health implications, especially as this might explain a strange phenomenon which occurred in Darwin around June, 1974. It is not widely known that on this day, the exposed skin of hundreds of Darwinites blistered in less than a couple of hour’s exposure to the late morning sun, and many of these victims were well-tanned open air workers. Although ozone-measuring equipment was immediately installed (as it had been in other parts of Australia since 1966), a tight-lipped Federal Government explained nothing. Cyclone Tracy destroyed the equipment some months later and this was not replaced for some twenty years.
Was this strange occurrence due to spontaneous emergence of an ozone gap, or was this the result of localised impact by widespread and intensely burning ground fires? Clearly, the Federal Government is required to initiate appropriate research, if this hasn’t already been undertaken; and to provide some kind of explanation. But, in these times of abysmal government credibility, will we be able to believe the explanation?
Experience strongly suggests to us that all government pronouncements on public health and environmental issues must be treated with deepest suspicion. And, as part of the globalization of science, funding now drifts only in the direction of useful propaganda or industrial profit. Consequently there are two kinds of scientists; employed potboilers, and unemployed people of integrity or proven incompetence. Both are tarred with the same brush.
A Federal Government study, released in 2003, reported that a reduction in fauna species throughout Australia means that many of these animals will soon become extinct. This was blamed largely on deforestation due to land clearing; mostly certainly, in many parts of Australia, a serious issue in itself.
However, there has been relatively little land clearing in the NT’s Top End (much less than 1%) yet wildlife species depletion is also evident there, and at similar rates to elsewhere on the continent. This indicates the existence of a different cause and fire should be an immediate suspect. (The NT observations were made pre-cane toad migration).
Considering the evidence, it is reasonable to speculate that there is probably inestimable damage to the northern natural environment ranging from degradation:
- Of both the upper and lower atmospheres; to
- The dry biomass and coastline;
- The wetlands and rivers, and
- To the northern coast coral beds, possibly even the Great Barrier Reef, albeit northern and southern ends (the central portion may be protected from the residual impact of fire by mainland high rainfall and the presence of coastal rainforest).
Powerful national and international environmental organisations also prefer to look the other way. Although many of these were once grass roots movements, one-time enthusiastic but now disillusioned supporters now regard these as cynical hierarchical corporations which have become corrupted by their own executive power and by compromising sources of funding and banking.
Three loosely-related lobbies in particular have outlawed all discussion about the fire issue because each is partly reliant for its mandate on the support on the other two, and all would be embarrassed by the release of reliable and objective scientific research.
In other words, individual bush fire-promoting careers are at stake.
When environmental lobbies and organisations obtain funding, the automatic conditions of funding demand the employment of acceptably qualified professionals (often a mistake in the first place). These professionals, once ensconced, would be unlikely to endorse views which might place their employers in positions of national disrepute. This would threaten funding, and hence their jobs, not to mention their professional reputations.
With, according to reports, something like ninety-five percent of qualified bio-scientists not employed in their specific field of training, those so employed are perennially and compulsively defensive.
This basic fact of life impinges on all organisations, from small conservation foundations all the way through to the Federal Government’s nature conservation agency (which changes its name so frequently that reference here would be counterproductive, and one wonders if this chameleon-like quality is also a defense mechanism); state national park authorities, the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Wilderness Society, World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace. All have a great deal to lose. Two of these organisations are also linked to the greatly rejuvenated and immensely influential Eugenics movement, which views wild flora and fauna as suitable replacements for 85% of global human population.
Another source of pessimism is the top-heavy preponderance of PhDs:
- At all levels of field work;
- In public relations;
- In industrial and interdepartmental liaison;
- In administration of environmental studies, and
- Even in wildlife management.
Decisions are the jealous prerogative of minds that are incapable of practical, prioritized, and coordinated implementation of knowledge, let alone the accommodation of data not presented in esoteric language and resonating suitably in their sectarian enclaves.
Policies are justified in tomes that are, what observers of normative intelligence would describe as unreadable and pedantic gobbledegook; which is of course, the reason for all jargon… the alienation and distancing of likely critics, concomitantly creating an aura of unchallengeable superiority of knowledge around the user.
Behind such professional arrogance, even the silliest decisions can be delivered with supreme confidence. Indeed, in one year alone, 1989, ANPWS/ANCA (the federal agency then responsible for management of Kakadu National Park) eliminated approximately one third of all Northern Cypress in the Park with its ill-advised burn-off programmes (the celebrated and lyrical "mosaic of fire"). However, an internationally audible “oops!” could not be permitted, and it is simply pretended that this blunder never happened.
Visitors to the North during the dry season see the official burning and invariably have one question, why? Most visitors are skeptical about official explanations; as would be any normal human being who retains a vestige of commonsense.
The genesis of broadacre burning
The origins of what we might call broadacre burning may be found in the cattle industry so, quite naturally, pastoralists who are already bruised over other environmental and political bun fights, are also reluctant to discuss the issue in the hearing of an intemperate media, or within cooee of conservation groups with little appetite for social and economic realities.
Pastoralists are not alone in their reticence.
What has now become cynically known in rural north Australia as the ‘Aboriginal Industry’ has reinvented itself for the profitable public relations value that this presents. One of the fabricated aspects of new-age synthetic Aboriginal culture has been Firestick Farming.
This originated from a book written by European author Rhys Jones in 1969 and consisted largely of poetical and remote speculation.
As far as is known, Jones had not interviewed Aborigines who were familiar with traditional (pre-pastoral) burning practices; the title Arnhem Lander being sufficient for credibility. The fact that at the time of his interviews almost all such people who spoke English language with culturally corresponding meanings, were young and had no comprehension of earlier traditional living. Nor, for that matter, had Kakadu officers or scientists of ANPWS/ANCA taken traditional experience into account. The last traditional Aborigines, that is, people of pre-pastoral times in this region, had died some thirty years before the National Park was declared. The term ‘pre-pastoral’ is all-important.
Pastoral burn-off practices
As what should be a historical issue of critical relevance, the pastoral component of northern fire regimes, appears inexplicably to have dropped out of the equation altogether. What people in Kakadu call traditional burning practices are in fact techniques of purely pastoral origin.
The few surviving former cattle station managers who understood these burn techniques are less than impressed with today’s destructive practices and do not understand why their own very qualified knowledge has not been sought (as of the time of research, 1985-88). Perhaps this has something to do with rapidly changing and foreign ownership of cattle stations, but more likely the reason is distaste for inconvenient evidence.
The history and reasons for pastoral burning provide otherwise inaccessible insights and are worth recounting here:
Cattlemen of the late nineteenth century, lured into the north by explorer’s reports of vast pastures, quickly realised that if they did not burn the dry grass every year; (dry because the six-month dry season is invariably without rain) their cattle would starve and die. Thus began an annual rotational technique of pastoral burn-offs:
A few weeks after burning, new grass would emerge and, progressively engaged, this practice would feed stock until the following wet season rains triggered fresh normal growth.
This practice continues today but not in the finely tuned chain formation of small planned evening fires of a former era, lit by Aboriginal ringers as part of their clearly-defined station employment roles:
These former fire regimes led cattle through the low lands as the Dry Season progressed, diverting the animals to higher ground as the Wet Season approached, avoiding floods and stock losses from drowning and crocodile attack. This managed-cattle-herd-movement terminated where grazing patterns ensured that end-of-Wet preferred pasture was close to where mustering was convenient, when the following Dry Season evaporated surface water sufficiently.
It was, admittedly, an environmentally sacrificial practice, but it was executed on a carefully planned strategic scale. In all, it incorporated bush tick eradication, stock yard cleaning and muster pre-tracking. A price paid in pastoral regions was the eventual elimination of Beech and Cypress trees, and many low-canopy leafy shrub species and rainforest pockets, except in ‘fire islands’ and creek beds. (Fire islands are small locations which prevailing topography, winds and fuel load become convergent factors which cause a fire front to flow in a wide circular formation and then burn back on itself, eventually petering out. They are often demarcated by creek beds and billabongs. These land form-generated occurrences were repeated annually, protecting localised dense canopies and ground litter, the latter of which retained moisture which successively resisted night and morning fires, should these eventuate. Fire islands in the Top End can be identified by atypical stands of Canarium australianum and Syzygium forte, and shrub cover which includes Gardenia megasperma, Ixora tomentosa, the vine Jasminium aemulum, and native woodland ferns).
As a skilled pastoral management programme, this practice ceased when well-intended southern-inspired Aboriginal equal award wages were introduced in February,1968.
(Historical speculation is relevant here: It is difficult to say if Aboriginal station employment cessation was due entirely to economic and logistical factors, or also to some extent, outrage on the part of poor rural whites at being ‘equalised’ with blacks (as the song goes: "everybody has to have someone to look down on").
Perceptions of the time are important for historical reasons, but also because these may impinge on future rural developments. The truth is, it is doubtful if equal award wages on northern stations were ever sustainable given that only about five years in seven produced sufficient profit to justify a fully manned muster by ringers. In some years, none; and many station managers were lucky to be paid directly at all during these hard years).
In historically comparative terms, today’s pastoral burning is a massive over-kill, resulting in regions of scorched earth covering several hundreds of square kilometres, sometimes cumulatively many tens of thousands.
In terms of effects, burning is now vast and indiscriminate and has been adopted by national park rangers and by semi-acculturated Aborigines, in the belief that this is ‘traditional’. It is traditional pastoral, not the ancient practice of traditional Aborigines; an assertion that most urban white romantics and urbanised Aboriginal activists will now be unable to confront.
Neither Reece-Jones, nor most other bio-scientists, had considered what part our fire-sensitive trees would play in their cherished and shallowly conceived ‘multi-millennia burning regimes’, nor how seedlings and saplings would fare. In northern records, only Kym Brennan, then of the Office of the Supervising Scientist (OSS), Jabiru, in Kakadu National Park, appears to have read the bush with the eyes of both scientist and bushman.
To quote the observant Mr Brennan:
One of the most contentious issues concerning the maintenance of forest and woodland plant communities in the (Kakadu National) Park is the use of fire. Pastoral activities in the region, before the Park was established, replaced the small, ‘controlled’ fires, characteristic of traditional Aboriginal burning regimes, with more widespread, uncontrolled burning patterns. This was done to stimulate the growth of "green pick" for stock.
Although most mature shrubs and trees in woodlands are adapted to tolerate frequent exposure to fire, their seedlings are not, and unless recruitment occurs then the woodland communities slowly decline through natural wasting. The Cypress Pine Callitris intratropica is a tree known to be sensitive to fire and has vanished from most lowland forests.
In the Park today Aboriginal people continue to burn many areas, but the use of four-wheel-drive vehicles and safety matches is hardly traditional style and therefore mainly serves to perpetuate pastoral habits.
Park managers also conduct extensive early dry season ‘cool’ burns to minimise the destruction caused by ‘hot’ fires later in the year. In most years, 80 - 90% of the lowlands in the park are burned and it is arguable whether this is desirable. A fire management policy for the park is being developed and involves consultation with the Aboriginal people in Kakadu who are still conversant with traditional fire practice.
-Wildflowers of Kakadu, 1986.
Kym Brennan’s reference to ‘consultation with Aboriginal people in Kakadu’ requires some qualification. These people had been exposed to adjacent cattle station practices for almost a century and had not engaged in traditional burning practices since arrival of the first missionary, who provided access to guns for hunting.
Their knowledge of burning is now restricted wholly to highly degraded adaptations of former pastoral burn-offs, and are completely uncontrolled. This latter statement is meant to be taken literally. The oft-used term control burns implies to interested readers that the authors of fire control its spread. They do not. What is meant by control burns is simply that a landscape which has been incinerated cannot catch fire again until the following year. And yes, one must question the logic of this in terms of environmental protection. The option of fire prevention is never seriously engaged.
Another factor demands clarification. Although Kakadu National Park managers make constant allusions to ‘consultation with Kakadu traditional owners’, in fact there are no ‘traditional’ people in Kakadu, in the sense implied. The last traditional Gagadju man passed away around 1985 and his burial ceremony (baparu bunggal) remains unfinished to this day for the simple reason nobody remembers the Songlines or ceremonial protocols. The phrase ‘consultation with Kakadu traditional owners’ is nothing but cunning use of words and ambiguity to create an impression to achieve a political end.
While Aboriginal languages are retained, few if any have a complete knowledge of social and family relationship structures and rules, or of ceremonies, and most ignore them anyway. Outsiders from the north-east, the only people who have the necessary knowledge, must complete funeral ceremonies.
The last significant painting done in Kakadu was by a Galpu man, Mathuman Gurruwiwi, from Galiwin’ku, some three hundred kilometres away. He did this at the behest of one of the more celebrated ‘elders’ of Kakadu, Bill Neidjie, justified because the Galpu man’s clan songlines extend into Kakadu and he (hopefully) had the required knowledge (something other Morning Star bungal participant leaders actually dispute).
(Of possible significance, Mathuman was also the longest-serving guide on my 4WD Far North Safari, which operated in Kakadu National Park from 1987 to 1995. As the reader might well speculate, we discussed Aboriginal culture of that region to considerable depth. Others of our guides included Sophia Garrkali, who later sang for Yuthu Yindi and became senior field officer for the Department of Territory Families; and Mawuyul of multiple movie fame; all of these genuinely traditional people and respected for their knowledge).
Sadly, what most of the Gagudju people now have in common is alcoholism and greed, which is nurtured by royalties from uranium mining, National Park entry fees, unearned salaries, and a broad range of welfare, CDEP (now CDP) and development payments.
As with all people, everywhere, the receipt of money without contributing effort is invariably destructive and stifles initiative (compare with studies of the fates of lottery-winners in all countries and cultures). Few Aborigines in Kakadu have genuine jobs. A handful work as rangers but their roles are tokenistic, generally emptying rubbish bins and lighting the destructive ‘traditional’ fires, invariably at the worst possible time; the heat of mid-day.
This ‘consultation’ process referred to by rangers is essentially a ploy that makes Park management a delightfully unaccountable exercise, all questionable practices and decisions being deflected to their “traditional advisors”, linguistic comprehension of whom, by visitors or agency investigators, is neither expected nor required…a sort of cross-cultural adaptation of the Emperor’s New Clothes.
Nobody dares question the almost childishly obvious absence of authenticity. (That this increasingly out of control façade would inevitably precipitate bizarre behavior was, inexplicably, not anticipated. Now, the unthinkable has finally happened and ‘traditional owners’ have decreed that swimming in tropical Kakadu National Park’s crystal clear sub-escarpment lagoons must cease forthwith. Kakadu ‘leader’ Jonathan Neidjie stated that tourists will have to use conventional swimming pools, sprinkled presumably throughout the national park. Clearly, links with reality have finally been severed).
Contrary to public relations images, Gagadju people have little interest in participating in tourism or in any other source of earned income. As one ‘traditional owner’ said to me, “It doesn’t matter if tourism is finished because the Federal Government will look after us”. A similar attitude devoid of social responsibility or even genuine interest in the fate of the environment, is reflected in burn-offs. This must come as a shock to southern whites who cherish the belief that Aborigines are nature’s forestalls who are custodians of Mother Earth.
From what has been discussed so far in this article, it should be apparent that no serious examination of the issue of fire in the north of Australia can proceed without final clarification and resolution of the Aboriginal component; especially historical, but contemporary aspects as well. This comprehensive analysis should finally end the fanciful speculations and pseudo-anthropological hypotheses, which have so confused fire management authorities, government conservation agencies, and scientific and academic communities.
Aboriginal hunting fires
Only Aborigines living in non-pastoral regions would be able to recall traditional burning techniques, and even then only as verbally passed-on descriptions.
During the mid nineteen seventies, one elderly man, then living on an outstation outside of the small community of Gapuwiak (NE Arnhem Land), recalled how he had witnessed a hunting fire when he was about 17 years old. Such practices, he said, became obsolete when missionaries gave Aborigines guns to hunt with. The following is his description (barring possible errors of interpretation):
A hunting fire target zone encompassed about two to eight hectares and was a curved strip no more than seventy to a hundred metres in width, a distance any greater being beyond accurate spear throw.
The convex side faced upwind, which was always south-easterly. Covering themselves with soil, crushed cathedral termite internal nest material, and leaf-litter, hunters lay in the concave side bush perimeter in wait for early morning foraging by wallabies and kangaroos eating the newly emergent grass which follows three weeks after the fire.
In most regions, the practice was only engaged during times of dry season (April/May) population-intensive ceremonies such as Madayun (eastern tribes) / Kunapipi (western and central tribes) and, in respect of each clan, only at two to seven year intervals, with hosting alternately by opposite moieties. In other words, even though this was an annual event, individual hunters would only be required to use hunting fires once every several years.
Apparently, only in the Bamyili / Beswick / Goyder River region was this a geographically fixed annual event, up until about 1980. Such areas are marked by Kunapipi poles and any person venturing too close to these is warned they will be killed. Even the use of the word Kunapipi is proscribed, so it is not hard to imagine why non-Aborigines are rarely aware of associated practices.
It is curious how the idea of hunting fires caught on in western consciousness. The image of animals fleeing the flames had its origins in Walt Disney’s cartoon Bambi. Elsewhere, animals either stroll out of the way of flames (ie veldt grass fires in Africa) or in Eucalyptus forests, get burned to death.
In Australia, the concept of using fire to flush animals out for easy killing would be restricted to desert country, and then only since Aborigines had access to rifles. Hunting with a spear and spear-thrower is infinitely easier without the fire factor. The gullibility of rangers and anthropologists, when regaled with contemporary claims of “culture”, is unbelievably childlike. Even Aborigines are now incredulous at how far the boundaries of absurdity can be pushed.
From the viewpoint of Aboriginal hunting and gathering, in the open savannah woodlands of the north, fire would have serious counter-survival effects. It would:
· Remove all foliage cover, making stalking of game difficult, if not impossible.
· Convert previously grassed terrain into fire hardened stubble, spikes that resemble large syringe needles which would puncture the feet of any Aborigine foolish enough to run after a speared kangaroo (always presuming he was fortunate enough to get close to a kangaroo under such inopportune circumstances). For a hunter a foot injury would have been seen as the worst of possible injuries.
· Remove much-needed shade in the entire burned area.
· Burn all accessible fruit off the trees.
· Burn all yam vines and with these, visibility access to yams, the main dry season form of carbohydrate; and the prime source of energy. Long yams are found by sighting the bunches of triple-winged seedcases in the foliage of trees above, tracing the vines to the ground, then digging. Fire would burn the fragile dried-out vine rendering it impossible to locate. Consequently, to all intents and purposes, this critical energy source would no longer exist; no small catastrophe.
· Burn all leaves, leaving nothing with which to roof shelters; nothing to lay food on, which would mean tooth-eroding sand in the food; and nothing to sleep on except spiky and uncomfortable burned earth.
· Kill small animals and reptiles that live in hollow logs and trees; much sought after for food.
There is not one element here that enhances survival.
Among the spiritual new-age set, it has become fashionable to envisage Aborigines ‘burning the bush’ as some kind of Holocene Land Care project. Even the word Aborigine has been abandoned in favour of Indigenous, implying special status (and hilariously ignoring the same status of Finns, or Irish, or Sami, or Scots). Aborigines are now seen by these people as Tolkienesque custodians of the environment, not daring to harm a leaf without apologising to the spirits.
The reality is the opposite; that Aborigines were taught as children to break branches off bushes and shrubs as they walked, so as to keep annual food cycle walking trails clear, and to make it easy for adults to find children when they play in the bush. Only children have such energy to waste, and this behavior was encouraged.
A more recent reputation as ‘natural environmentalist’ has also taken hold amongst urban white Australians, especially Greens, and Aborigines are now expected to support all environmental initiatives. When it is found that Aboriginal camps are covered with accumulations of litter, the hypothesis is that this is a result of white man’s corruption. While this is a view which could be sustained by selective interpretation, the real reasons are more historical.
In pre-European times, when a camp was vacated, litter was left where it fell (but not human excrement, which was deposited secretively, everyone being aware of how this could be used in magic to harm or kill the depositor).
Being entirely organic, this accumulation of rubbish was of no concern. It would be long gone before the family returned the following year. The existence of shell maddens several metres high is well-known evidence of this practice. Today, the litter is inorganic; cans, bottles, plastic bags and wine cask bladders are testament to any Aboriginal camp site. Conservation was never a feature of Aboriginal culture; there was simply no need for such an ethic. (Not strictly germane to this topic, it nevertheless should be mentioned that the traditional casual attitude to rubbish has had a deleterious impact on Aboriginal health; coupled with the surviving belief that sickness is the result of sorcery or malignant spirits).
The application of conservation practices whilst collecting food, also was not a cultural ethic, as so many romantics contend. Collecting food was hard work. Only a lunatic or a fool would work harder than was necessary and collect more than could be consumed. (It has been estimated that about one third of the energy value of a long yam was used in locating, digging, cleaning, cooking and digesting the yam in the first place; a serious consideration in a carbohydrate-deficient continent). Avoiding unnecessary work was the sensible preservation of difficult-to-obtain energy, which had nothing to do with conservation ethics in the contemporary western crusaderesque sense.
The only actual example of ‘conservation’ cited has been the re-burying of a tiny vine-attached portion of yam, whereupon this site will be remembered and re-exploited the following year. Once again, this simply avoids unnecessary work effort (a survival imperative which is manifested cross-culturally to Europeans as laziness).
Other fires
Arguably, the largest fire type was the signal fire, much-recorded by early explorers. It is curious that these explorers failed to comprehend that they and their strange animals and craft were the subjects of the signals, leaving them to speculate in their journals, on other possible reasons.
Immediately following European contact, contagious disease severely reduced populations in some regions by up to 80 or even 90 % and the remnants of some bands had to join together to form viable mobile communities. An outcome of this was that, in desert country, ceremony-beckoning smoke signals had to be immense to be visible to other intending participants who might now be fifty kilometres away. Most explorers would not have comprehended this, although one making a return journey through the Western Desert did make such an observation.
Apart from the still used June/July mosquito-control burns which might cover a few square kilometres upwind of camp, large fires (other than accidental, of which nowadays there are many) were abandoned when people moved into mission stations early in the mid-twentieth century; the last small group giving up the food cycles around 1953.
There was virtually no movement of Aborigines back to tribal homeland areas until the early 1970s. By this time the knowledge of traditional burn practices had died with its practioners, except for the tiny handful of ‘nephews’ who had gone against the international trend of ignoring old-fashioned beliefs, and these few clung to the ancient ways.
And here, Aboriginal sensitivities come into play: For them it would be unthinkable to humiliate their peers by criticising or directly correcting their contemporary techniques. There being no available Aboriginal protocol to resolve this situation, out-of-control burns have now become the norm, even in southern NE Arnhem Land, the last (partly) traditional area.
It is either naïve, or possibly fraudulent, for bio-scientists and anthropologists to talk about ‘traditional practices’ of any kind when what in fact we witness today are tattered remnants of a former culture, open to wide misinterpretation. Even to Aborigines, quite recent events quickly become ‘ancient’. Examples of this are ceremony components that incorporate Macassan knives and flags, and boat shapes in the sand, quoted by ceremony leaders as dreamtime, yet the earliest Macassan presence was 1710 (or so it is claimed. Actually, some senior men say the contacts go back way further, as do some Indonesian experts).
With a unique combination of naïveté and racism, virtually anything said by Aborigines is taken as gospel, a throwback to the noble savage ethic of The Enlightenment era and of 19th century romance genre, to be found in Chums Book of Adventures and Splendid Stories of the British Empire: “Black man not think like white man. Black man not speak with forked tongue”.
Of course they do, just like any other people. In fact, in genuine Aboriginal culture, truth and fact have little or no differentiating meaning at all, and these factors are subservient to the desire to protect the feelings of the recipient in dialogue. The Aboriginal culture portrayed in the media today, throughout the southern part of Australia, is a concoction. Remnants of genuine culture survive in rural Northern Territory, The Kimberley and Far North Queensland. The rest is pure theatre.
That it has taken thirty years for two members of the academic community to challenge the preposterous and unsupportable positions adopted by self-serving anthropologists and their historian colleagues should cause all concerned Australians to re-evaluate their confidence in scientific and academic integrity.
Retired Senior Lecturer in Anthropology in Sydney University, Roger Sandall, recently published his book The Culture Cult, in which he perceptively demonstrates the destructive consequences of misrepresenting the positions of so-called primitive and tribal peoples. Simultaneously, historian Keith Windschuttle, in his The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, gave the same treatment to the once adulated but now widely discredited ‘black-armband brigade’; those pot-boiling historians who so profitably provide ammunition for the Aboriginal Compensation Industry.
Now that these few academics have made a stand, we may anticipate a plethora of exposés made by people who were successfully intimidated by UN/university proselytised political correctness throughout those decades.
Balancing this observation, the same expose authors have delivered other assertions that are significantly less plausible. The position adopted here is that objective research has a long way to go.
Legitimate reference to ‘traditional’ today is simply to differentiate Aboriginal-language-speaking people from Europeanised acculturated people.
This reflects the obvious and just requirement for government to accommodate the language(s) of Aborigines in any exercise of meaningful communication, especially in respect of issues of consultation, health, education, employment and future empowerment.
Obviously, if the majority of people in an Aboriginal community speak English only as a third, fourth or even seventh language, consultation in English is pointless. Thus, it may be reflected upon and recognised that throughout Australia’s European contact period of history, there has never been meaningful consultation with Aborigines by government.
There is every reason why Aborigines should complain loudly about this deliberately contrived obstacle to communication and democratic process, and one might reasonably ask why this hasn’t happened?
The reason it hasn’t is that the only Aborigines who fully comprehend the disadvantage that this imposes, are the very people who benefit most from this deliberate act of disenfranchisement; so-called Aboriginal leaders. These are the Aborigines who oppose government /community dialogue in local languages. Were this to happen they would lose their lucrative incomes, their dubious status, and the corruptive power which can be so advantageous in a contemporary Aboriginal environment.
In the ‘traditional’ setting, any Aborigine with a modicum of English language knowledge is in a position of power. He or she can tell the rest of the community whatever he likes, using this knowledge to best personal advantage. This happens in all Aboriginal communities.
Moreover, nepotism is the rule. In Aboriginal culture, not only is this not seen as criminal, the perpetrator is liked and admired by all as a person who looks after his family. On the cultural interface this is what tribal really means. Family is the ultimate value. This is difficult for experienced government field officers to criticise or to accommodate, both responses being unjust, so they turn a blind eye.
Government can pretend that it has been unaware of these cross-cultural problems but existing ministerial and departmental files prove otherwise. Discussion about the problems of cronyism, nepotism and the cultural incapacity for financial accountability began as far back as 1976, and were raised by the anthropologist Elkin before WWII, whereupon he demanded that government representatives learn Aboriginal languages. (Elkin has since been vilified by that school of anthropology which is so closely allied to the pot boiling ‘orthodox’ historians).
It is time we all grew up.
If an Aboriginal person claims to be authoritative on cultural issues, it is imprudent to accept this on face value, especially if this refers to a practice from a bygone era, such as fire regimes.
Essentially, this is what has been happening, with destructive results. Being genetically Aboriginal does not necessarily denote credible knowledge; anymore than we would expect every Australian of European origin to be knowledgeable in our own cultural anthropology.
Likewise, the use of the word elder to denote tribal authority, is a classic European grope for comprehension and labeling. The reality is, to be older is as likely to deserve the epithet ‘silly old fool’, as ‘wise old man’; and in Aboriginal culture this applies, as in all other cultures. Southern, urban part Aboriginal claims to being an elder of their tribe, are laughable and transparent pretentions, which equally mock those gullible enough to believe it.
However, traditional speakers of Aboriginal languages are really at a communication disadvantage; as are the outsiders trying to communicate with them.
Even discounting the impracticality and disenfranchisement of expecting traditional Aborigines to articulate in English language, there is another obstacle to communication which every Australian should understand: The cultural imperative of traditional Aboriginal culture is to avoid conflict (traditionally, conflict with spirits, with nature and with people). Thus, it is the overriding intention to please a questioner by providing answers that the questioner wants to hear. No genuinely traditional person wishes to upset another person with an answer that is unwelcome or which might embarrass or displease.
In any event, no Aborigine would ask the sort of direct questions that non-Aborigines ask. Aborigines do not understand why we have to ask so many questions anyway and why we can’t use the more polite and subtle conversational mode of nuance, representation, oblique suggestion and subliminal overtone; or as some people describe the process, delivering a ‘sideways story’.
So, when anthropologists, politicians, tourists or government officials ask traditional Aborigines if they favour a certain proposal, they will always answer yes, unless clothing fashion, uniform, occupation, known attitude or body language, indicates that the desired response will be no. The more that they like us as individuals, the less likelihood there would be of what we would call an ‘honest’ answer.
This is the inconvenient reality of cross-cultural communication. If we are European, we must identify Aboriginal attitudes by observing Aboriginal behavior and, even then, by not interpreting this in typical European terms. Even then, there is never any guarantee that the interpretation will be accurate.
The supreme irony is, much of this concern over accuracy of feedback is irrelevant. At the end of the day, most people believe what they want to believe and scientists and academics are just as inclined towards this proclivity as everybody else; some would say, more so.
Thus, the immense lyrical appeal of the phrase firestick farming ensured that it has won a place in the hearts of upper middle-class city-dwelling academics. It has infiltrated school literature, and joined the other popular myths about the Australian bush so cherished by urban armchair environmentalists and other worshippers of kitsch Australiana.
Other new word-fashions have emerged and these are used like medieval incantations, making certain meanings and implications mandatory by rite of political correctness. Among these are bio-diversity, which if it has a meaning at all can mean that more is better than less, even if part of the more is in the wrong habitat; and mosaic of fire must automatically be a good thing.
That Aborigines did not burn as extensively as is claimed, has been proven conclusively by competent bio-scientists. Several species of fire-sensitive tree could not exist in Australia today if this had been the practice. That these scientists later recanted at the hands of the PC Inquisition, is yet another concern.
The fire / seed germination myth
The belief that certain plants require fire for regeneration is but one in a tiresome list of examples of how plant biologists should restrict themselves to scientific pursuits and leave the application of broader implications to people who are dedicated generalists.
The fact that some seed cases will not germinate until cracked by fire, or some other agent, is merely evidence of well-known natural processes, entirely unrelated to fire.
In the normal course of events such hard seedcases will survive on the woodland floor until two conditions coincide. The first condition is, following ten or even twenty years of weathering, the outer case eventually decays allowing the entry of moisture, thus precipitating germination. The second condition is, should there be a convenient gap in the foliage canopy allowing the sunlight to reach the new seedling, a gap usually availed by the parent or other tree dying and falling to the ground; then a new tree will replace the old. This is the typical regeneration path of the Melville Island Beech and the Macadamia; both of which have similar nuts.
That such a seed would also crack prematurely under the influence of fire, is purely incidental and coincidental. A Macadamia shell would weaken or even crack following contact with fire as well but this does not mean that Macadamia trees require fire for regeneration. Similarly, horticultural texts often recommend grinding or the application of acid prior to attempting germination of some seeds. Are we now to accept that acid rain is natural and desirable?
(Science has recently plunged itself into an orgy of absurd projections, and the Australian public is asking itself why impoverished taxpayers should be funding manifestly counter-productive university faculties and research units. The outrageous assertion that there is scientific consensus on AGW and that the nation should therefore rescind its right to self-determination, accepting instead rule by scientists, may already have launched funding reprisals in the future).
A tree species popularly quoted in school textbooks, as requiring fire for seed germination is the Black Wattle or Acacia auriculaformis.
One researcher, obviously skeptical about the whole theory, experimented with the seedlings and subsequent fires in natural circumstances.
He found that fire did indeed result in prodigious germination, but subsequent fires killed all the seedlings. His conclusion was that the environment would need to be free of fire for at least three years for the trees to survive. Given that in the areas where (nowadays) fire commonly occurs, incidence is usually annual, or at least every two or three years; the seedling would not survive (apologies to the unknown author of this research).
In other words the fire / plant regeneration theory simply does not stack up.
Nevertheless, people believe what they want to believe and even those scientists who originally produced the evidence that effectively disproved the firestick farming proposition (in 1985 & 1991), have evidently found compelling reasons not to rock the boat.
There is no condemnation here. As we have noted elsewhere, when one has a family to nurture a responsible parent does not sacrifice his/her babies for the lesser principle of scientific integrity. Other, less vulnerable single colleagues should undertake this role.
Unfortunately they haven’t.
Senior bio-scientists who now have administrative roles within Australia’s major nature conservation departments (a mistake in itself) have put ambitions before ethics and honesty, and this has conformed to a now painfully obvious pattern.
But, individuals are one thing; whole organisations are another.
Three informally affiliated groups of people are prepared to stand by and see environmental degradation on a vast scale, rather than embarrass themselves with inconvenient truths. These are:
· Aborigines and part Aborigines, many of whom pretend to possess a culture that time deprived them of more than a century ago, and
· Environmental organisations (including Greenpeace; and that organisation for well-heeled environmentalists and parlour activists, the Wilderness Society, also are unwilling to be embarrassed. This is especially as they now embrace the logically challenged bio-diversity theory that “fire is a good thing”.
This genuine Australian ‘export’ has resulted in the recommendation that Yellowstone, Yosemite and other American national parks should be left to burn…“because fire is natural, man” (as is death by bubonic plague, but most of us would want to avoid that like, well… the plague). Gullible Americans accepted this child-like conclusion even though the circumstances upon which this theory is based ceased to exist since we removed most of the world forests, thus rendering any significant forest loss as something of a bio-disaster).
It is evident that northern bushfires, far from being remote events of negligible significance, could well prove to be one of Australia’s more serious environmental catastrophes; albeit one developing in slow motion. Most certainly, in the north, it overshadows land clearing as a cause of faunal and floral depletion, contamination of water and degradation of marine habitats. All of these impinge on human health in one way or another.
As we may have concluded, human health in its widest context can be a vast and complex subject, and our traditional compartmentalised view of the world is seriously challenged. Circumstances now urge us to adopt a more holistic vision. Perhaps we do not do this because we feel that we will become overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the tasks that confront us.
Implications for human health
Some familiarity with both primary and secondary determinants is required before we are able to appreciate the full implications for human health posed by northern fires:
· Degraded food-producing environments due to soil erosion and soil sterilisation
· Degraded or destroyed fish-breeding environments and reduced cacheable fish stocks due to suspended or sedimented silt
· Impacts on plant growth and health, and seed fertility
· Effects on drinking water management in catchment reservoirs and wells (has anyone researched the excessive flow of potash into water environments?)
· Expansion of shallow mosquito breeding environments (especially salt marsh and anopheles mosquito-breeding zones) due to creek and estuarine sedimentation
· The loss of fish, bird and animal species, which may have unforeseen effects in terms of the integrity of ecosystems.
Looked at this way it is now apparent that what we formerly thought were fires of distant and inconsequential significance may in fact be responsible for a wider environmental crisis.
At the very least, if these contentions cannot be immediately disproved, we have reason enough to initiate a major study. This must be transparent and independent; which is to say, public input must influence research, conclusions, and recommendations at all stages. The long-criticised ivory tower has never been more lofty; nor its inhabitants more insular.
We may also now appreciate that the present compartmentalised attitude to human health and to environmental issues inevitably leads to gaps in our vision. By holistically bridging these gaps we are more easily able to appreciate that, subjectively speaking, environmental health and human health are essentially the same thing, or at the very least, overlap or interrelate significantly.
The other advantage of adopting a holistic approach is that, by formally and immediately recognising all related issues we are more quickly alerted to the true magnitude of given problems.
Those who believe that the current form of autocratic government will address this issue need to explain why this hasn’t happened already?
According to the evidence, the Federal Government has been aware of the damage generated by northern fires since 1996, but continues to ignore the entire range of issues. The then Chief Minister and later Liberal Party President, Shane Stone, stonewalled several attempts to have the 1996 publication tabled, or even to have its existence recognised at all. Yet NT fire management authorities privately and unreservedly supported the booklet’s findings and recommendations.
We are not being unduly pessimistic when we conclude that under the current regime of non-accountability lodged in Canberra, action will not take place at all, or if it does, it will be a matter of too little, too late.
It may already be too late.
Even if Australia moves swiftly to resolve our macro-environmental issues, it would be at least a decade before the damage is finally halted and the continent’s northern topsoils, only ever some 70 mm deep in most regions but now reduced to 15-30 mm, or entirely eroded altogether, are finally stabilised. Even then, it would take an estimated 35 years (ref. Bowman & Brown) of strict fire control to restore some semblance of ecological balance (eventually, fuel loads and reestablished lower canopies combine to provide higher ground-surface / litter moisture retention, lower ambient temperatures and reduced access to wind, thus inhibiting intensity of fire and its capacity to spread other than during the high temperature / fresh breeze environment of mid to late afternoon).
After more than a century of annual burning, the soils of entire regions have already disappeared, leaving sterile lateritic pebble; often mistaken as a naturally-occurring soil unit. It may take hundreds of years of careful management and tree planting to make this land productive again.
Following the earlier recommendation regarding Goyder’s survey plinths, once average erosion levels have been associated with specific land units, which themselves can be quickly and accurately identified by their typical floral habitats, it will be simple to assess the likely degree of degradation at any comparable sites across the north of Australia.
As a not entirely inappropriate aside, it must be said that the first step in restructuring management of Australia’s environment must be democratisation of government, entirely replacing the present system of government by globalist edict.
Only a genuinely democratic government, one which reflects the informed concerns of the Australian people, will invest willingly and adequately in this direction. Had this always been the operative mode of government, the land-healing methods pioneered by NSW farmer Peter Andrews (with the essential support of retail leader Gerry Harvey) would have been adopted decades ago; salinity and land-clearing issues would now be chapters of history, and there would never have been the need to prepare this paper.
For those who imagined that Australia is already democratic: three-yearly surveys by Ryan Research since 2001 have demonstrated that approximately 90% of government policies are opposed by 80% of the electorate. This in no way relates to Democracy as understood by the finest political minds in human history: Thucydides, the Irish Monks, the Finnish Philosophers, Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, and Lord Acton.
Evidently, a campaign to preserve and repair the Northern Australian environment from cremation, will become part of a wider war against entrenched elitism and oligarchy.
References for fire study: (1) Firestick Farming, Rhys Jones, 1969; (2) Bushfires in Tasmania, DMJS Bowman & MJ Brown, 1986; (3) Wildflowers of Kakadu, K Brennan, 1986; (4) Response of a Monsoon Forest – Weipa, DMJS Bowman, BA Wilson & RJ Hooper, 1988; (5) On pastoral burn-off techniques, Anecdotal evidence, Reg. Wilson, NT, 1995; (6) Verbal evidence about history of fire and NT aviation, ‘Ossie’ Osgood, pioneer pilot, 1995; (7) Aboriginal fire use, verbal evidence, Timothy Buthiman Dhurrkay, 1975-1996. (8) The experimental booklet Kakadu Burning, Tony Ryan, 1996.
FOOTNOTE FOR ACTIVISTS: What has been written above will conflict sharply with almost every urban reader’s general understanding of Australia’s ecology; and, if seriously considered, will certainly damage faith in the integrity of our scientists, academic institutions and environmental organisations. This wake-up is long overdue.
Concerned readers may prudently give themselves some time to absorb and come to terms with the implications, but what then? Academics and scientists will find spirited direction through researching the above references; and some kind of sanguinary fallout is expected. But this, in itself, will not bring about change.
Without exploring further details, it is evident that the pivotal remedial issue is the non-responsiveness of our governments. Our surveys show that the ordinary citizen is not apathetic at all… just voiceless. People are worried indeed, and would support any and all measures to reverse ecological decay. We all need to understand clearly that this disaster is not a failure of mankind per se. What we are witnessing is environmental destruction wrought by vastly powerful corporate entities, many of them with economies greater than those of most countries. Their apparent motivation is profit at any cost, but their CEOs are engaged in a blindly neurotic race to become the ultimate monopolistic corporation.
Manipulating from behind are the giant investment banks, who own the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the WTO; and who through the Rothschild’s Bank for International Settlements (BIS) control all of the world’s reserve banks, including the US Federal Reserve; and who carry more influence with governments than any body of voters.
They also provide, directly or otherwise, the most strategic proportion of funds which pay for political party election campaigns; fought, ironically, with media owned by moguls who are part of the same banker cabal. These observations are not in the realm of conspiracy theories, but thanks to the Internet are now very basic knowledge possessed by any serious student or observer of politics or geopolitics.
So, if the destroyers of our environment effectively own our governments, what power do we have for change? The answer is, plenty. At the risk of being trite, the answer is People Power. But non-violent expression of people power is not possible while 70% of the Australian media is owned by Rupert Murdoch and all of it under his control, including the ABC and SBS.
The good news is that print newspapers are facing collapse through advertising starvation, and the UK News of the World saga makes it clear that Murdoch has very powerful enemies. An on-line contextualized news service is planned that will provide a reliable and independent alternative source of information, and as an uncensored conduit for national expression. This modest site is the embryonic genesis of such a resource. Because this site will be unpopular with Government leaders, discretion is an essential part of our development strategy.
WILDFIRE CONTAINMENT IN THE TOP END
Should the utopian dream of democratic goverment in the NT ever come to pass, the following is recommended as a containment strategy for rural and remote wildfires.
Goverment needs to invest in geo-stationary satellite monitoring of wildfires.
Any fire larger than a campfire can immediately be recognised by satellite. As virtually all damaging fires are man-made, a helicopter crew can be delivered to the site and the lighter of the fire arrested and, if conditions are favourable, the fire extinguished.
Penalties for illegal fires need to be substantial and custodial, to be taken seriously.
Larger fires during the heat of day can be extinguished as follows:
(1) Two graders need to be stationed every hundred kilometres along rural highways; housed at secure locations.
(2) Two graders can pursue the fire's flanks, commencing from the initial already-burned source zone, and moving towards the fire-front in inverse V-formation.
(3) The graders should be followed by water tank crews preventng lateral spread of the fire, either directly or by back-burning; especially targeting pandanus and grass types that are rapidly exploited by fire and spread aerially through convection winds.
(4) As the graders approach the convergent point, some hundreds of metres ahead of the fire's front, backburning will eliminate forward fuel load, concluding extinguishment.
When not in demand for firefighting, the graders can eliminate corrugations on regional dirt roads, thereby removing an expensive cause of community and government vehicle damage and accidents. In rural NT, road corrugations are the most significant cause of vehicle damage, either through vibrational damage, front end distortion from potholes, or loss of control on bends leading to accidents; sometimes fatal.
The grader compounds can also double as housing for noxious weed equipment stations, highway garbage collection vehicles, burm grass-cutting machinery, and emergency communications relay facilities. First Aid equipment and water may value-add these compounds.
Some may even support permananent populations of workers, attracting formation of village infrastructure and facilities.
The grader use for fire control concept was unreservedly supported by the 1996 NT Fire Chief.
Tony Ryan
© Copyright Tony Ryan 1996; 2018; 2022.
Tony has a fifty year association with the Aborigines of North East Arnhem Land and Kakadu, speaks Dhuwal and Dhangu languages, and has also written extensively on geopolitics, democracy, health consumerism, Aboriginal development, environmental issues, and cross-culltural communication. He has worked in a plethora of industries, including cattle, education, journalism, social research, road construction, publishing, rail, public service, tourism, landscaping, and real estate.
