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The Watermelon Blog Green on the outside, social justice inside

"We can do better" (Kennedy)

Richest fluency

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman

The Goodies

good television

good movies

good books

good poetry

more good books

good songs

good children

good boys

good people

good leaders

Try a lucky dip:

"Well it looks to me as if the whole heaven of the world is on fire now."

"landscape that had been farmed for 2000 years or more but had retained some biodiversity and variety."

"So now there are calls for children in schools to be only taught that nuclear power is good for you."

"One of those human-animal hybrids reared its head again the other day and said "Moooo"."

"If you want people to be always under control then simply abolish the concept of "private", and it will get rid of those silly philosophical arguments between teenagers on the meaning of life and the concept of identity."

"if you had to choose one person who is most responsible for the failure of governments, particularly the American and Australian governments, to act over the last critical ten years, Rupert Murdoch is your man."

"Now, for the first time we have a literally Earth-changing event, the effects of CO2 increase on the climate of the whole planet."

"The falseness of this argument is easy to spot because it is proposed by people who have never ever conceded that anything else Aborigines did was of any value."

"Lesser humans may look on aghast, as elections are fixed, opposition parties destroyed one way or another, lies told, courts and the boards of public bodies stacked with zealots, the media starved of information, laws broken, constitutions ignored, democracy trashed."

"In protests everywhere young people literally hug trees, believing, it seems, that there is some quality to a tree which allows a mystical connection with humans."

"Wow, I thought, Peter Costello has looked up from his "tax breaks for the rich spreadsheet" for a moment and smelled the carbon dioxide."

"the inability to do a Google search and instantly find an answer to a question you are pretending doesn't have an answer sure makes even a simple country boy put one flagellum with another flagellum to make three flagellae."

"these religious fundamentalists who spread the enormously damaging creationist propaganda, inflicting a kind of mental terrorism on schools, should also be on "no fly lists"."

"While most of us saw the dangers ahead for the only planet we can live on, representatives of the nuclear power industry, and their tame scientists, saw only a marketing opportunity."

"The ones who could express that love of country through creating art were lucky, but the others who came along to see it were part of that same community spirit."

"I wonder if John Howard has phoned any of his old high school teachers to say thank you for an Australian education?"

"The problem does not lie with the Iraqi people but with the fact that they have been invaded and occupied."

"before you can say "red sky at night, shepherd's delight", there will be the usual nonsensical calls for more and more dams to be built, or for rivers to be turned inland."

"I was again struck with the reality of how badly served are farmers by the leaders of the farmers' organisations."

"They are people who saw Orwells "1984" not as a warning but as a manual."

"Such approaches would certainly be much more productive, and much less damaging than a mistaken belief in the value and benign nature of "prescribed burning"."

"The strong element of belief is dangerous in science as in religion because it prevents people seeing things."

"Will the minister be happy when only 15 percent of Australians accept that humans evolved on this planet, or does he have a still lower figure in mind?"

"well, someone is going to make money out of the destruction of the planet and it might as well be me."

"The combination of course let Pauline Hanson and her shadowy backers and wacky supporters off the leash and the rest is history."

"It would be hard to see any politician arguing against the need for big business to be more accountable to the community that supports it."

"Add into the mix the shockjocks on radio and television shamelessly promoting prejudice and whipping up emotions."

"brown snake bodies wrapped around them."

"Grasslands grow where they do because of combinations such as poor soils, flat lands, high temperatures and low rainfall, they are not areas where Aboriginal burning removed forests."

"It is also often claimed that Australian ecosystems are adapted to fire. This is a bit like saying that lawns are adapted to lawnmowers."

"The business community, with the governments help, is about to send us back to those horse and buggy days of employers ruling the world."

"All care will be taken, they promise, qualified pharmacists running them."

"How could you let them subsume the economy and international interests of Australia into the interests of the Republican Party of the USA"

"but where are my slippers"

"then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies."

"I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey"

"a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party."

"the evening star is coming."

"You might at least try to avoid the proposition that if there is a perceived conflict between business and "the environment" that there is no question but that the thing which goes is the environment."

"There may well be people who have a spiritual dimension to their feelings about forests, just as there are people who have a spiritual dimension to feelings about V8 cars or Collingwood football."

" the only thing the market is good at, the only thing it is really for, is taking care of business, and it does that very well."

" let us not go rushing into this religious stuff until we see if there is anything science can't explain."

" Remember Iraq. Remember the flowers that weren't strewn on the streets for the invading armies."

" " we have to work with the effects of the "progress" that has been made since Ned Ludd and his merry band were smashing the new fangled weaving machines. Go Ned, I want to say."

" Hard to tell how long the eruptions of the religion plague will last, and what damage they will do."

" Greenhouse temperature rise is a massive refutation of the proposition that the world should be run by businessmen for businessmen."

" We are pulling up the drawbridge against the peasants."

" People in areas prone to bushfires are usually advised to develop an escape plan or action plan which includes having, in easily transportable form, the core possessions you want to survive."

" most of our members were probably Methodists, it being as hard to imagine teetotal Catholics and Anglicans as it was to imagine a drunken Methodist."

" he is playing , like the grasshopper, in the warm sun of high resource prices and plenty of tourists, what happens when the prices collapse and winter comes and the tourists do not?"

" as after walking all that way I think I am capable of looking after myself."

" They can be brought out onto the streets to have some rather odd laws three thousand years old put into their courthouses."

Strange

Bedfellows

John Howard

Kevin Rudd

Al Gore

George Bush

Malcolm Turnbull

Leon Trotsky

Thomas Huxley

Oliver Goldsmith

Kurt Vonnegut

Tony Blair

Samuel Pepys

Winston Churchill

Peter Costello

Joan of Arc

Fidel Castro

Sarah Williams

Peter Beattie

Ned Ludd

De-Anne Kelly

Barack Obama

Kylie Minogue

Tony Abbott

Alexander Downer

Barbaro

Sam Kekovich

Alan Bennett

Osama bin Laden

Rupert Murdoch

George Lakoff

Bjorn Lomborg

Adolf Hitler

Ayn Rand

George Orwell

Julia Butterfly Hill

Saddam Hussein

James Carville

Charles Darwin

Philip Cooney

Jacky Kelly

Irshad Manji

James Lovelock

Bob Hawke

Brendon Nelson

Barnaby Joyce

Robert Menzies

Robert Tressell

Slim Dusty

Noel Coward

Samuel Johnson

Walt Whitman

Edmund Hillary

Robert Byrd

Phillip Adams

Alisa Camplin

Arnold Schwarzeneger

Blogger's Cut

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Future to the back

Ox power

Whacko Texas

Ticked off

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God unwilling

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Game over

All change for

Dog bites man

Whale tears

Flowers for bosses

Curtin spinning

Gotta love it

Dodgy intelligence

A glass darkly

Truth and consequences

Media-ocrity

Cant get me Im part of the society

Growing like woody weeds in the nanny state

Fire and Australian Society

The following post is a talk I gave at a WA Conservation and Land Management conference "Fire In South-Western Australian Ecosystems: Impacts and Management" held in Perth in April 2002. It was later published (see reference at end) but is not widely available, and I thought people might find it useful to have it available on this blog together with my other writing on fire and the environment. My apologies for its length!

When I was a young fellow growing up in the suburbs of Perth a book was published, in September 1950, which was to be one of the first of the blockbuster "popular science" books. It was "Worlds in Collision" by Immanuel Velikovsky. It was reprinted a staggering 13 times over the next ten years selling many tens of thousands of copies, and author and title were household names in the 1950s.

The book was nonsense. Velikovsky's theory was that the planets had moved around the solar system in a kind of celestial game of snooker, and the collisions between them, and the after effects, could explain all the history of climate and geology of the planet, and the evolution of organisms, and all human development. The collisions and their effects had continued not only through the last few hundred thousand years but into historical times.

The book was based on an obsessive belief in the theory and a willingness to force every piece of information the author could find, every reference to the heavens in ancient texts, into the mould of his vision. If you know the truth, really know the truth about the past, all evidence must accord with that truth.

The acceptance of the book by the general public was understandable - a claim to explain everything about the past all wrapped up in a simple theory is enormously appealing. Why though wasn't Velikovsky's book immediately discredited by the scientists of the day? Because a cosmologist reading it would say - "well, the cosmology is of course complete rubbish but the geology looks very interesting". A geologist would say, "well the geology is nonsense, but gee there are some interesting ideas about biology here", an historian would say, "well of course his reading of history is insane, but this stuff about planetary movement is really intriguing". And so on.

Because the book combined material from many disciplines, no one was game to tackle it. Real scientists tend to feel a bit constrained about intruding into other disciplines, and they may give the book the benefit of the doubt, assuming the areas they don't have expertise in are ok. This lack of analysis by scientists didn't matter much for "Worlds in Collision". Like the 60s blockbuster "Chariots of the Gods" it was pretty harmless fun, with no implications for human activity in the real world.

In the last few decades a view of the Australian past has been popularised which, not just implicitly, but explicitly, has very serious outcomes in the real world. It is a view which combines interpretation of evidence from a number of different disciplines, it has been very popularly received by the general public and supported by the media and by political interests with particular agendas, and it has led to the justification of some behaviours and attitudes, and ever increasing demands for action of certain kinds.

The ideas about Aboriginal use of fire and the effects of such use preceded the evidence for them. In the last 30 years data from disciplines including archaeology, ethnography, biology, geomorphology, anthropology, palynology and history have been used by some people not to evaluate the validity of those ideas but to demonstrate their truth. The greater the popularity of the ideas, and the more they became a source of support for vested interests, the less critical has been the examination of the data. The media has played a major role, giving great publicity to the latest claims of proof, and no publicity to the voices of criticism.

Generally, combining data from a number of different fields and using them to investigate a single idea would be seen as a strength. In the firestick farming case it has proved a weakness - practitioners in each discipline have assumed that they can build on the work of the other disciplines and that any doubts that they might have are cancelled out because of the assumed strength of the combined evidence from all the disciplines.

There is also an assumption that if there are many separate pieces of evidence, even if some are wrong, some must be right. But the case is a house of cards, and as soon as you start, without preconceptions, picking away at the evidence in any of the disciplines, the whole lot comes tumbling down.

The idea that has been dubbed "fire stick farming" was from the start that most dangerous thing, the unfalsifiable hypothesis. This was made explicit by Rhys Jones who said that every change in the environment in the past was to be considered the result of human activity unless it could be demonstrated not to be.

So, high levels of charcoal in a swamp deposit? Fire stick farming. Low levels? Fire stick farming. Historic evidence of scorched tree trunks? Fire stick farming. No scorched trunks? Fire stick farming. Historic reports of many fires? Fire stick farming. Few reports of fires? Fire stick farming.

This monolithic interpretation of evidence extends to the model itself. The model demands that fire stick farming, in contrast to fires in recent times, was conducted in cool seasons when the conditions were such as to allow little gentle fires to run very slowly and quietly. Hence Aborigines would have burnt the bush in Spring or Autumn with moisture in the ground and vegetation, and little wind. In fact historic reports show the majority of fires burning in Summer. In Sylvia Hallam's work for example, of about 100 references to fire she records, 63 are in the months of December to March. Of the other 35 or so 13 are not references to bushfires, and in 14 it is unclear when the fire had actually been burning. In very few of those 35 is it clear that a fire had been caused by Aborigines. Attempts had to be made to discourage Aboriginal use of fire in the summer. Another report suggests fires being set on very windy days. The reason? Aborigines knew that on windy days the flames would be kept low!

Because we have here not a theory derived from the evidence, but evidence derived as a result of belief in a theory, there are a number of fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of that evidence. I don't have time to do more than pull away a few of the cards here.

• Fire has probably been fundamental to all human societies. The ideas of a hearth as a focal point for the family, of fire to keep wild animals or bad spirits away, fire to illuminate ceremonies or story telling, fire to cook food or keep warm, are all universal and of great antiquity. Consequently ideas about how humans learnt to make and harness fire is a common feature in mythology around the world. That these things are also true for Aboriginal societies provides no support for the fire stick farming hypothesis and is simply irrelevant.

• The general failure of observers in the past to distinguish in their reports between the smoke from campfires and the smoke from bushfires, is a major problem in ethnographic interpretation. Or, if it is a bushfire, to distinguish between a fire caused by lightning strike and one lit by humans. Or, if lit by humans, to distinguish between a fire set for the purpose of habitat modification and fires escaped from hunting trips and other such uses. The fact that in the early days of European exploration of Australia observations of campfires were used by Europeans as an indication of both human presence and human numbers means that frequent reports of fire mean very little in the context of fire use for other purposes.

• Similarly the early reports of occasional landscapes described as "park-like", so important in the fire-stick farming idea, have no bearing on it. Early European observers of Australia knew that Aborigines didn't practise agriculture. Here was the only continent on which no one practised agriculture. This being the case, the early observers knew that what they would be seeing as they explored was a wilderness of forests with thick undergrowth. There was no other alternative possible, if people didn't clear land it was wilderness. They were therefore surprised, and found it noteworthy, when they came across areas that had less undergrowth and apparently more widely spaced trees. Such reports were therefore accentuated (and the normal landscape ignored), and accentuated too because the colonists were farmers and were looking for areas to pasture sheep and grow crops. Observers had no way of knowing that variations in soils, topography and climate could cause significant variations in Australia without human intervention. Nor did they usually know whether a fire might have influenced the landscape some years before, nor, if it had, how that fire had started. It is far less excusable for writers 200 years later to also expect to see thick forest everywhere and to ignore all the descriptions of non-parklike conditions.

• A proposition designed to bolster this idea that Aborigines had turned the Australian landscape into a park is that some areas have "reverted" to thick wilderness when Aboriginal use of fire stopped. There is a lack of knowledge about European use of fire in the early nineteenth century, a failure to recognise that the effects of domestic and feral animals and plants and land clearance and fire suppression attempts also need to be disentangled, and 200 years of climatic change analysed, before there can be any attempt to see the presence and absence of Aboriginal fire, as a simple cause and effect experiment related to floristic change, even supposing that a postulated change in some area, and its timing, is itself well documented.

• There is a lack of understanding that whether or not human use of fire can effect vegetation change, it is undoubtedly true that vegetation change as a result of climatic change will cause a change in fire regimes. Confusion of cause and effect is often a problem in science when trying to unravel historical events.

• There is a propensity to take not just observations by early nineteenth century observers at face value, without any attempt to establish what they could have observed and what they actually were observing and whether they had an agenda which influenced what was reported, but also their theories about what was going on. There is an amazing trust in the observations and ideas of untrained observers, writing long before the development of modern science or anthropology, and who were dealing with a complex society which is only now, after some 50 years of sophisticated observations, beginning to be understood.

• There is a clear and irreconcilable conflict between two different models of fire stick farming, and between these models and anything actually observed in the nineteenth century. Norman Tindale said (a view later repeated by Rhys Jones) - "Man, setting fire to large areas of his territory ... probably has had a significant hand in the moulding of the present configuration of parts of Australia. Indeed much of the grassland of Australia could have been brought into being as a result of his exploitation. Some of the post-climax rain forests may have been destroyed in favour of invading sclerophyll, as the effects of his firestick were added to the effects of changing climate in Early Recent times... Perhaps it is correct to assume that man has had such a profound effect on the distribution of forest and grassland that true primaeval forest may be far less common in Australia than is generally realised". Conversely other authors have suggested that burning of small patches over long periods with small fires, exercising a level of control and an appreciation of long term consequences impossible for us to achieve, maintained a so called mosaic environment in an overall constant state for 50,000 years.

• There needs to be a motive for the level of activity proposed under either model, and in spite of strenuous efforts no valid motive has yet been suggested. If the idea was to increase kangaroo numbers (when Rhys Jones called it "firestick farming" he actually meant "kangaroo farming", the firestick being the tool, the kangaroos being the animal farmed) for Aboriginal use it was a dismal failure. The presence of kangaroos in the food refuse in archaeological sites is always unusual. In fact you can turn the question round and ask why you would try to increase the availability of something that was an insignificant element of the diet. The question becomes even more pointed if you realise that the animals which did form the bulk of the meat diet were small marsupials and placentals and reptiles that would have been disadvantaged by a program of burning which aimed to reduce leaf litter, old trees, logs, large grass tussocks, in woodlands and forests. Incidentally, the suggested motive of getting rid of what commercial tv now calls creepy-crawlies, and at least one nineteenth century observation that fire did achieve this, is, if you wanted to take such observations at face value, an indication that fire stick farming was damaging to biodiversity. Talking about the casual use of fire in hunting, or for seeing at night, or escaped campfires, is a description of alternative causes of bushfires, not of fire-stick farming.

William Robertson, Doctor of Divinity, said in the 1770s, in the interval between James Cook and Arthur Phillip - "In other parts of the globe, man, in his rudest state, appears as lord of the creation, giving law to various tribes of animals which he has tamed and reduced to subjection ... This command over the inferior creatures is one of the noblest prerogatives of man, and among the greatest efforts of his wisdom and power. Without this, his dominion is incomplete". The good doctor was writing about America, but he represented the climate of opinion which saw the colonisation of Australia, and which has continued to colour the approach to the environment today.

James Cook had said of Australia - "We are to consider that we see this country in the pure state of nature, the Industry of man has had nothing to do with any part of it" the Aborigines "have no fixed habitations but move about from place to place like Wild Beasts in search of food, and I believe depend wholly upon the success of the present day for their subsistence". Such views of the Aboriginal economy had important political implications both then (Australia was to be occupied by virtue of it being a terra nullius - the country was not being "used" and was therefore available for vacant occupation) and now.

This belief that the potential of the continent was wasted by its indigenous inhabitants was based on the idea that the Australian landscape had been unaffected by human activity until 1788, and that Aborigines were merely ‘intelligent parasites’ upon the land. It was a curious phrase, and the analogy it invoked with, say, lice or tapeworms was not only insulting, but put in place quite the wrong image of economy and society. But this was a belief with strong political approval because it reinforced the idea of terra nullius. If you didn’t farm the land you didn’t deserve to keep it.

The politics of the situation crystallised when anthropologists and archaeologists, on the side of the angels in the fight for Land Rights for Aboriginal people, began to see Australian hunter-gathering as a form of farming, and the Australian landscape as a managed landscape. That is, the form of management may not have been clear to European eyes, and the resulting landscapes not obviously man made, but they were as much an artefact as the rolling parklands of, say, the Duke of Bedford.

A people who had nurtured the land in this way could no longer be ignored as rightful claimants to the land, with a title in land use as valid as that of any Queensland grazier or Victorian wheat farmer. It was a view of a new reality eventually to be confirmed by the High Court. This new orthodoxy, success crowned by Mabo, has proved to be as hard to shake as the old orthodoxy, rooted in terra nullius, had been.

Political alliances changed as the implications of these new views about Aboriginal manipulation of the environment became apparent. If it was true, as Norman Tindale believed, that there wasn’t a single habitat in Australia that hadn’t been created by Aborigines, then the question by Rhys Jones as to what we wanted to preserve, the environment of 200 years ago, or one of, say, 70,000 years ago, was a good one. If the answer, as Jones pointed out, was 200 years ago, then we would need to use fires as Aborigines had done. That is, if the Australian environment was an artefact of human behaviour, there was no reason why it couldn’t be manipulated by farmers, cattlemen and foresters. In the last few years Flannery has popularised the ideas of Tindale, Hallam and Jones. - "there is no Australian wilderness, and no national park that can exist in its pre-1788 form without the ongoing input of people". The campaign to change public opinion has focused on apparent changes to the environment caused by cessation of burning, the risk to property caused by bush fires (and the need for controlled burning), changes to vegetation (and the need for forestry practices to rectify things).

A concept that Aboriginal burning practices may have kept woodlands relatively open, and that therefore a particular spot of ground may (or may not) have more trees now if it has not been burnt than it would have had 200 years ago, has been extended into the ludicrous suggestion that there are more "trees" in Australia now than there were 200 years ago. Farmers seize on this to justify continued large scale land clearing.

The popularisation of a set of particular interpretations of archaeological and ethnographic records, and of hypotheses derived from them, has been both presented, and received by media, politicians, and some scientists, and consequently by the public at large, not as interpretation and hypothesis but as fact. People who, in relation to all other aspects of human endeavour, would hold Aboriginal society, culture and people in total contempt, amazingly profess to find, when it comes to interaction with the environment with fire, that what they have been told was the Aboriginal way is the best way.

At the time of Native Title, Mabo, Wik, ten point plans, stolen generations, apologies and preambles, there was a large part of the population delighted to hear that Aborigines not only hadn't owned the land or been custodians of it, but had caused massive damage, extinctions, vegetation destruction, even, god help us, climatic change - a holocaust - and it was up to us to put things right. Aborigines constantly find themselves in no win situations in white Australia and here was another case of damned if you do and damned if you don't. If you didn't manage the environment you are freeloaders who didn't deserve to keep the land, if you did manage it you are incompetent primitive vandals.

There is perhaps an even more fundamental level at which the fire stick farming hypothesis is striking a chord and becoming an alibi. The recent Regional Forest Agreement legislation, pushed by the representatives of both big business and union interests in parliament, is the result ultimately of a shared belief with the Doctor of Divinity William Robertson, that humans have a noble prerogative to be "lords of creation". Anything in the environment, whether a tree, a grassland, a river or oil on the Barrier Reef, which is not exploited to the maximum possible extent for the economic benefit of the exploiters, is wasted.

This links to another campaign. In NSW at Christmas, almost as the first arsonist was striking the first match, the campaign against the existence of National Parks, against the conservation activities of the NPWS, against any concept of wilderness areas and publicly owned land, flared up again like the flame on the match. There are it seems a number of people to whom the idea of public land strikes at the core of capitalism, and the idea of natural areas strikes at 10,000 years of human heritage in agriculture and forestry. There is to be no land which is not managed to make a profit.

Such people stare over the fence into National Parks, their angry faces on, demanding to know why this wasted land is being managed by greenies, and not by people from the real world who know that you need to thin trees, build tourist facilities, bring in sheep and cattle, encourage four wheel drives and motor bikes, and drop incendiary capsules and poison baits from the air. Hearing first about fire stick farming, and then that there is no such thing as wilderness in Australia, but it was all created by Aborigines, has played into the hands of these people.

This is all pretty heady stuff - ideas and metaphors about the past (stylistic devices in archaeological writing, the stuff, normally, of just tea room and seminar room debate) are being used to determine the place of Aborigines in society and perhaps even more frighteningly to determine environmental policy for the future.

The fire stick farming hypothesis fell onto fertile ground among some in the scientific community too. The reasons for this are also complex but involve the idea that the biological sciences in Australia should take more notice of indigenous knowledge about the environment.

Here was an ideal case - the anthropologists were saying, and, presumably, had good reasons for doing so, that Aborigines had used fire to modify the Australian environment. If this sounded odd as an economic and environmental strategy well, then, ecologists knew nothing of anthropology and its methods and would have to take it on trust. If the anthropologists thought it was okay then it must be.

What they didn't realise was that most anthropologists know little or nothing about ecology. Many anthropologists and archaeologists picked up on the idea with approval not only because of their philosophical predisposition to believe that Aborigines were active and not passive environmental agents, and their political views in support of Land Rights, but because it was a simple and elegant idea expounded with passion and conviction, and it therefore must be right. Besides that there seemed to be ecologists in favour of it.

The ecologists in turn could not fail to be influenced by an idea praised in the media and promoted in a book that sold many thousands of copies. So a general climate was created across the disciplines involved that firestick farming was not just an hypothesis but a fact, and a fact operating for 50,000 years, and therefore of critical importance in any investigations of prehistory and ecology.

Two further observations.
• For the last couple of hundred years sheep farmers in the uplands of Wales have been burning their pastures annually in the belief that in doing so they were reducing woody shrubs and encouraging palatable grasses. It has been realised lately that, combined with overgrazing and other activities, this fire stick farming was causing environmental problems. In my area of NSW every year farmers also burn pastures and the stubble from crops as they do all over Australia. If asked why they would probably say 'Well, the Aborigines did this and it's good for the environment'. I don't know how many Australian farmers have Welsh ancestors, but it would be an odd chain of idea development if the activities of Welsh shepherds 200 years ago had reached their descendants (and other farmers) not directly, but after being filtered through a hypothesis about Aboriginal behaviour.
• This conference is focused on forests, and the conservation battlegrounds both here and in the east are also focused on fire use in forests. It is curious then that if you read Sylvia Hallam's book, a book in which every camp fire, every burnt piece of land, every observation and theory by a settler, is seen as support for the fire stick farming hypothesis, there is no record of the use of fire in forest by Aborigines. As is often the case with fire stick farming, people see in the mirror what they expect to see, and they have assumed as a matter of course that the model, and the evidence for it, extends into the forests ........ Not the case.

I have no doubt that Aborigines were keen observers of their environment. How could they not be? They undoubtedly knew that there was succession after fire, and that different aspects of that succession offered different opportunities for resource exploitation. They also had no reason to worry about fire unless caught in it - no permanent housing, no railways, factories, domestic livestock, farm sheds, no reason to worry about damage to artefacts difficult or expensive to replace. A casual attitude was possible because the effects were understood and there was nothing to fear. In Australia in 2002 we know that bushfires can result from lightning, arson, or accident. My view is that the same was true 200 years and more ago.

I have no doubt that the great majority of people who are promoting the idea that we should take lessons from what they believe was the pattern of Aboriginal fire use in the past genuinely have the best interests of the environment, and Aborigines, at heart. But fire stick farming makes for strange bedfellows, and conservationists might be uneasily looking over their shoulders at some of the other groups who are, uniquely for once apparently on the side of conservation, promoting the same idea.

Conservationists should not assume that fire stick farming is a done deal. They should ask hard questions about both the logic of the hypothesis and the data on which it is based. If they have concerns about the current use of fire in forests, and its long term effects, they should ask hard questions about those matters, and no longer accept that the answer "But Aborigines did it like this" closes off the debate.

There are also people who are promoting the idea of control burning who do not have the interests of the environment at heart. They have always believed the environment should be dominated and managed, and burnt constantly and frequently. It is not that the fire stick farming hypothesis generated these ideas, but that they seized upon the hypothesis in order to legitimise intentions which have long been there.

Fire stick farming is not an alibi or a prescription or a cover for extensive control burning. If you want to burn parts of the forest to protect property then let us take as our null hypothesis that "control burning" will damage the environment and you should be required to demonstrate that in each proposal this is not the case. If you take the reverse hypothesis, assume that fire does not cause damage unless proved otherwise, and burn the extent of country with the frequency that is being promoted, then you will, in a very short time, cause damage, probably irreversible, that Aboriginal people managed to avoid causing in 50,000 years.

Scientists should analyse their data relating to fire ecology and see what it tells them. The data should not be analysed on the basis of what people believe Aboriginal people might or might not have done in the past. A similar mistake is to assume that we know that Australian organisms are "adapted" to frequent fire and interpret accordingly. Theories in this critically important area must arise from the data, not be imposed upon the data.

For more of David Horton's work on fire, check under "Category" in right hand column of this blog and click on "Fire" and then later "History Conquerors" (which includes more context).

Fire in ecosystems of south-west Western Australia: impacts and management
Edited by Ian Abbott & Neil Burrows
2003, xiv + 466 pages, 127 (3 col.) figs, 25 tables, hardbound
ISBN 90-5782-131-1
Backhuys Publishers, PO Box 321, / 2300 AH Leiden, The Netherlands.

Fire in ecosystems of south-west Western Australia: impacts and management vol 2 Community perspectives about fire
2003, 85 pages, 4 figs, 4 tables, softbound.
Published by The Department of Conservation and Land Management, Kensington, Western Australia

fire

26 March 2008
Category Fire
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"You are a person of some interest,one comes to you and takes strange gain away." (Pound)

"I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world." (Keats)