Fire-stick farming

Aboriginal Australian practice of regular burning

Fire stick farming, also known as cultural burning and cool burning, is the practice of Aboriginal Australians regularly using fire to burn vegetation, which has been practised for thousands of years. There are a number of purposes for doing this special type of controlled burning, including to facilitate hunting, to change the composition of plant and animal species in an area, weed control, hazard reduction, and increase of biodiversity. While it had been discontinued in many parts of Australia, it has been reintroduced in the 21st century by the teachings of custodians from areas where the practice is extant in continuous unbroken tradition such as the Noongar peoples' cold fire.

The term "fire stick farming" was coined by Australian archaeologist Rhys Jones in 1969. It has more recently been called cultural burning and cool burning.

Aboriginal burning has been proposed as the cause of a variety of environmental changes, including the extinction of the Australian megafauna, a diverse range of large animals which populated Pleistocene Australia. Palynologist A. P. Kershaw has argued that Aboriginal burning may have modified the vegetation to the extent that the food resources of the megafauna were diminished, and as a consequence the largely herbivorous megafauna became extinct. Researcher David Horton from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, suggested in 1982, "Aboriginal use of fire had little impact on the environment and the patterns of distribution of plants and animals which obtained 200 years ago would have been essentially the same whether or not Aborigines had previously been living here". A 2010 study of charcoal records from more than 220 sites in Australasia dating back 70,000 years found that the arrival of the first inhabitants about 50,000 years ago did not result in significantly greater fire activity across the continent The study reported higher bushfire activity from about 70,000 to 28,000 years ago. It decreased until about 18,000 years ago, around the time of the last glacial maximum, and then increased again, a pattern consistent with shifts between warm and cool climatic conditions. This suggests that fire in Australasia predominantly reflects climate, with colder periods characterised by less and warmer intervals by more biomass burning. Regular firing favoured not only fire tolerant or fire resistant plants, but also encouraged those animals which were favoured by more open country. On this basis, it is clear that Aboriginal burning, in many areas at least, did affect the "natural" ecosystem, producing a range of vegetation associations which would maximise productivity in terms of the food requirements of the Aboriginal people. Jones goes so far as to say that "through firing over thousands of years, Aboriginal man has managed to extend his natural habitat zone". Most of these theories implicate Aboriginal use of fire as a component of the changes to both plant and animal communities within Australia during the last 50,000 years, although the significance of the effect of their burning is far from clear. Some have suggested that the intensive use of fire as a tool followed, but was not directly a consequence of, the extinction of the megafauna. If the megafauna remained in some areas until the Holocene, evidence is needed from within the last 10,000 years for changes induced by new Aboriginal burning patterns. Another factor to be considered is the likelihood that Aboriginal population density increased rapidly and dramatically over the last 5,000 to 10,000 years. The stone technology which Aboriginal people had been using with little modification for over 40,000 years diversified and specialised in the last 5,000 years. Spear barbs and tips peaked about 2,000 years ago, and then completely disappeared from the archaeological record in south eastern Australia. They were replaced by technologies associated with the exploitation of smaller animals – shell fish hooks and bone points along the coast for fishing, axes for hunting possums across the woodlands, and adzes for sharpening digging sticks along the banks of the larger rivers where the yams were abundant. The intensive and regular use of fire was an essential component of this late Holocene shift in resource base. Cultural burnings were slowly eradicated after European settlers began to colonise Australia from 1788 onwards. Studying the layers of pollen and other organic matter from samples of sedimentary layers of earth from the around the Bolin Bolin billabong in Victoria in 2021 revealed that colonisation brought about the biggest changes in around 10,000 years. The samples show a lack of plant biodiversity since then, with huge forests of highly combustible species of eucalypt replacing plants which were less flammable and burn at lower temperatures. An early result of the disruption of cool burning was the devastating Black Thursday bushfires in February 1851, which burnt of the colony of Victoria.

There are a number of purposes, including to facilitate hunting, to change the composition of plant and animal species in an area, In 2019 the Darwin Centre for Bushfire Research at Charles Darwin University released data suggesting that the reintroduction of traditional burning on a large scale had significantly reduced the area of land destroyed by wildfires. In the final report of the 2020 Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements, the Commission found that "The weight of research into the effects of fuel reduction on the propagation of extreme bushfires indicates that as conditions deteriorate, fuel reduction is of diminishing effectiveness". It distinguished between ordinary and extreme bushfires, saying that fuel reduction could be used to reduce risk: "Reducing available fuels in the landscape can also slow the initial rate of fire spread and fire intensity, which can provide opportunities for fire suppression and thereby reduce the risk of fires escalating into extreme fire events."

On 14 May 2021, a scheduled cultural burn took place in the Adelaide park lands by representatives of the Kaurna people, in a highly symbolic moment after years of preparation to restore the ancient practice. The project, called Kaurna Kardla Parranthi, was undertaken with the support of the City of Adelaide. The burn was part of the ecological management plan for a key area of biodiversity in Carriageway Park / Tuthangga (Park 17).

A series of aerial photographs taken around 1947 reveal that the Karajarri people practised fire stick farming in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia for thousands of years, until they left the desert in the 1950s and 1960s. When fires swept the desert in the decades following their departure, they caused widespread destruction, "losing 36 to 50 per cent of of desert to just a couple of fires every year". Since the establishment of native title over the area and the proclamation as an Indigenous Protected Area in 2014, Karajarri rangers have reintroduced the practice of burning. Traditional owners and scientists are studying the flora and fauna in the area to see how the fires affect individual species. While some species prefer more recently burnt vegetation, others favour areas burnt longer ago, so it is important to have a diversity of different fire ages, to encourage biodiversity.