Neolithic revolution which had spread domesticated flora and fauna—agriculture—to the Old World. Unlike the Americas, no autonomous agricultural centers developed in Australia. None was necessary. Population remained light, and resources ample. The landscape could be “farmed” to an adequate degree by fire.
Within Aboriginal society fire was pervasive. It assured Aboriginal dominance over megafaunal Australia much as it confirmed eucalypt dominance over megafloral Australia. Fire and Aborigine were never far apart; on this the hottest and the driest of the vegetated continents, Aborigines habitually walked across the landscape armed with smoldering firesticks. Of fire’s role at the nuclear core of Aboriginal life, perhaps William Dampier put it best: “This their place of Dwelling was only a Fire, with a few Boughs before it, set up on that side the Winds was of.” Their shelter existed for the fire, not for themselves. The hearth, as Robert Hughes has observed, was for the nomadic Aborigine “of far greater significance than the home.” They carried their hearth—the society that it created and symbolized—with them.19
Yet the Aborigine had forged, as had the eucalypt before him, a Faustian bargain with fire. The dependence on fire was perhaps too total; the reliance on fire, for all the subtlety of its usage, too singular. Once committed to a fire-dependent society, anything that altered the status of fire or fuels would ripple catastrophically throughout the social and ecological system. Add new ignitions, remove old flora, alter the seasonal timing of fires—such changes would selectively reorder a biota. Tease apart the fuel structure and a whole ecosystem could unravel. While their reliance on the firestick made Aborigines a power in Old Australia, the society that lived by the firestick could also die by it. A landscape shaped by fire could be seized by more powerful fire.
When that moment occurred—when European fire arrived—it set into motion a biotic revolution that rivaled that of the Pleistocene. With breathtaking speed Europeans destabilized and restructured the fire regimes of Aboriginal Australia on a scale that had not been experienced for tens of millennia. Repeatedly, instinctively, Aborigines turned to fire to drive off the invaders. But the Europeans had even more assertive fire arms, and with domesticated biological allies they could attack the fuel structure of Australian fire regimes. A wave of extinction and of humanly dictated repopulations followed.
The pillars of smoke by day and of flames by night that likely beckoned the first humans across the waterways to Australia were a kind of siren song. They suggested that other humans were present, that humans could thrive in this environment because it could be manipulated by fire. Yet once in Australia there was apparently no means to depart and few alternatives to the widespread use of fire for survival. The rafts that brought early migrants to the Sahul could not be rebuilt with Australian materials. The route to Australia was a one-way journey, and once committed to a fire-intoxicated society, there were few opportunities to escape the firestick. The Aborigine, and Aboriginal Australia, became vulnerable to anything that distorted ignition, fuels, or the health of Aboriginal society. With palpable irony the smokes of Aboriginal Australia beckoned the Europeans, as the smokes of Old Australia had once called the Aborigines.20
6
Firestick Farmer: Profile of a Pyrophile
The natives were about, burning, burning, ever burning; one would think they … lived on fire instead of water.
—ERNEST GILES, Australia Twice Traversed (1889)
… [Burning was] the alpha and omega of their simple notion of “doing their duty by their land.”
—ROBERT LOGAN JACK, Report on Explorations on Cape York Peninsula 1879–80
IN THE ABORIGINE, Australian fire had discovered an extraordinary ally. Not only did ignition sources multiply and spread, but fire itself persisted through wet season and dry, across grassland and forest, in desert and on mountain. Lightning was a highly seasonal, episodic ignition source; the Aboriginal firestick was an eternal flame. The domain of fire expanded, not only geographically but temporally, for this inextinguishable spark obliterated even the seasons. But “if fire was maintained by the Aborigines, it is also true,” as Phyllis Nicholson notes, “that the Aborigines were maintained by fire.” The relationship between them was reciprocal, symbiotic. “The evidence that fire was the indispensable agent by which Aboriginal man extracted many of his resources from the environment is irrefutable.” 1
Those means—and their remarkable consequences—were pervasive, varied, and subtle. A flaming front does not advance with the crushing finality of a glacier. Rather it progresses like the exploratory probe of a surgeon, responsive to an environment of landforms, local and regional winds, microclimates, and fuels. It establishes feedback with its sustaining biota. It acts in concert with climatic and biotic changes, a catalyst: in some cases, creating; in others, maintaining. It can leverage one process into larger dimensions. It interacts with and magnifies other human practices. In Aboriginal Australia it hardened wooden spears and it drove game onto those spears. It tempered the flint used for cutting flakes and cooked the meat those flakes carved. It helped shape stone adzes and burned the wood the adzes cut. It promoted the growth of yams, cycads, bracken, and then cooked the harvest. It mediated between a Pleistocene Australia populated with marsupial tigers and giant wombats and a Dreamtime crowded with mythological beings. Its ring of fire transformed Old Australia into Aboriginal Australia.
BLACK LIGHTNING
The Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land, reported James Backhouse in the early 1830s, had “no artificial method of obtaining fire, before their acquaintance with Europeans: they say, they obtained it first from the sky—probably meaning lightning.” George Robinson reported from his informers that, should a fire expire, they had “to walk about and look for another mob and get fire from them.” The reference to lightning as an ultimate source has both environmental and mythological backing, as does the need to beg, barter, or steal fire from other humans; but the rest is hearsay. Even the maligned Tasmanians could ignite fire with the proper materials. It was an act, however, rarely witnessed by Europeans.2
Firemaking required controlled friction, tinder, and a degree of skill in putting the two together. For tinder Aborigines resorted to fur, feathers, shredded kangaroo dung, dried fungi, grass, and other finely disassembled organic matter like dried seed heads or powdered flowers. Friction resulted from rubbing or drilling. Worldwide, there are three types of implements used—the saw, the drill, and the plow. Another strategy, stone percussion, creates a spark by striking flint with steel or iron pyrite. While few cultures have employed more than one technique, it is “notable,” as D. S. Davidson remarks, that Australia contained “not only the presence of all four for the continent at large, but the knowledge of at least three in certain localities.3
Commonly a woomera (spear thrower) was rubbed against a wooden shield or a log or another woomera. Sand in the groove increased resistance, which added to the heat produced. The fire maker would then add tinder, blow, and transfer the glowing matter to larger fuels. By contrast, the firedrill relied on rapidly spinning a rod in a cavity for the frictional heat of ignition. The most common material was the stalk of the grass tree. Depending on local materials, there were variants of drills, saws, plows, and tinders. There is some suggestion that percussion was used in South Australia, Tasmania, and elsewhere, but the documentation is sparse. Tindale suggests that an Aboriginal expression for pyrite near Nairne was “fire-stone.” It appears that the drill is the most ancient device, a likely part of the toolkit of the ancestral Australians. The woomera-saw technique probably represents a later introduction, which apparently entered Australia at its northwest quadrant. It may thus belong with the special toolkits, also originating in south or southeast Asia, that appeared around 4,000 years ago, a technique
