ability to generate fire by hand was clearly part of Aboriginal lore and must have been practiced frequently to maintain the level of skill that seems to have existed. The anthropologist Baldwin Spencer, documenting practitioners during the 1920s, thought that “any native will make fire in, at most, a minute and a half by either of these methods.” That observant Victorian squatter, Edward Curr, snapped that “any blackfellow with the proper materials would make fire in this way in a few minutes.”5
The operative phrase is “proper materials.” For a nomadic people, it was inconvenient to transport the paraphernalia of firemaking. The advantage of the woomera-and-shield apparatus was precisely that these were objects which were necessarily carried quite apart from their utility as fire starters. Its disadvantage was that it required at least two participants. The firedrill made from grass-tree stalks was widespread because the grass tree was widespread. But this still meant that abundant, dry tinder had to be present as needed or be carried, yet the conditions that would likely extinguish an existing fire were precisely those that made it unlikely to find a ready cache of dry tinder. In brief, before firemaking could commence, the proper materials had to be gathered. As nearly every observer of the Aborigine has commented, it was far simpler to keep an existing fire going than to start a new one.
It was easier to carry a firestick. Anything that could be grasped and could glow could serve the purpose. The choice of implement varied by season, place, and purpose. The stalk of a grass tree, a slab of smoldering mulga bark, ironbark, a decayed branch of eucalypt, a Banksia cone—all were employed. To early European observers, the native and the firestick were inseparable. Shortly after landing, Captain Arthur Phillip wrote Viscount Sydney that the natives “are seldom seen without a fire, or a piece of wood on fire, which they carry with them from place to place, and in their canoes …” On the western coast Scott Nind in 1831 reported the same phenomenon: “Every individual of the tribe when travelling or going to a distance from their encampment, carries a fire-stick for the purpose of kindling fires …” In South Australia Richard Helms confirmed that “they are always careful, to carry a piece of burning bark with them on their day’s march, or whenever they go any distance away from camp; this is partly for the purpose of setting the spinifex-grass on fire, but principally to have fire ready when about to settle down again.” In Queensland Tom Petrie described fire starting, but quickly qualified his observation: “it was only on rare occasions that the natives needed to do this, for they took care always to carry lighted firesticks with them wherever they went.” In his meticulous journals about life in Aboriginal Tasmania, Robinson casually reiterates what every observer of Van Diemen’s Land witnessed, that the association of Aborigine and firestick was indissoluble.6
There appears to have been a division of labor by gender. Men made fire; women principally transported it. Men employed fire for hunting; women, for the harvesting of vegetable staples and small game. The bushfire belonged to the male universe; the hearth fire to the female. In cold weather, however, everyone seized a firestick as a matter of warmth. Children freely played with fire, to the astonishment of Europeans. It is said that by the age of three they displayed a familiarity that was unimaginable to a society trained to other fire practices and educated to very different perceptions of fire.
Some skill was required to carry a brand without burning the body and without allowing the embers to die. From time to time, the firestick would be waved, fanning the coals to life, or plunged into scrub or spinifex, which in flaring would rekindle the main stalk. A sympathetic European claimed that, by unburdening women from firesticks, the “tinder-box,” along with tobacco and iron tomahawks, were the “three boons which the Blacks received from the Whites in compensation for their endless disadvantages.” By lining their craft with clay, Aborigines even transported fire in their canoes. Each firestick ended in a campfire, which ended with the ignition of a new firestick, and so the cycle continued, waxing and waning with opportunities and seasons, but never ceasing—a dynamic chain of fire. Almost never did Aborigines deliberately extinguish a fire.7
The constant interaction between firestick and landscape replenished both. The liberal distribution of fire also meant that, if lost, fire could be more readily reclaimed from the land. The banking of fires in large tree boles, the lighting of heavy scrub, the ignition of larger trees directly or indirectly, all littered the scene with fire caches, not unlike food caches or waterholes—temporary sources of an essential element. Everywhere smoke marked the presence of Aborigines, whose wanderings traced storm tracks of black lightning.
ITS OWN FIRESIDE
Whenever Aborigines stopped, however briefly, they habitually ignited a small fire. The act had practical consequences: it replenished firesticks, warmed travelers on cold days, and served to cook whatever had been collected, which was often the reason for stopping. But, even on the hottest days, a hearth fire was kindled because it promoted fellowship and solidarity. Each family, Baldwin Spencer reported, “lives as a separate unit within the camp but the essential thing is that its life is centred around its own fireside.” Writing in the early 1840s Robert Austin stated that each family in the tribe had “its own territorial division, its own ka-la or ‘fire-place’ …” At night, as James Bonwick remarked, fire “kept the bad spirits away.” Around the fireside were conducted the important rituals and ceremonies of spiritual existence. In symbolic, no less than technological terms, fire prescribed the conditions of domestic life.8
The hearth took many forms. Cooking fires suited the food to be prepared. Hot stones were ample to fry Bogong moths; small banks of coals suited marsupial rodents; somewhat larger, specially shaped hearths baked cakes, cooked tubers, and leached toxins from various foodstuffs. Kangaroos—usually cooked where killed—required larger, temporary fires, and proceeded in stages. The carcass would be singed on one side, then turned and singed on the other, then removed and scraped clear of fur, gutted, and thrown back on the coals for deep roasting. Fish were cooked in canoes, which carried fire in clay-lined niches. Cockles—consumed by the tens of millions—were prepared for eating by heaping the shells into piles, then topping the mound with a small fire, which heated the valves sufficiently to pop them open without the need for breakage. The ever-handy firestick ensured that cooking fires could be manufactured on demand. With the exception of the larger game, hunted by men and prepared on site, the domestic fire was the province of Aboriginal women.9
More permanent ovens were made, as Edward Eyre described in 1845, by “digging a circular hole in the ground,” lining it with stones or clay balls, and building a hot fire that dried the cavity and heated the stones (often splitting them in the process). Some hot stones were then placed into the gutted animal, the bottom of the oven lined with leaves or grass, and the carcass placed into the oven. The top was sealed with more grass or leaves and a dressing of dirt. The ground oven could be reused. Hot stones were employed to crack open hard fruits and Acacia seeds. In canoes, Aboriginal fishermen used seaweed in place of leaves and dirt, and searched out branches of “false sandalwood,” often at some cost, to burn as fuel. The aromatic wood burned virtually smoke-free.10
Constructed ovens, in particular, warranted protection. The ideal site was a cave. Here fires were located near flat rock walls that could better reflect the heat. In more open areas Aborigines might erect a bark windbreak, the origin of semipermanent dwellings. In areas infested with mosquitoes and other insects, they could enclose the windbreak in a hut that trapped a fumigating smoke. Again, it was “the business of the women … to build the hut and also to fetch wood for the fire.” But perhaps the most intriguing variant was the use of large eucalypts, whose trunks were shaped by Aboriginal burning into ovens and fire depots.11
Pilot-Major Francoys Jacobsz described such trees in Tasmania; John Lhotsky cited examples from the Australian Alps; and others noted them as well, from South Australia where red gums were used, to Westralia where the jarrah was preferred. Governor Phillip observed that “the natives always put their fire, if not before their own huts, at the foot of a gum tree, which burns very freely, and they never put a fire out when they
