ate into the green bole, and the more the site was revisited, the larger the fire-excavated cavity. In places, such hearths showed signs of digging, sometimes of lining by clay. The larger cavities could even shelter Aborigines. But the primary side benefit was that, as the hollowing process continued, possums and other creatures took up residence in the upper cavities. The Aborigine could then return and hunt those creatures by smoking them out with a fire at the base. Either way a long-glowing fire became, for days, a public utility at which faltering firesticks could be renewed.12
The hearth warmed sleeping areas. At night, J. B. Cleland noted, the Aborigine “sleeps behind a breakwind with a little fire on each side of him and another at his feet.” It was not uncommon for burns—sometimes disfiguring—to result. To prevent the hearth fire from escaping, camp sites were cleared of fuel, often by preburning it. To maintain a fire through the night involved constant tending, which broke an evening’s sleep into a chain of lighter naps.13
Preferred camping sites—links in an annual cycle—were fired when first revisited. Ludwig Leichhardt observed that “the natives seem to have burned the grass systematically along every watercourse and round every waterhole” so, he thought, that they would be surrounded by new growth. More recently, Richard Gould described how, “back at Pukara, the man with the firestick uses it to ignite the dry brush surrounding the waterhole. In a few minutes all the brush and thorns that have accumulated since the place was last visited are burned off.” Fire was the modus operandi by which Aborigines reclaimed a site; it was so common that astute explorers in the desert quickly learned to identify smoke with Aborigines and waterholes. The likely reason was not only to attract game to fresh herbage in a few weeks, but to clean up the site—to purge it of overgrowth, evil spirits, and noxious creatures such as ants, spiders, and especially snakes. Over and again in Aboriginal legends a hunter is killed by a poisonous snake at a waterhole, and a quick fire was a simple prophylactic. Sites dense with mosquitoes could be fumigated, at least temporarily, by burning.14
The domestic fire interacted with other tools. Careful charring hardened digging sticks and spears. Heated waxes and resins made a useful glue for hafting. Warming a spear shaft could help in straightening it. Heating bark in ashes made it easier to mold into a canoe. Fire was probably used in preparing flint, perhaps even in quarrying it. Ashes served as a poultice for wounds and snakebites, for body decoration, for disguising the human odor. Fire cauterized wounds and assisted with the healing of ritual incisions. Fire applied to the base of trees replaced the axe, generating fuel for more hearths and firesticks. And fire made light. It gave humans the nighttime for story, ceremony, and companionship.
The hearth fire defined the human world, for through it Aborigines remade Old Australia. Thus, while Aboriginal vocabularies contained many words for fire, they carefully distinguished the hearth fire from the bushfire. The hearth fire was the origin of all other anthropogenic fires; without it human society was unthinkable. Europeans often marveled that, during inclement weather, Aborigines would huddle around a fire rather than forage or hunt, that they would rather go without food than without fire. No less marvelous was the fact that Aborigines would kindle multiple hearth fires on even the hottest days. “Whatever the weather …,” Bonwick concluded emphatically, “a fire was essential.” During the height of the Black War, Aboriginal Tasmanians listed the prohibition against fire—essential to avoid detection by marauding Europeans—as among the worst of the privations forced upon them. Without fire life was too hard, too cruel, too frightening to be endured.15
“THE WHOLE COUNTRY IS SHORTLY IN A BLAZE”
The constant rubbing of nomadic tribes against a tindered Australia was itself an environmental firedrill that littered the landscape with smoldering ignitions. A semipermanent campsite could be insulated from accidental fire by a preparatory burn; but those sites were only a fraction of the chronic fire setting that occurred, and even those burns typically ranged far beyond the actual site of occupation. When traveling, Aborigines rarely extinguished their ephemeral fires after they served their purpose. The fires simmered, their domain restricted only by the vagaries of the weather and the patterns of previous burning that limited their access to fuels.
To the casual eye this habitual unconcern with secondary consequences seemed careless. His interest “often aroused” by bushfires, Leichhardt pondered the Aborigines of Queensland “who light fires all over the place to cook their food but leave them unextinguished.” In the early days of the Swan River colony a reporter for the Perth Gazette was “persuaded” that “the origin of these fires is not at all to be attributed to any malicious intent at all on the part of the natives; they resort to their accustomed practice of lighting a fire in the bush, for the purpose of cooking and from the bush, being highly inflammable at this season, it extends with resistless violence.” In addition to their cooking fires and signaling fires, George Moore noted that Aborigines tossed aside individual firesticks when they no longer needed them. “The half-clad native starts with the lighted bark; as the day advances the warmth of the sun renders artificial heat unnecessary; the bark is discarded … A breeze comes … and the whole country is shortly in a blaze.”16
Signal fires were no less common and no less likely to be abandoned. Explorers rarely advanced into lands unwatched. Many of the smokes that announced the presence of natives to them were in fact announcements by Aborigines of the presence of the exploring party. Thus as Robert Logan Jack “approached the site of the old diggings, signal fires broke out on the Twelve Apostles, in advance of us in such a manner as to leave no doubt in our minds, that the ABORIGINALS (themselves unseen) were honouring our progress with their serious attention.” Some observers noted how a person “entering another clan’s territory lit a fire and placed green branches on it” so the smoke would alert the local Aborigines that the party was on a peaceful mission. Captain Hamelin reported from Tasmania how “one man was walking in front and carrying a brand with which he set fire to everything as they went along,” an act Hamelin understood as “customary when they want to stave off or begin a war among themselves …”17
With the firestick and combustibles usually handy, signal fires became a bush telegraph. The techniques were again continental. On Cape York Jack McLaren related how the Aborigines would overlay a flaming fire with green boughs, which proceeded to smoke heavily, then controlled the output with sheets of bark. In the Kimberleys A. B. Facey, lost and prostrate with illness, watched as three Aborigines “piled all the green bushes and scrub onto the fire which made a thick white smoke. Then one of them took the saddle cloth from Dinnie and kept putting it on and off the fire.” Although Europeans puzzled over the complex messages that such simple acts conveyed, the explanation is probably that the smoke only confirmed texts that were agreed upon in advance. In areas barren of distinguishing landmarks, a smoke column imposed a geodetic order to which foraging parties could orient themselves. Flames from coastal fires—pandamus palms made a favorite torch—similarly guided fishing canoes at night.18
While special smokes could convey special messages, the Aborigines themselves were a traveling smoke. Smokes blazed their trails, and to the fires that they abandoned Aborigines added others in a deliberate strategy of broadcast burning to assist travel through tall grass or dense scrub, to flush out game, and to sustain a preferred habitat. The great corridors of Aboriginal transit were broad paths of fire. And since humans need water frequently, those paths tended to follow watercourses or connected waterholes. “A great party of natives appeared to be travelling up the creek,” A. C. Gregory jotted into his diary, “as fresh fires are constantly seen to the northeast along its course.” Charles Sturt wrote that “although the river line was lost in the distance, it was as truly pointed out by the fires of the natives, which rose in upright columns into the sky, as if it had been marked by the trees upon its banks.” In his interminable journals Robinson reported open thoroughfares through otherwise dense Tasmanian scrub, the vegetation change corresponding to frequent transit and burning by Aborigines. His companions shunned unburned areas, on one occasion warning Robinson that he would never emerge from an almost impenetrable, unburned thicket. Elsewhere, even when
