as the “blackboy,” its shape mimicked that of an Aboriginal hunter standing cannily in the bush, wooden spear thrust boldly upward, as though in unconscious recognition that the pattern of harvesting fires followed a pattern of hunting fires.
“THEIR SPORT, THEIR SPECTACLE, AND THEIR MEAT-GETTING, ALL IN ONE”
“These interesting Downs,” Allan Cunningham wrote of land through which he trekked in the early 1820s near present-day Canberra, made a “striking contrast.” Those portions that had been “burnt in patches two months since” had greened brilliantly. Those that had escaped burning had a “deadened appearance.” The agency for the burns was the Aborigine, whose “common practice” it was to “fire the country in dry seasons where it was wooded and brushy.” Cunningham immediately recognized two causes for these fires. They assisted with the hunt, flushing kangaroos in particular from cover; and these “extensive … conflagrations” also attracted kangaroos and emus to mass on the nutritious new grass which soon accompanied the rains. In both cases, the grazers were exposed to native spears.28
These observations built on those of earlier European explorers, and they were repeated, in one way or another, by virtually every commentator on Aboriginal life and for virtually every environment of Aboriginal Australia. Fire was employed in all aspects of hunting and on a variety of scales. That Aborigines everywhere in Australia hunted meant that hunting fires—fires used to drive or flush game, fires used to shape desired habitats—were everywhere implicated in shaping the biotas of the continent.
Some uses were almost laughably small. The bush possum and pademelon (a wallaby) frequented the large gums hollowed out by the hearth fires that Aborigines constructed at their bases. By igniting another small fire at the base, the possum would be forced out of the hole, often through cavities at the top of the tree. Either the possum then fell or a hunter would climb after him. Torches assisted the operation, as they did night fishing from canoes. “They frequently go fishing during the night,” Angas recalled, “each man carrying a torch, which is replenished by a bunch of inflammable wood slung across his shoulders; the light attracts the fish, which, as they rise, are struck with the wodna or the spear.”29
Other fires were applied to brush that harbored game, from bandicoots to lizards to kangaroos. The magnitude of the fire varied accordingly. Since the object was to flush out small creatures, the technique called for a relatively controlled fire, specific to a particular site. This practice was commonly conducted by women and assisted by children. Scott Nind reported that the women, “who also kindle fires,” would search through the ashes for lizards, snakes, and bandicoots. Where fire exposed burrows, Aborigines smoked out small marsupials. Fire flushed euros from spinifex and smothered pied geese rooting in paperbark trees. “The natives in summer set fire to the grass and dry herbage for the purpose of hunting,” George Moore noted, “and after the fire has passed over the ground, you could hardly find as much green food as would feed a rabbit, till the herbage has time to grow again. Over the hills the grants in that locality are less burned, being less frequented by white or black people.” Special sites for hunting were identified and sustained by regular burning. Rock cliffs, box canyons, rivers—any barrier could serve to help concentrate the hunted animals. What is evident is that such fires were the faunal equivalent of the fires used in “gardening” the Australian flora.30
An uncontrolled fire was wasted, even hazardous. J. L. Stokes of the Beagle, upon meeting “a party of natives engaged in burning the bush,” noted that they distributed fire “in sections every year,” that the “duty” was “specially entrusted” to particular members, and that they used “large green boughs to beat out flames” that moved in an errant direction. In Tasmania George Robinson related how the Aborigines not only exploited a landscape of grass and wooded copse—firing the wooded clusters, one after another, to flush out game—but shaped that very landscape. “When burning the underwood,” the Aboriginal hunters “beat out the fire in order to form these clumps.” The “whole range for miles,” he concluded, formed “a beautiful picturesque” scene. Near Perth George Grey outlined “another very ingenious mode of taking wallaby and the smaller kinds of kangaroos.” The Aborigines encircled a “thick bushy place,” broke down the scrub all around it into a tangle of debris, then fired the site and speared the “frightened animals” as they attempted to flee. Tribes in riverine environments routinely fired the adjacent lands as part of their annual treks. Sturt, for example, described how the “natives continued to fire the great marshes … to procure food, by seizing whatsoever might issue from the flame.” John Wollaston noted how the “margin of some river or swamp” could serve as a trap; once driven to the water or the water’s edge, “animals and reptiles … become easy prey.” Obviously, to be effective, the same sites would be repeatedly burned, or the same techniques would be applied to newly visited sites in the process of being incorporated into an annual regimen. In this way, too, Aboriginal hunters could exert some control over the fire by controlling the fuels on which they depended. While the prospects for escaped conflagrations were, as Nind put it, “very great,” the Aborigines “generally guarded against [it] by their burning … in consecutive portions” or according to some secular calendar. Control also had social dimensions, as Moore described when “some trespassers went upon this ground [near Perth], lighted their fires, and chased the wallabees,” and were themselves chased out after a “general row” with the local Aborigines.31
When conducted by whole tribes, hunting operations could themselves be far-flung, as Captain John Hunter observed. The Aborigines, “when in considerable numbers, set the country on fire for several miles extent, this, we have generally understood is for the purpose of disturbing such animals as may be within reach of the conflagration and hereby they have an opportunity of killing many.” In Western Australia Richard Dale recorded similar sights, “the natives having at that season set fire to the country round for many miles” for the purpose “of driving objects of chase from their fastnesses …” Families, “who through the winter have been dispersed over the country,” reassembled, commenced to fire the country, and procured “the greatest abundance of game.” On such occasions, Nind concluded, “vast numbers of animals are destroyed.”32
The most daring expression of fire hunting involved the use of free-burning fire to drive game in open country. Such an operation could succeed only with the skill and patience that Hedley Herbert Finlayson detailed for a maala drive conducted in central Australia in the early 1930s. The maala (Lagorchestes hirsutus) inhabited spinifex, “on which it thrives exceedingly and grows fat.” Where burning is impossible, it is necessary for someone to leap into the tussock—its “spines like a darning-needle”—and try to flush the maala out into the waiting spears or clubs. For two becalmed days Finlayson’s party tried this technique without success. “But the third day was ideal, a scorcher with a hot north-west wind.” The party left camp “for the ground,” a site not randomly selected but chosen for its abundance of maala tracks and its mature stands of spinifex. “The blacks were in great spirits, chanting a little song to themselves, twirling their fire-sticks and at intervals giving instructions to the two weeis, who had not seen a maala drive before.” Their confidence was fully warranted, for “event followed event to a final success, with the precision of a ritual.”
The “whole procedure” appears to have “become standardized and perfected by age-long repetitions.” The first step was to send runners outfitted with firesticks “into the wind” along two lines inscribing a flaming horseshoe. Spinifex tussocks were fired about every fifty yards. While the size of the burn depended “of course, on the size of the party operating,” Finlayson estimated that the arms of the horseshoe were nearly two miles long and the open end approximately a mile wide. This effectively enclosed the area of densest tracks, which equally defined a patch of spinifex of a certain age. The strong winds meant that the flames advanced primarily away from the hunting party, that the open area burned toward them much more slowly, that they were themselves safe. “The country outside the horseshoe is left to its fate.”
Finlayson
