to the grass at certain seasons, in order that a young green crop may subsequently spring up, and so attract and enable him to kill or take the kangaroo with nets. In summer, the burning of long grass also discloses vermin, birds’ nests, etc., on which the females and children, who chiefly burn the grass, feed. But for this simple process, the Australia woods had probably contained as thick a jungle as those of New Zealand or America, instead of the open forests in which the white men now find grass for their cattle, to the exclusion of the kangaroo …
As further proof, Mitchell cited the melancholy consequences that followed the expungement of Aboriginal fire. “Kangaroos are no longer to be seen there [Sydney]; the grass is choked by underwood; neither are there natives to burn the grass …” Extinguishing Aboriginal fire extinguished as well the Aborigine and the peculiar biotas of Aboriginal Australia.37
CLEANING UP THE COUNTRY
Dutch, British, French—all the European explorers of coastal Australia witnessed fire by night and smoke by day. Each understood those phenomena as emblematic of human settlements. Captain James Cook summarized their collective experience when he wrote that his crew “saw upon all the Adjacent Lands and Islands a great number of smokes—a certain sign that they are inhabited—and we have daily seen smokes on every part of the Coast we have lately been upon.” When Philip King extended that domain to the interior, he also spoke for many: “Very distant smokes were distinguished inland, proving the existence of natives removed from the shores.” Fires deep in the mountains convinced Governor Arthur Phillip that Aborigines inhabited them. Leichhardt, Sturt, Stuart, Mitchell, Eyre, Gregory, Giles—one could pick almost at random among the classic exploring parties around and across the continent for the identification of smoke and fire with Aborigines. Even those who considered lightning as a possible cause, as did First Fleeters Arthur Phillip and George White, soon agreed that the Aborigine was by far the most powerful agent. Whatever the natural pattern of fire, the fire regimes of Aboriginal Australia were shaped by the firestick.38
Over and again astonishment at the extent of burning punctuated initial reports. Hooker DeNyptang in 1697 saw, “after sun-set,” a “great number of fires burning the whole length of the coast of the mainland.” Soon after landing Governor Phillip wrote to Viscount Sydney that “in all the country thro’ which I have passed I have seldom observed a quarter of a mile without seeing trees which appear to have been destroyed by fire.” Exploring the Derwent River in 1802, François Peron marveled that “wherever we turned our eyes, we beheld the forests on fire.” William Edward Parry exclaimed that “I never saw anything like the state of the country with the fires—literally as black as charcoal for miles together.” At Port Essington in Arnhemland, it was reported that “the natives set fire to the grass which is abundant everywhere, and at that time quite dry … The conflagration spreads until the whole country as far as the eye can reach, is in a grand and brilliant illumination.” The peripetic George Robinson routinely noted in Tasmania that “the country as far as we had come was all burnt off and there was fires in all directions.” Near King George Sound Archibald Menzies, with Vancouver’s expedition, found “but few places I travelled over this day but what bore evident marks of having been on fire.” There were “frequent marks of fire and general burnt state of the country everywhere.” George Vancouver himself spoke of “the very extraordinary devastation by fire which the vegetable productions had suffered throughout the whole country we had traversed.” At the Swan River colony John Wollaston entered into his journal how “for 50 miles through the forest a tree is hardly to be found which has not the mark of fire upon it”—a mark that prevails “so universally in Australia.” T. L. Mitchell concluded that “conflagrations take place so frequently and extensively in the woods during summer as to leave very little vegetable matter to return to earth. On the highest mountains, and in places the most remote and desolate, I have always found on every trunk on the ground, and living tree of any magnitude also, the marks of fire; and thus it appeared that these annual conflagrations extend to every place.” And so it went, in virtually every environment of Australia.39
Commentators not only catalogued bushfires among the exotica of this land of contrarities, but soon implicated fire as a cause of its singular peculiarities. The careful Charles Sturt, as knowledgeable as any explorer of his age, concluded that “there is no part of the world in which fires create such havoc as in New South Wales, and indeed in Australia generally. The climate, on the one hand, which dries up vegetation, and the wandering habits of the natives on the other, which induce them to clear the country before them by conflagration, operate equally against the growth of timber and underwood.” The “general sterility” of New South Wales he ascribed to “the ravages of fire.” Edward Curr thought that it would be difficult to “overestimate” the consequences of the Aboriginal firestick. “We shall not, perhaps, be far from the truth if we conclude that almost every part of New Holland was swept over by a fierce fire, on an average, once in every five years. That such constant and extensive conflagrations could have occurred without something more than temporary consequences seems impossible, and I am disposed to attribute to them many important features of Nature here.” Curr “doubted” whether any other group of humans “has exercised a greater influence on the physical condition of any large portion of the globe than the wandering savages of Australia.” To the ubiquitous bushfires Europeans even attributed the blistering winds from the interior that scorched coastal settlements.40
The interplay between natural and Aboriginal ignitions, the subtle synergism of varied fires and varied biotas, the actual pattern of fire regimes—all have to be understood within the context of particular places and times. But there can be little doubt that the firestick brought anthropogenic fire everywhere to Australia, that Aborigines used fire consciously and systematically, that they powerfully, perhaps irreversibly, reinforced the trends by which fire pervaded Old Australia. But just as the ecological consequences of fire involve more than the sum of its separate effects on individual flora and fauna, so the character of Aboriginal burning appears to embrace more than the sum of its separate instrumental uses.
In describing the cycle of contemporary burning by the Gidjingali of Arnhemland, Rhys Jones lists among the reasons for fire their desire—their understood obligation—to “clean up the country.” Other observers have echoed the sense with which Aborigines consider the role of fire as a restorative, and their use of broadcast burning, a moral imperative. C. D. Haynes even concluded that this impulse “dominates all other reasons” for Aboriginal burning. Thus, while there were purposes for burning, each independently reasonable and justifiable as contributing to a livable habitat, overriding each was an ensemble effect, a perception that land unburned or burned badly was land unmanaged. Land rumpled with litter was “dirty” and disgraceful. What Aborigines typically did to prepare a site for occupation—to burn it over—they thus projected across the entire inhabited regions of Old Australia. That relationship was reciprocal: if fire made the land fit for humans, humans in return accepted an obligation to use fire to sustain the land.41
It is an old drama, this replacement of the bushfire by the hearth fire. But it has been replayed in Australia in special ways. Aboriginal fire was not identical with any fire. It owed its character as much to Aboriginal culture as to Australian nature. It bound the material life to the moral life. It bridged technology to ritual, environmental manipulation to social myth. The revolutionary fires that raged during the Pleistocene raged also in the minds of men.
7
Fires of the Dreaming
Goorda then led the men away from the blackened area and showed them the secrets of fire … “This is fire,” he said. “Guard it carefully so it will serve you and not devour you.”
—RECORDED BY LOUIS A. ALLEN, “The Coming of Fire: the Goorda Myth”
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