Coexisting with combustion: the future of bushfire management

Given that we cannot completely control fire and there are no absolute fixes, we need to create a better and more honest relationship of coexistence.

By CRC researcher Dr Timothy Neale. This article originally appeared in Issue Three of Fire Australia. 

I first became interested in fire during my doctoral research in Far North Queensland. It’s a landscape where fire and smoke are a reliable everyday presence through the dry season – seeing people not treat fire as an emergency started me off in thinking about the diversity of relationships we can have with it.

Since the end of the Second World War, Australians in the nation’s south have increasingly aspired not only to own their own homes, but to own homes close to coastlines and forests – close to nature. Unfortunately, these same landscapes are places that, for millennia, have regularly experienced bushfires, meaning that many things we care about – like houses, humans and animals – are put at risk.

One of the key difficulties, as I think of it, is that human and ecological timescales are very different. Someone can live in a landscape for years and never experience a significant bushfire, and therefore reasonably not think of it as a high-risk area, but that landscape’s rhythm is actually ticking away on a timescale of decades or centuries, preparing itself for a major fire.

In addition to these mismatched timescales, anthropogenic climate change is impacting the frequency and intensity of the fires on this continent, changing the weather and the vegetation we can expect in a location, and often increasing the fire risks.

Given that we cannot completely control fire and there are no absolute fixes, we need to create a better and more honest relationship of coexistence – that’s the headline message from recent social science research into bushfire.

Agencies and communities are already doing a lot in this direction, seeking to know more about the positive and negative outcomes of fires in the environment and to understand the risks different communities face. However, there is much more to do, including engaging much more extensively with Aboriginal peoples.

A major aspect of my research is looking at the many benefits from engaging with Traditional Owners and Indigenous Australians about bushfire management. Many Indigenous Australians have immense pride in their long history of skilful fire use, and we have solid evidence about the clear ecological, economic, social and health benefits to being engaged in caring for Country.

When European settlers first began invading the continent over two hundred years ago, many saw Aboriginal peoples’ fire practices as an annoyance or a threat. Only a few settlers, often farmers, saw the positive effects these practices could have on promoting regrowth and reducing the fuel available for future fires, and even fewer respected their importance in hunting, ceremony and communication.

In recent years, there’s been renewed interest in Aboriginal peoples’ fire practices and knowledge, thanks in part to books such as Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu; however, it is interesting to note that non-Indigenous scientists have been influenced by these ideas for some time. If we look at early ideas of fuel reduction burning, developed at CSIRO in the 1960s and 1970s, they were drawing on ethnographic and archaeological evidence about how, when and why Indigenous Australians used fire in the landscape. Regrettably, that influence was not matched with any real engagement with contemporary Aboriginal peoples.

That said, the mistake that many government and other agencies can make, in Australia and overseas, is that they can be too focused on what Aboriginal peoples might have to tell non-Indigenous peoples. We have to understand that, in Australia and elsewhere, many Indigenous peoples’ past and present experiences of sharing their knowledge have frequently been negative and exploitative. It’s pretty galling, if you think about it, to follow up centuries of dispossession by asking for more.

There are better alternatives, and one has to think in terms of respectful partnership. As Indigenous scholars and activists have been saying for a long time, non-Indigenous peoples have to give up some of their power and control if they want to work together. We have to start from the premise of Aboriginal peoples’ rights, as the First Peoples of this place, to speak authoritatively about Country. They must be supported to use their own knowledge and be treated as leaders in the management of their Country.

Dr Timothy Neale is a co-lead on the CRC project Hazards, culture and Indigenous communities, which focuses on the risk and resilience priorities of Indigenous communities in southern Australia, the emergency management sector’s priorities for these communities, and how these interests interact. In 2018 he was awarded a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council for his project ‘Pyrosecurity: understanding and managing bushfires in a changing climate’.