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Firestick Farmer: Profile of a Pyrophile

The natives were about, burning, burning, ever burning; one would think they … lived on fire instead of water.

—ERNEST GILES, Australia Twice Traversed (1889)

… [Burning was] the alpha and omega of their simple notion of “doing their duty by their land.”

—ROBERT LOGAN JACK, Report on Explorations on Cape York Peninsula 1879–80

IN THE ABORIGINE, Australian fire had discovered an extraordinary ally. Not only did ignition sources multiply and spread, but fire itself persisted through wet season and dry, across grassland and forest, in desert and on mountain. Lightning was a highly seasonal, episodic ignition source; the Aboriginal firestick was an eternal flame. The domain of fire expanded, not only geographically but temporally, for this inextinguishable spark obliterated even the seasons. But “if fire was maintained by the Aborigines, it is also true,” as Phyllis Nicholson notes, “that the Aborigines were maintained by fire.” The relationship between them was reciprocal, symbiotic. “The evidence that fire was the indispensable agent by which Aboriginal man extracted many of his resources from the environment is irrefutable.” ¹

Those means—and their remarkable consequences—were pervasive, varied, and subtle. A flaming front does not advance with the crushing finality of a glacier. Rather it progresses like the exploratory probe of a surgeon, responsive to an environment of landforms, local and regional winds, microclimates, and fuels. It establishes feedback with its sustaining biota. It acts in concert with climatic and biotic changes, a catalyst: in some cases, creating; in others, maintaining. It can leverage one process into larger dimensions. It interacts with and magnifies other human practices. In Aboriginal Australia it hardened wooden spears and it drove game onto those spears. It tempered the flint used for cutting flakes and cooked the meat those flakes carved. It helped shape stone adzes and burned the wood the adzes cut. It promoted the growth of yams, cycads, bracken, and then cooked the harvest. It mediated between a Pleistocene Australia populated with marsupial tigers and giant wombats and a Dreamtime crowded with mythological beings. Its ring of fire transformed Old Australia into Aboriginal Australia.

BLACK LIGHTNING

The Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land, reported James Backhouse in the early 1830s, had “no artificial method of obtaining fire, before their acquaintance with Europeans: they say, they obtained it first from the sky—probably meaning lightning.” George Robinson reported from his informers that, should a fire expire, they had “to walk about and look for another mob and get fire from them.” The reference to lightning as an ultimate source has both environmental and mythological backing, as does the need to beg, barter, or steal fire from other humans; but the rest is hearsay. Even the maligned Tasmanians could ignite fire with the proper materials. It was an act, however, rarely witnessed by Europeans.²

Firemaking required controlled friction, tinder, and a degree of skill in putting the two together. For tinder Aborigines resorted to fur, feathers, shredded kangaroo dung, dried fungi, grass, and other finely disassembled organic matter like dried seed heads or powdered flowers. Friction resulted from rubbing or drilling. Worldwide, there are three types of implements used—the saw, the drill, and the plow. Another strategy, stone percussion, creates a spark by striking flint with steel or iron pyrite. While few cultures have employed more than one technique, it is “notable,” as D. S. Davidson remarks, that Australia contained “not only the presence of all four for the continent at large, but the knowledge of at least three in certain localities.³

Commonly a woomera (spear thrower) was rubbed against a wooden shield or a log or another woomera. Sand in the groove increased resistance, which added to the heat produced. The fire maker would then add tinder, blow, and transfer the glowing matter to larger fuels. By contrast, the firedrill relied on rapidly spinning a rod in a cavity for the frictional heat of ignition. The most common material was the stalk of the grass tree. Depending on local materials, there were variants of drills, saws, plows, and tinders. There is some suggestion that percussion was used in South Australia, Tasmania, and elsewhere, but the documentation is sparse. Tindale suggests that an Aboriginal expression for pyrite near Nairne was “fire-stone.” It appears that the drill is the most ancient device, a likely part of the toolkit of the ancestral Australians. The woomera-saw technique probably represents a later introduction, which apparently entered Australia at its northwest quadrant. It may thus belong with the special toolkits, also originating in south or southeast Asia, that appeared around 4,000 years ago, a technique universally employed in Polynesia.⁴

The 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 leave the place.” The process began by using large trunks as reflectors for campfires. The fire naturally 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 “the country was a succession of hills covered with thick forest,” it was “rendered tolerable easy travelling by the recent burning of the bush by the natives.” In this way throughout Australia broadcast burning, by intent or accident, coincided with regions of travel. For a continent inhabited by a congeries of nomadic tribes, that realm was enormous.¹⁹

In Australia, as Geoffrey Blainey has imagined, “every day for millions of days countless fires had been lit or enlarged for countless purposes, and many of those fires had unintended effects.” Rhys Jones has estimated that in the better populated areas of Australia, an area of thirty square kilometers would have supported a band of roughly forty people. “Assuming that on average, three foraging parties of various types left camp per day, that each lit ten bushfires and that this happened on only half of the days of the year, then within that area, no less than 5,000 separate bush fires would be lit each year.” And this, he considered, is “a highly conservative estimate.” ²⁰

Their kindling multiplied by several orders of magnitude the frequency of natural ignitions, and they imposed, even as they obeyed, new rhythms and new patterns. Increasingly, the geography of humans defined the geography of fire: the more humans, the more fire. Their traveling fires laid down a matrix within which lightning fire had to function. Fire seasons tended to follow the seasonal migrations of Aboriginal firesticks.

“TILLED HIS LAND AND CULTIVATED … WITH FIRE”

Other sites—neither camps nor corridors of travel—demanded additional fire practices. These included areas in which local plants were subjected to semicultivation, a spectacle that in part led Rhys Jones to refer to Aboriginal economies as “fire-stick farming.” Broadcast burning assisted foraging, as Captain John Hunter speculated, after watching “large fires” set by Aborigines in the apparent ambition of “clearing the ground of the shrubs and underwood, by which means they might with greater ease get at those roots which appear to be a great part of their subsistence during the winter.” But other natural products assumed a more conscious status as protocultivars, among them such environmentally inconspicuous but dietarily important foodstuffs as bracken, macrozamia nuts, cycads, yams, and others. In each case, the prescriptions for growing, harvesting, and cooking included prescriptions for fire. As Edward Curr shrewdly noted, “living principally on wild roots and animals,” the Aborigine “tilled his land and cultivated his pastures with fire.”²¹

Sir George Grey observed in the southwest that “the natives must be admitted to bestow a sort of cultivation upon this root [flag, a species of Typha] as they frequently burn the leaves of the plant in dry seasons, in order to improve it.” Others related how, during the dry seasons, the “swamps” and warran were fired to expose and cure the edible roots. “The root is in season in April and May,” wrote George Moore, “when the broad leaves will have been burned by the summer fires, by which the taste, according to native ideas, is improved.” In the southeast the daisy yam (Microseris) was a major foodstuff, whose range could be extended by suitable firing. “In order to get more easily at the roots amongst the underwood and scrub,” George Angas observed, “the natives set fire to the ‘bush’ in many places; when the fire is extinguished, they dig up the roots.” Doubtless, burning was also part of general site preparation, as it is throughout southeast Asia, New Guinea, and Polynesia.²²

Bracken—an Australian indigene (Pteridium)—supplied another palatable root. That the fern was a fireweed, an aggressive colonizer of recently burned sites, made it a perfect complement to routine broadcast burning for other purposes. The roots were roasted in ash and preferably served with kangaroo. In Victoria Edward Curr witnessed “bags full” of mallee manna in almost every camp. He “understood the Blacks to say that they used to set fire to a portion of the mallee every year and gather the manna the next season from the young growth.” Broadcast burns assisted the harvest of bunya seeds by exposing the cones and keeping the woodlands open. Other edibles emerged from the fire regimes as useful by-products. Recolonization of recently burned spinifex, for example, increased the abundance of wild tomatoes (Solanum) and the wild banana, a vine that sought out burned trees. Not every edible plant thrived in such a regime, as the Europeans quickly discovered; but once committed to broadcast burning, Aborigines learned how to shape the enduring and fire-adapted elements of the biota to their advantage.²³

In some cases, this meant intervening in the life cycle of native grains. The Bagundji who inhabited the semiarid basin of the Darling River harvested wild millet (Panicum) by gathering the cereals when the seed was full but the grass was yet green. They then allowed the stacks to ripen simultaneously; this pattern also ensured that the grains would not be burned accidentally prior to collection. Surveyor-General Thomas L. Mitchell was shocked to see “ricks, or hay-cocks, extending for miles” along the Darling in 1835. The uncut stalks were almost certainly fired after harvest, caught up in an annual conflagration of the countryside.²⁴

Even more spectacular was the manipulation of cycads like Cycas media and especially Macrozamia or burrawang. This palmlike species features a huge and highly nutritive, but highly toxic, seed, which must be leached and heated before it can be consumed. It appears that Macrozamia cultivation belongs with those other introductions to Australia that arrived around 4,000 years ago. Fire attended all stages of cycad production: it cleared the site of competing vegetation, apparently increased the output of kernels (up to eight times that of unburned plots), and caused the seeds to ripen more or less simultaneously. The latter was important because the nuts served as “communion food,” a preferred foodstuff for large ceremonial gatherings. The extensive stands of cycads that existed at the time of European discovery, it is suggested, may be “the result of Aboriginal manipulation of the woodland ecosystem,” principally through fire.²⁵

Equally, there was a time and a place for fire exclusion. A grass fire through a yam (Dioscorea) patch, responding to the curing cycle of grass, not that of yams or flag, could injure the valued plants and disguise their tops, which made harvesting more difficult. D. F. Thompson reported that Aborigines in Arnhemland kept their broadcast burning under control for fear that indiscriminate burning might injure yam warran. Hunting fires were not lit until the roots were collected, “after which everything was burned.” There are several reports—J. L. Stokes near Albany, George Robinson in Tasmania—of Aborigines actively swatting out fires with boughs to encourage special sites of copse or to keep fire from spreading in some undesired direction. Active intervention of this kind was, however, limited in scope.²⁶

More extensive were prohibitions against burning particular subbiotas. The best-known expressions are protected “jungles” in the tropics, vine thickets that harbor foodstuffs not well adapted to fire. But similar sites have been documented for the interior deserts, and probably they existed throughout Aboriginal Australia. In each case, the site claimed totemic protection. In Arnhemland, it was believed that spirits in the sacred thicket would blind with smoke anyone who allowed a fire to burn into it. Instead, firebreaks as much as a kilometer wide were burned around the thickets as soon as possible after the Wet, so that the sites would be spared from the free-ranging fires that plague the Dry.²⁷

There is, again, a curious reciprocity at work. As the protected thickets demonstrate, not every potential foodstuff demanded that Aborigines arm themselves with firesticks or that they loose broadcast fire wherever they tread. But once committed to broadcast fire—in large measure for hunting—the resultant fire regimes selected the assortment of roots, fruits, and nuts that would be available for consumption. It is no surprise that these plants would be manipulated, at least at critical times, by fire. It is especially revealing of Aboriginal Australia, however, that the exclusion of fire called for special attention. Fire was a norm; its restriction an exception that demanded human intervention.

If there is a cameo of the fire-driven Aboriginal plant economy, it is surely Xanthorrhoea, the fire-florescing grass tree. Xanthorrhoea absorbed the cycles of fire around it, both natural and Aboriginal. It supplied the essential components of the firedrill, it served as a firestick, it flowered after burning and thrived in fire-frequented environments, it was harvested and eaten after roasting over a hearth fire it probably started. Even its appearance pointed to the fundamental circumstances of this fire economy. Known colloquially 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 identified three distinct phases to the hunt itself. While it backed into the wind, the fire steadily concentrated all the creatures into a narrowing island of unburned fuels. Aborigines crowded the successively igniting spinifex, “keenly watching for a breakaway” maala that they could club with a throwing stick. This operation took all morning. It concluded when the “wings of flame” finally met. The unburned middle was now surrounded by flame, and the formerly open side of the horseshoe, now sealed with fire, could run with the wind.

The action quickened. What had been a backing fire now became a heading fire, and with a “steady roar” it raced to engulf the interior fuels. The small band heard crashes, “as some isolated patch of mulga or corkwood is engulfed, and swept out of existence in a second.” The Aborigines gathered their spoils and hurried to their starting point, by now burned over, and waited to receive the wildlife flushed out by the renewed wall of flame. “Every living thing which has remained above ground must come within range of their throw.” Finlayson, too, shared in this “time of most stirring appeal.”

The world seems full of flame and smoke and huge sounds; and though the heat is terrific, yet one is scarcely conscious of it. In the few tense moments that remain before they break into frenzied action and frenzied sound, I watch the line of blacks. The boys can scarcely control their movements in their excitement; the three men, muscled like greyhounds, are breathing short and quick; they swing their weight from foot to foot, twirling their throwing-sticks in their palms, and as they scan the advancing flames their great eyes glow and sparkle as the climax of the day draws near. It is their sport, their spectacle, and their meat-getting, all in one; and in it they taste a simple intensity of joy which is beyond the range of our feeling.

When the flames expired, the party retired to camp to wait for the ashes to cool. For the rest of that day and part of the next—the third phase—they scavenged through the fire. The shallow “pop hole” of the maala made it an easy victim for digging sticks. Had the party been larger, women and children would have eagerly joined the search. The ash disguised human scent, traced the movements of lizards, snakes, and rodents, and exposed burrows. It made human travel through the prickly site easy. Finlayson noted that such a fire, which to the uninitiated “might be thought” to “wipe out every living thing in its path,” was selective. In effect, it largely claimed those creatures that depended on a certain age-class of spinifex, a habitat that was temporarily destroyed by the fire and was integral to the natural and human history of the region. This “whole business has been carried out systematically for untold generations and over enormous areas of country.”³³

What Finlayson related was a paradigm of fire hunting. With minor inflections, it could describe the spectacle witnessed by J. L. Stokes of the Beagle, who noted the “astonishing” dexterity of an Aboriginal fire drive that disgorged “various snakes, lizards, and small kangaroos, called wallaby, which with shouts and yells they thus force from their covert, to be dispatched by spears or throwing-sticks …” Anticipating Finlayson, Stokes could “conceive of no finer subject for a picture,” the whole scene being “most animated,” the “eager savage, every muscle in action and every faculty called forth, then appears to the utmost advantage, and is indeed almost another being.” A century later in Arnhemland D. F. Thompson reported that, as the grass begins to dry, “the people start to burn it systematically in conjunction with organized fire drives.” Burning was not random: they fired grasslands and spared viney jungles. The harvest included “wallabies, bandicoots, native cats, ‘goanna’—monitor lizards, and large snakes and their eggs, both Pythons and Rock Pythons being taken in numbers.” Daisy Utemara of the Mowanjum tribe reported, in steps identical to those outlined by Finlayson, how her tribe burned for kangaroos. “This was,” she concluded simply, “my life which I lived.” ³⁴

Fire hunting was a marvelously effective device, but as with any technology it had its dangers and its limitations. It was restricted by its fuels. In perennial grasslands or savannas a fire drive could be used at most once a year—another incentive to confine fires to relatively small areas, so that the overall burning could be staggered over the course of several weeks. In spinifex its frequency depended on the capacity of the tussocks to rebuild. Equally, by removing many grazers, fire hunting granted a small reprieve to the burned grasses in their rush to recover. Because it was essentially a once-a-year event, the fire hunt had to maximize returns, and this argued for a communal enterprise. It made little sense to sweep up large numbers of animals when there was no means of preserving the meat. It had to be eaten quickly.

It is abundantly true, as well, that hunting fires escaped. Once ignited there was little chance of stopping such a fire, unless the surrounding fuels were sparse or the fire burned into a river or a cliff. If the weather dried and the winds rose, the fires could range widely. A stiff wind was of course essential to the prescription. Grass fires in particular could burn extensively—as any European explorer of the interior would readily testify. Other fuels, however, could carry fire as well. In Tasmania, John Wedge told of a hunting fire that spread “to a range of hills five to six miles in extent.” Outside Adelaide ship-borne observers watched as a “fire on one of the hills”—set by Aboriginal hunters—“seemed to spread from hill to hill with amazing speed … as if the whole land was a mass of flame.” It is remarkable how many reports tell of fire hunts during the dry season or high winds. Captain John Hunter spoke for many early witnesses when he “observed that they [Aborigines] generally took advantage of windy weather for making such fires, which would of course occasion their spreading over a greater extent of ground.” More recently, Richard Gould told how a fire hunt conducted for three feral cats swept across twenty-three square kilometers. Fire was far from being a precision instrument. The principal control the Aborigine exercised over fire, apart from the original decision to burn, was the distribution of fuels, which was a reflection of past burning history. The process was circular: fire controlled fuel which controlled fire.³⁵

In many such cases—and there are numerous such reports—the object was probably not fire hunting per se but other purposes, among them a purging of woody shrubs and the desire to drive off encroaching Europeans. What made such fires tolerable was the nomadism of the Aborigine and the millennia of burning that shaped the fuels. Without a fixed habitat, the Aborigines could accommodate an unusually large fire. They could move from site to site, from resource to resource as each in its proper season became available. They could wait years for spinifex to recover and restock with maala. They could move to new grass, new mallee, new heath to burn. Once established, patch burns created a mosaic of fuels that were, except under the worst conditions, self-limiting. What was problematic was the initial establishment of such a regime.

And what made broadcast burning effective in the end was not its direct effects but its indirect ones, not the fire hunt but the fire habitat. By regenerating preferred environments, fire hunting evolved into a renewable resource. Within limits Aborigines controlled the productivity and geography of the grazers they hunted. They favored some creatures and some environments over others. This was clearly recognized by European visitors. After describing “the extensive burning by the natives, a work of considerable labor,” Surveyor-General T. L. Mitchell documented how the burns “left tracts in the open forest which had become as green as an emerald with the young crop of grass.” Leichhardt echoed that observation. The burning, he speculated, “is no doubt connected with a systematic management of their run to attract game to particular spots in the same way that stockholders burn parts of theirs in the proper season.” The burning was far from random or promiscuous, or applied without regard to consequences. Rather it played upon the pyric patterns inherent in the Australia biota, even as it confirmed that dependence on fire. It exploited the nomadism of the Aborigine even as it compelled that trait. It reinforced the special capacity of humans to wield a firestick, even as it committed humans to an ever greater reliance on that implement.³⁶

Fire fused Aborigine and bush into a special weld. After nearly a century and a half, the celebrated commentary of Mitchell still speaks with astonishing clarity:

Fire, grass, and kangaroos, and human inhabitants, seem all dependent on each other for existence in Australia; for any one of these being wanting, the others could no longer continue. Fire is necessary to burn the grass, and form those open forests, in which we find the large forest-kangaroo; the native applies that fire 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.