By Ryan Slater

It’s an overcast day with the occasional wind flurry. The Sparking Conversations team has been invited to a rural property on the eastern shores of the River Derwent. We’re attending a cultural burning session with a local palawa man and Traditional Fire Practitioner.

The property is typical of many rural residential properties we visit – acreage with no grazing animals, cured grasses and tussock with open eucalypt forest and environmental weeds. To most, this may seem like a normal landscape. However, if we step back to a time before colonisation, the landscape we would see before us would be significantly different.

It’s not uncommon to read Australian history and learn of settlers finding manicured woodlands in an almost park-like condition. There’s a reason for this. The traditional custodians of Australia were highly versed in caring for and managing the land.

They cared for country with the most effective tool in their possession – fire.

Now we’re here, on nipaluna/Hobart’s eastern shore, 200 or so years later. The land is prevalent with weeds and a disproportionate amount of vegetation coverage.

Across Australia we are seeing a great desire to understand how the burning methods used by Aboriginal people is beneficial to the natural environment around us and how it can be used to manage land in the future.

The practice is called Cultural Burning.

We start our session gathered around a campfire with an introduction from our Traditional Fire Practitioner. He speaks of the health of the land, and how we're here to start the healing process. We then move off into the land.

We look at a small area of tussock burned a couple of weeks before our visit – fresh green shoots have emerged from the blackened surface. The marsupials need this fresh growth to eat, they can’t eat the cured grasses.

Cultural burning doesn’t decimate everything, it regenerates the understorey.

Heading further into the property our practitioner talks about how “walking country” is so important for understanding what country needs. Aboriginal lore tells him what the land needs and where the imbalances are.

A small tuft of tussock grass is ignited. Initially, the flames are small, then the fire grows as more grass and bark-litter catches. It all happens slowly - this allows the small insects and other ground dwellers to move away safely.

We talk about the importance of keeping the fire cool. By “cool” we mean to not let the fire gain intensity and damage trees or other larger plants. This is an important difference between cultural burning and most large-scale hazard management burns.

We extinguish the fire and move on to a patch of “kerosene bushes”. The property is covered in these. Our practitioner highlights these as a problem – unhealthy for the land, smothering the grasses and sedges. But through regular burning, the lamandra and tussocks will start to return in balance.

We finish our session gathered around the campfire again before heading up to the house. We’re huddled around a small, smokey, low intensity eucalypt fire where our partitioner shares with us his story, the good and the not so good. He tells us how becoming a Traditional Fire Practitioner has helped him heal while he in turn helps country heal, all while rekindling his connection to country. Heading up to the house where our host has prepared an impressive spread, we gather to revisit the experience, where new friends and acquaintances are made.

This may have you wondering – what does cultural burning have to do with the Sparking Conversations project?

We’re often asked about clearing property to create a Hazard Management Area, a space designed to protect assets during a bushfire. In most instances mechanical clearing is the most common method of removing vegetation. Landowners who are confident and skilled with fuel reduction undertake their own hazard management. Most hazard reduction burns are considered “hot” burns, burns that can damage larger plants and trees while potentially damaging root systems and encouraging dense regrowth. Cultural burning is when Aboriginal people make connection to country through fire - to nurture and to heal country. “Cool” burning is similar, though without the cultural element.

What separates “cool” burns from “hot” burns? In essence, “cool” burning is more selective, typically only burning the understorey at low intensity, promoting healthy regrowth of the landscape in patches to form a mosaic of healthy vegetation with reduced fuel.

However, it’s important to note that using fire as a method to reduce fuel loads can be dangerous and needs to be undertaken by competent people under the right conditions.