Burning Bush. Stephen J. Pyne
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