Burning Bush. Stephen J. Pyne
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