In central Australia, a group of Aboriginal people walk through grasslands backed by rocky outcrops with firesticks in hand, setting alight the vegetation before them.
In this footage, filmed in 1936 and seen in colour for the first time in the new SBS series Australia in Colour, we witness firestick farming, where Aboriginal people systematically burnt vegetation to reduce fuel and encourage new growth to lure grazing animals for hunting.
One of the central pillars of Aboriginal land management, traditional burning was practised for millennia among Aboriginal people. It was a complex, interconnected system that spread across the continent, creating “a single estate, albeit with many managers,” historian Bill Gammage, author of The Biggest Estate on Earth (2011).
Senior Macquarie University Environmental lecturer Dr Emilie Ens says the natural cycles of drought that existed before colonisation have been exacerbated by climate change and widescale clearing.
Fire is another issue, says Dr Ens. In the absence of traditional burning – characterised by regular controlled low-intensity fires – the unchecked growth of “above-ground biomass” has led to the large, high-intensity and incredibly destructive bushfires that have ravaged Australia in recent years.
“This has resulted in change to the whole ecosystem,” says Dr Ens. “In some places, we’ve seen declines in rainforest-type species and other reductions in species that require longer intervals between fire or lower intensity fire.”
Europeans also brought with them “a fear of fire”. They quickly prohibited the practice of traditional burning, which allowed ‘understorey’ vegetation to grow unchecked.
Recent years has seen a renewed appreciation for practices such as fire-stick farming. “In Northern Australia where I work,” says Dr Ens, “the reintroduction of traditional burning practices has reduced those big late dry season fires, so we have lower intensity burns.”
In remote parts of Australia, in particular, “where Aboriginal people have greater control over land management,” she says, “we’re seeing those positive effects and the environment being restored.”
As Bruce Pascoe recounts in his influential 2014 book Dark Emu, early European settlers observed that the abundant grasslands they saw recalled the manicured parks of England. Others related seeing sophisticated fish traps and evidence of grain farming. At the height of its productivity, Australia supported large populations, writes Pascoe, thanks to the inhabitants’ “industry and ingenuity applied to food production over millennia.”
Underpinning Aboriginal land management practices is a deep spiritual connection with the land that is closer to kinship than ownership, Pascoe writes. “Aboriginal people are born of the earth, and individuals within the clan had responsibilities for particular streams, grasslands, trees, crops, animals, and even seasons.”
As Arrernte/Luritja woman Catherine Liddle , “Connection to Country is inherent, we are born to it, it is how we identify ourselves, it is our family, our laws, our responsibility, our inheritance and our legacy.”
Aboriginal people systematically burnt vegetation to reduce fuel and encourage new growth to lure grazing animals for hunting.
The arrival of Europeans
When Europeans arrived in 1788, they brought with them an approach to land management that was in direct conflict with the long-established practices of the continent’s Aboriginal custodians. They seized and cleared land and built fences to demarcate property ownership, a concept unheard of in Aboriginal thinking. Fighting broke out between the settlers and Aboriginal people who once moved freely across the land. Tens of thousands of Aboriginal people were massacred in more than a century of frontier warfare.
It was a land grab of immense proportion. According to the National Museum of Australia , by the end of the 1840s, less than 2000 squatters had gained 28 million hectares of land. These Europeans also brought with them “a fear of fire”, says Dr Ens.
They quickly prohibited the practice of traditional burning, which allowed ‘understorey’ vegetation to grow unchecked and crowd out previously productive grasslands.
The hard-hooved sheep and cattle favoured by the Europeans degraded Australia’s fragile ancient soils, as did the introduction of rabbits in 1859. Productivity quickly declined as “sheep ate out the croplands and compacted the light soils,” Pascoe writes. “The fertility encouraged by careful husbandry of the soil was destroyed in just a few seasons.”
Connection to Country is inherent, we are born to it, it is how we identify ourselves, it is our family, our laws, our responsibility, our inheritance and our legacy.
The impact of Europeans’ arrival was just as devastating. As Pascoe recounts in Dark Emu, little visible evidence remained of Aboriginal civilisation by the 1860s. The members of Indigenous clans who previously occupied the land had perished in large numbers due to “warfare, murder and disease”, their agricultural lands wiped out by sheep and cattle and their villages and storage facilities destroyed by nature or, in many cases, arson.
European farmers and graziers soon felt the effects of their mismanagement. In 1889, an outbreak of a fungal disease called black stem rust decimated the nation’s wheat crop and led to the importation of wheat to Australia for the first time in its history.
Six years later, in 1895, the worst drought since white settlement gripped the Country. Known as the Federation Drought, it saw rivers dry up and the loss of half the nation’s sheep flock, reduced from 106 million in 1892 to 54 million in 1903.
Still, the settlers persevered. Technological advances, such as Australian-made windmills designed to pump water from the continent’s vast underground reservoir and the expansion of the rail network, and the development of new species better suited to Australia’s harsh climate, such as the merino sheep and rust-resistant wheat varieties, led to an agricultural boom driven by wool and wheat.
Between 1897 and 1915, wheat production , and by 1914, the wheat industry was the country’s largest employer. Wool enjoyed a similar trajectory. By the 1950s, so lucrative were Australia’s wool exports, supplying 80 per cent of global demand, that the nation was said to be “riding on the sheep’s back”.
The problems that beset the early settlers are still being felt centuries later. Two of the worst since white settlement have occurred in recent history: the Millennium Drought, spanning from 1996 to 2010, and the severe drought between 2017 and 2019 that affected much of south-western and south-eastern Australia.
This is the third of a special three-part feature series on Australia in Colour. Australia in Colour is a four-part weekly series narrated by Hugo Weaving, airing Wednesday at 8:30pm on SBS. Catch up on past episodes on
