Fire-stick farming facts for kids
Fire-stick farming, also known as cultural burning or cool burning, is a special way Aboriginal Australians have used fire for thousands of years. They regularly burn plants in a controlled way. This helps them with hunting, managing different plants and animals, controlling weeds, and making areas safer from big wildfires. It also helps increase the variety of life, called biodiversity.
Even though this practice stopped in many parts of Australia, it is now being brought back. This is thanks to the teachings of Aboriginal elders from places where the tradition never stopped, like the Noongar people's cold fire.
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What is Cultural Burning?
The name "fire-stick farming" was first used by an Australian archaeologist named Rhys Jones in 1969. Today, people often call it cultural burning or cool burning. These terms describe the careful and planned use of fire by Aboriginal people.
A Long History of Fire Use
Aboriginal people have used fire for a very long time, possibly for tens of thousands of years. Some experts believe their burning practices changed the Australian environment. For example, some think it might have affected the large animals that lived in Australia long ago, known as Australian megafauna. These animals were mostly plant-eaters.
One idea is that Aboriginal burning changed the plants these megafauna ate. This might have led to their numbers going down. Another idea is that Aboriginal people hunted these large animals, which caused them to disappear. After the megafauna were gone, more plants grew, creating more fuel for fires. This made fires bigger and hotter. Aboriginal people then might have burned more often to keep many different types of plants and animals alive. They also did this to stop very hot fires from harming medium-sized animals and plants.
Other researchers believe that Aboriginal fire use did not change the environment much. They think the plants and animals found 200 years ago would have been similar even without Aboriginal burning.
A study in 2010 looked at old charcoal records from over 220 places in Australia. It found that when the first people arrived about 50,000 years ago, there wasn't a huge increase in fire activity. The study showed that fire activity changed with the climate, with more fires during warmer times and fewer during colder times. This suggests that climate played a big role in how much fire there was.
However, regular burning did help plants that could survive fires. It also helped animals that liked more open country. This shows that Aboriginal burning did affect the "natural" environment in many areas. It created different types of plant groups that helped Aboriginal people find more food.
Over the last 5,000 to 10,000 years, Aboriginal people started using their tools in new ways. They used tools for hunting smaller animals, like shell fish hooks for fishing and axes for hunting possums. Using fire regularly was a key part of these changes in how they found food.
After Britain started to colonize Australia in 1788, cultural burning slowly stopped. A study in 2021 looked at old soil layers in Victoria. It found that colonization caused the biggest changes in plants in about 10,000 years. There are now fewer types of plants. Large forests of highly flammable eucalypt trees replaced plants that burned less easily. One early and terrible result of stopping cool burning was the Black Thursday bushfires in February 1851. These fires burned about 5 million hectares in the colony of Victoria.
Why Cultural Burning is Important
Cultural burning has several important goals:
- It helps with hunting by clearing areas.
- It changes the types of plants and animals in an area to make them more useful or balanced.
- It helps control unwanted plants or weeds.
- It reduces the risk of big, dangerous fires by burning off fuel.
- It increases biodiversity, meaning more different kinds of plants and animals can live in an area.
For example, fire-stick farming helped turn dry forests into grassy areas called savannahs. This increased the number of grass-eating animals like kangaroos.
Cultural Burning Today
Even though cultural burning stopped in many parts of Australia, it is now being brought back. Aboriginal elders are teaching these old ways to new generations and other groups.
In the early 2000s, cultural burning was reintroduced in some areas. Now, some Australian states use it along with other ways to prevent fires. In northern Australia, there has been a lot of support for Indigenous fire planning. In 2019, data showed that bringing back traditional burning on a large scale had greatly reduced the amount of land destroyed by wildfires.
Learning from the 2019–2020 Bushfires
The huge 2019–2020 Australian bushfire season led to more calls for using fire-stick farming. Traditional fire practitioners had already been working with fire agencies to do small burns. More and more people, including farmers, wanted to learn how traditional fire practices could help protect their land.
Experts like Oliver Costello from the Firesticks Alliance Indigenous Corporation said that cultural burns can help stop wildfires. They also help plants grow back and protect animal homes.
Adelaide Park Lands Cultural Burn in 2021
On May 14, 2021, the Kaurna people held a planned cultural burn in the Adelaide Park Lands. This was a very important moment, as it brought back an ancient practice after many years of planning. The City of Adelaide supported this project, called Kaurna Kardla Parranthi. The burn was part of a plan to manage a key area of biodiversity in Carriageway Park / Tuthangga (Park 17).
Real-Life Examples
Old aerial photographs from around 1947 show that the Karajarri people used fire-stick farming in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia for thousands of years. They stopped when they left the desert in the 1950s and 1960s. After they left, fires in the desert caused a lot of damage.
Since 2014, when the area became an Indigenous Protected Area, Karajarri rangers have brought back the burning practice. Traditional owners and scientists are now studying the plants and animals to see how the fires affect them. Some species like areas that were burned recently, while others prefer areas burned longer ago. So, having different ages of burned land helps many different types of plants and animals thrive.
See also
In Spanish: Agricultura del palo incendiario para niños
