00:00 The 2019-2020 catastrophic bushfires that impacted an enormous area of
00:06 Southeast Australia, the narrative around these fires that are actually increasing
00:09 in time is that they are an inherent feature of the Australian landscape.
00:13 They're something that we need to deal with and that are being exacerbated or
00:17 made worse by climate change and we really want to interrogate whether that
00:20 was true or not. The understanding that I have both from my cultural
00:25 background as a Wiradjuri person but also in my research with and for
00:29 Aboriginal communities is that landscapes and country in Australia was
00:33 very different prior to the British invasion and that it's quite possible
00:38 that these catastrophic fires have been made more frequent and more severe not
00:44 only through climate change but more deeply through the lack of care and
00:48 management of country. There's a whole bunch of different kinds of information
00:52 we can glean views of the past from and what country was like or what landscapes
00:59 were like in Australia prior to the British invasion and the removal of
01:02 Aboriginal care and management. There's writings of settlers and farmers and
01:06 colonists. There's the paintings from realist painters such as Eugene
01:12 Vongarad whose paintings are considered so accurate that they've re-vegetated
01:16 landscapes based on being able to identify species within his paintings.
01:20 And there's the empirical scientific data that I collect which is essentially
01:26 microscopic remains that are produced by plant communities and by fires and all
01:31 of these kinds of processes that happen that have blown around in the atmosphere
01:35 and they land on lakes and swamps and bogs and they settle and build up over
01:38 years and years and years and sometimes millions of years much like an ice core
01:42 but on land. By piecing these various fragments together to build up a
01:47 whole picture of how country has changed we know that there was a strong
01:53 narrative that Australian landscape particularly in the southeast were open
01:57 so we can glean from that that the landscape has changed a lot. We've got
02:02 sites ranging from Bundjalung country which is a little south of Byron Bay
02:07 right through to Wadawurrung country which is to the west of Melbourne in the
02:12 southwest and they are all from within contemporary forest ecosystems and they
02:18 all show a significant increase in eucalyptus trees occurring immediately
02:26 following the removal and suppression of Aboriginal care and management. It's in
02:30 the mid 1800s you see this increase in eucalypts and why that's important is
02:35 what we know is that eucalypts are incredibly flammable they're fast
02:38 growing and flammable so this increase in eucalypts is associated almost
02:44 uniformly once again with an increase in charcoal okay the products of fire
02:48 being deposited. Eucalypts increase and then fire increases and we see this as a
02:55 uniform pattern right up the east coast of Australia and through the southeast
03:00 and really importantly this happens prior to the onset of anthropogenic
03:05 climate change and now we're in this situation where we have overloaded
03:11 forests that are not cared for or managed as they have been for millions
03:16 of years, sorry thousands of years. We readily conserve or protect but we don't
03:22 return the kind of care and management that these forests need and to keep them
03:28 safe to live in. The approach to looking after country that dominates now
03:34 the conservation the National Park ideology is based on a fundamental lie
03:41 which was that this landscape was uninhabited, was that Aboriginal people
03:45 were intelligent parasites who had no discernible impact on the environment
03:49 all they did was happen to glean their vegetable and animal sustenance where it
03:55 arose and this lie perpetuates it stems from those early colonists ideas about
04:01 country they would write these open landscapes the splendor of these open
04:05 landscapes that we know ecologically if you leave them alone turn into forests
04:08 so the fact that they were open and grassland meant that there was some
04:11 intervention happening so right at that foundation the founding document
04:16 that terra nullius is based on was unoccupied land terra nullius, nobody's
04:20 land and that myth and that lie is perpetuated right through to the present
04:24 day. In terms of solutions it's multifaceted we need to address that
04:28 deep fundamental cultural schism that is perpetuating this problem that is
04:34 setting up things like you know our firefighters they are incredible people
04:39 but the fundamental paradigm that you need a paramilitary organization to
04:45 fight fire in a landscape that is incredibly flammable and has been cared
04:49 for and managed with fire for at least 60,000 years is one of the systemic
04:55 things or at least representative of the systemic schism the split between
05:00 reality and where we're existing today that exists in this continent and I see
05:05 society sitting now you know a very simplified spectrum between this
05:09 narcissistic view that environments and the world is there for us and we take
05:14 take take take take you see there's a mining sector logging sector all this
05:17 that everything's there for us that has given rise to this misanthropic the
05:22 human hating group the antidote to that is to lock humans out and keep them out
05:26 and it misses the whole appropriate engagement with country and the very
05:31 fundamental principle of healthy country healthy people but Aboriginal people
05:34 because we are a part of it we need to get it get inventive you know if we're
05:40 not happy with handing over the reins to Aboriginal people and letting them take
05:43 control and in many cases that's it's not very possible because we've let
05:46 these systems get so wild and so sick that converting them back to healthy
05:53 country with fire becomes too dangerous so do we have to go in and intervene
05:57 selective logging follow up with some burning there's resistance to that but
06:01 let's try it let's try these these different things we have to get
06:05 inventive you're in this moment of almost chaos or or uncertainty and we
06:10 have to start trying different things but the one fundamental thing that
06:15 needs to underpin it all is engaging traditional owners this isn't a us or
06:19 them situation we all live on this country now on this continent and we all
06:23 live on country this is about empowering Aboriginal people to reconnect and bring
06:28 their enormous reservoirs of knowledge to solve the wicked problems that we
06:32 have now
06:35 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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