Antinuclear

VIDEO: Aboriginal Fire Power

Fire Power, ABC, Broadcast: 26/05/2013 http://www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2013/s3767527.htm Reporter: Tim Lee PIP COURTNEY, PRESENTER: Although the Australian continent is shaped by fire and flood, large-scale devastating bushfires are a man-made modern phenomenon. That’s the view of distinguished historian Bill Gammage, who argues that Australians have failed to understand their environment. His views may be contentious, but his latest book has won the nation’s top literary prizes and continues to win new and influential supporters. Tim Lee reports…….

Bill Gammage  contends that to confront the future, we must learn from the past. Specifically, and crucially, we need to heed the ancient knowledge and practices of Indigenous Australians…….

Aboriginal fire was actually making Australia, not a natural landscape, but a made landscape. Aborigines made it. And Europeans, when they came, assumed it was natural and so they left it alone. And what that meant was that trees and scrub were promoted to the disadvantage of grass….. BILL GAMMAGE: Can we get that knowledge back? I’d say there’s nobody that knows as much as the people of 1788, the Aborigines then, not even Aborigines now. But Aborigines know much more than the average European and they have a great advantage, and that is, especially in the north and centre, they want to stay on country. And the advantage of that is you learn local conditions – the local plants, how flammable they are, the local animals, what they need in terms of feed and shelter, where fire’s dangerous, where it’s safe, how often to burn. And staying on country and getting that local knowledge is the key to local fire management and Aboriginal people are far and away the best placed to do that. … What we lost by not listening to people in 1788 is a real tragedy. What we could have learnt is just beyond imagination. And it’s, you know, it’s cost us – it’s costing us a lot now in those cities and towns that get burnt and those people who get killed in fires.

May 27, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Audiovisual