Wominjeka.
“Come with purpose. ”
We stand together on a small plateau of compacted clay in a dry, stringybark forest near Dixons Creek, around 45 kilometres north-east of Melbourne.
About 20 people gather near a smouldering fire beneath a sparse canopy of grey green leaves. Darren Wandin places some cherry ballart leaves in the fire.
“The cherry ballart symbolises the children, because they depend on the parent trees, the eucalypts, to survive, just as the children depend on us.”
This flattened ground is the last remaining trace of a family home that was destroyed by the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009. Darren heaps a pile of peppermint gum leaves onto the fire. He says he does this because they smell nice. Perhaps we are standing where the living room had been. Finally, he places the leaves of the manna gum, wurun, to symbolise the Wurundjeri people to whose Country we are being welcomed. Thick white smoke crawls up from under the pile and reaches out into a crisp spring morning.
I was born on Wurundjeri land. This is the first time I have been welcomed to the Country where I have lived for most of my life.
I’m here with a few other journalists and a gaggle of PwC consultants to walk with Darren through one of the few patches of Wurundjeri Country that has seen a return of cultural fire. The sophisticated use of fire has been a key part of how people lived sustainably for thousands of generations in Australia.
Darren is part of a nationwide Indigenous Australian network, called Firesticks, working to restore the traditional knowledge and practice of fire. Traditional Owners from the savannas of northern Australia are collaborating with Traditional Owners across the country to help rebuild fire knowledge that was disrupted over the last 236 years. The return of healing fire to Country is a small part of the wider story of Traditional Owners reasserting their role as custodians of their land.
Darren is a little nervous speaking before the group, as this is one of the first times he has led a Welcome to Country. His brother gave him the personal totem species of gawarn, the echidna. I think it fits him. Like gawarn, he’s a gentle presence, more comfortable left alone to his work than performing in front of a crowd like he is today. His brother’s reasoning was that “he’s a scruffy bastard with a soft underbelly.”
At Darren’s invitation, we each take turns stepping into the smoke. Some bend down into it, some turn their backs to the fire and tap their feet behind them, others squat down and scoop the smoke up as if they are washing their faces in a creek.
As my turn approaches, I try to clear my mind, but it is flitting erratically from thought to thought like a fairy wren through the undergrowth. I wonder whether the cleansing nature of the smoke that Darren has described will help clear my mind. I think about purpose and about Country. With what purpose do I come? If this is not my Country, then what is? He’s right though, the smoke does smell nice.
Later, I ask Darren what it means for me to be welcomed to the Country I was born in. I feel a little uncomfortable asking the question, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He says, “It’s not about welcoming you into the physical space of country, we are inviting you into culture, we are inviting you to walk alongside us, to share space with us, to be a part of the story with us. It is an invitation to see Country in a different way.”
Long before the arrival of fences, brick houses, powerlines, cattle, smallpox, and firearms to this continent, the Country cared for Indigenous Peoples who cared for it. The landscape was threaded together by complex webs of mutual obligation. In the cataclysms of colonisation many things were lost. The oral transmission of lore was broken, Indigenous Victorians were denied access to their land, and the freedom to practice care for Country. In the densely populated and highly modified landscape of modern Wurundjeri Country, it may be impossible to restore the traditional cultural landscape, but returning traditional fire can begin the process of healing the Country and its people.
On paper at least, all levels of government in Australia support cultural burning. There are policy statements, press releases, Royal Commission recommendations, pilot projects and, in Victoria, a Traditional Owner Cultural Fire Strategy. Each of these documents make a case that cultural burning will either help reduce biodiversity loss, mitigate fire risk, improve reconciliation, strengthen Indigenous communities or some combination of all these things. Despite all the supportive language, red tape around fire continues to make it difficult for Traditional Owners to burn on public land. That is why we are on private property today.
“When it’s private land, you can just get out and burn, when the conditions are right,” says Darren.
Darren works for the Yarra Ranges Council. It’s his job to expand cultural burning in the area. However, the structures around risk management at the council restrict him from making the kind of real-time judgements around burning that traditional fire requires.
“We can’t just say we are going to go out on such-and-such a day and fill out all the forms and have the CFA come out with us. It’s a lot of planning,” Darren explains.
“Then the day comes around and the conditions are not right to burn. It’s too wet, or it’s too dry and windy.” With sites like this, on private land, it is far easier to assess the conditions on the day and decide to burn.
Today though, the conditions are too wet. The cloud has burnt off and a weak sun is shining, but the undergrowth is still soggy from recent rains. Darren leads us down the slope to show us what sick country looks like.
I ask a young woman from PwC what it is that they do. Immediately, she says, “What we are really doing is working to solve the climate crisis. To help Australia transition to sustainable energy and help companies become more resilient.”
“Oh,” my eyebrows shoot to the top of my face. “And what is your role in that?”
“I work in the mergers and acquisitions team.”
Here, beneath a sparse canopy, the soil is mostly bare and cracked, with the occasional thick drift of rotting leaves. There is very little grass, and the limited shrubby middle storey is made up of thick patches of white tea tree, known by Wurundjeri as burgan. Darren explains that if they put fire in this area, the burgan will burn too hot and the fire will jump into the canopy. Healing fire, he says, moves slowly through the undergrowth. To burn here, they would first need to manually remove the thickets of burgan that have proliferated in the wake of the fire that killed everything in this valley 15 years ago.
Australians have come to expect an apocalyptic bushfire every generation or so. Years like 1939, 1983, 2009 and 2019 remain as scars in the collective memory of some communities. It is increasingly clear that this kind of fire is relatively new to the continent.
While uncontrolled bushfires did occur before colonisation, their scale and intensity were lower. Huge, hot fires that tear through the canopies of dense, shrub-filled forests at high speed could not have occurred in the carefully tended, open woodlands of pre-invasion Australia. On top of this, climate change is now increasing the occurrence of fire-inducing weather and environmental conditions.
On another day, I speak to paleoecologist Dr Simon Connor. By looking at fossilised pollen and fragments of charcoal, he and his colleagues recreate the plant communities and fire regimes of Australia’s past. Cultural fire, he said, created a mosaic of different forest types. The first European settlers all over the country described the forests as open, park-like landscapes with grassy understories. Colonial settlers then cleared vast swathes of land, leaving relatively small patches of forest. Without their people, these forests became increasingly homogeneous and dense.
Plant communities are fuel for bushfires, Connor said. The diverse communities created by cultural burning “confuses fire” by changing fuel distribution across the landscape and by breaking up wind flows.
On a hot windy day, in a dense forest choked with woody shrubs, fire can tear through the landscape faster than you can drive down a country road.
That is what happened here in Dixons Creek on the evening of February 7, 2009.
Today, Darren takes us back up the hill, past the flat spot where the house once stood, to a part of the property that has had cultural fire applied over the last eight years. It still has a long way to go, Darren explains. The cultural landscapes of pre-invasion Australia were built over hundreds of generations, and it will take more than a few years to bring them back to their full health.
The canopy certainly looks fuller, and greener than the area we were before. There are several types of native grass, and there is less bare earth. Bit by bit, as these grasses and understorey plants come back, the soil recovers, the fungi come back, the insects come back; this brings the birds and lizards, which bring snakes.
Darren says you normally hear more birds in this part of the forest, but they are quiet today, aside from the occasional distant cackle of a kookaburra. Beside the track, somebody spots a pale pink orchid. This is a sure sign that the soil is beginning to recover after rains washed most of the topsoil from the bare slopes after the fire. Many native orchids rely on interactions with fungi to survive. Where the fungi have been lost to fires, erosion, and compaction from hooved animals, so too have the orchids.
Healing fire burns low and slow, Darren explains. Both the canopy, the grandparent trees, and the soil, the memory layer, are sacred. When a fire burns too hot it scorches the memory layer and destroys the seedbank. Without its memory, Country forgets who it is, which is why you get thickets of burgan and wattle in Country where it doesn’t belong. That is one way in which Cultural Fire differs from the hazard-reduction burning that is still the predominant way Australia manages fire risk. A hazard reduction burn will clear the forest of fuel for the coming fire season, but the forest that grows back will be thicker, denser and more flammable.
After lunch, Darren quietly peels off from the group to try to find something dry enough to burn. I follow him and, after a while, I ask him about last year’s referendum on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, which 60 per cent of Australians opposed.
“To be honest, as much as the result sucks, I’m just glad it’s over.”
We are standing by a mass of fallen branches tangled within a copse of thin, straggly regrowth.
He shrugs, “I don’t want to think about the politics and the lies and who said what. I can just go back to looking after Country, that’s where it all comes from, that’s all that matters.”
He sets fire to the drier leaves of a dead branch sitting above the wet soil. It is still too wet to burn at ground level, but burning off these higher and drier fallen branches will make it safer to burn on a drier day in the future.
He tells me about the first time he uncovered an artifact. Somewhere near the Maroondah Dam, he held a small stone tool, and felt that he was part of a story far larger than himself. Far longer than the span of his life. Before he started that work on archaeological sites, Darren worked in factories, in hospitality, for Telstra, for VicRoads and a few other jobs here and there.
“I worked a job to get paid. There were things that I liked, people I liked but I never had that feeling that I had when I found that artifact. That I want to be in my Indigenous Culture.”
We squat down by the fire as it crackles and roars, the sun is lost to the clouds again. The smoke mingles with the smell of wet earth.
“Walking on Country you feel that you are part of it. That you depend on it, that it depends on you. That is still true if you are working in a factory or an office. You are still breathing the same air as these trees; you are still depending on the water and the land.”
We listen for a minute, to the wind and the fire and the whispering leaves.
“I’m someone that has struggled with mental health issues quite a lot,” he says. “But every time I centre things back to looking after Country, healing Country and being on Country, all that stuff just seems to fade away.”
I wonder aloud if that is the purpose wominjeka asks us to come with.
“Well yeah, I think it’s about aligning purpose with action. Allowing time to be present in the moment.”
The fire burns itself out.
“We are here doing this now.”
