Aboriginal people have a knowledge system that is
so complex and have a lot of answers for us
and how we should better live with this planet into the future.
We can't separate climate change from management of land. They both go hand in hand.
I wasn't surprised to see the country go up that way in 2019
when those wildfires hit Australia.
I wasn't surprised at all.
The drought that we were going through over a number of years was just horrific.
And on top of that, the landscape had not been managed.
It was full of rubbish. It was a ticking time bomb.
It's all about creating biodiversity.
It's all about saving lives and respecting all the lives
that live in those ecosystems.
We apply one fire, a spot fire first in one place and then the smoke
will start to leak out and and the animals will
smell the smoke and then they will start to act.
They'll, the insects will start to climb the
trees to get safe in the canopies, and the
kangaroo and other animals will go to the next ecosystem,
which isn't far and which won't burn
because it's too green. And they know all this knowledge
They know where to go, all the animals.
Snakes go underground and ants go under the logs
and and all these these things happen.
And then we have animals that that come to the fire, like the
hawks will fly in and dive down to catch some grasshoppers.
And then we see the kookaburras
coming and sitting in the branches and the owls
coming at night after the fire, and they come
looking at night-time, looking for something to eat as well.
And when we apply that fire it's a
single single fire in a circle, so it burns in a
circle and it goes out like this.
And when it burns like that, there's 360 degrees of escape for the animals.
And because we're burning at that
right time in those certain places, then the fire
also burns very slowly.
And even little spiders can get away and little
insects can get away. Except we don't want the
tick ticks to get away because they're so slow.
And that's okay because we don't want to get
bitten by ticks.
But all the other insects, they all move and
sometimes you can't even see the bark of the trees
because there's so many insects climbing up the trees.
And it's just so beautiful to watch and you
get to see how so many thousands of lives are saved from burning the right way.
The fire being so cool
that it doesn't harm the canopy, very low fire
that just creeps around the country, just cleaning
up the mess, only burning where it needs to burn,
leaving a design of mosaic design pattern in the landscape.
The right temperatures for the seeds
that belong in those soils, and then up come the
fresh shoots of grasses straight away.
We see green grass within a couple of days when we burn
the right way on country, and in some cases in
a couple of weeks you wouldn't even know we'd
burnt that land because it's a carpet of green
grass right across the landscape.
So when we light the fire, we don't just, you know,
barge into the landscape and use a drip torch
and put heaps of fire through the landscape,
it's that's putting too much fire too quickly in
the land, that's no good.
So it's all about reading the land and understanding the land.
It's the trees that that tell us where to go and and where to burn.
And then from there, we read the grasses
to apply those fires in the right place at the right time.
And how Aboriginal people have
worked that out over thousands of years is by reading the landscape.
So there's all different timing through all the different ecosystems.
Even though it might sound so simple, there's so many layers.
So burning country is about food. It's not about hazard reduction.
It's about making food for the animals.
Food for people. And when we are
doing that, we have green, green, lush landscapes
and not dried out and neglected landscapes.
And by doing that, you gave the fire its rightful role
which is a friend, which helps our landscape,
improves our landscapes and keeps us safe from wildfires.
And that's what we need to work towards.
When a land is healthy,
it has more opportunity and more chance to to deal
with drought and other serious fires, wildfires and so forth.
And that's been evident through
traditional knowledge that has been done for
thousands of years, has been based on making the
land healthy and protecting the trees and bringing
up the right vegetation and the right soils and the right ecosystems.
As humans, we've we've come less intelligent when it comes
to connecting to our landscapes and to our natural environment.
When we look at the elders from before, like the old people
they were like walking encyclopedias,
and my mentors were like encyclopedias.
They had all this knowledge of the land and they had all this information.
Even songs and dances and a whole culture
that was, that's connected to the landscape.
And and and now we look at people today
and they they look at the land and have no idea
what they're looking at. And that's alarming.
Yet we're so intelligent when it comes to technology,
we're so intelligent when people look at their
phones and they can tap, tap away and and and all
these things. And you know, we can do our maths
and do our sums and read and all these things.
But we've lost all this intelligence of knowing about
our Mother Earth and the country and and having a
culture that's connected to that, that's healthy
and and and and educates us and around our
responsibilities as people and how we play our
role within the environment. That's all gone.
And that's why we're in this trouble.
We need to start to understand that we're a part of the problem
and we need to, we need to look at ourselves really
very, very hard through the lens of the landscape.
We're part of the problem, but also we're also the solution.
We can't separate climate change from
management of land. They both go hand in hand and
both are extremely important and they are both
connected as well and a result of each other.
And that's why we need to see this holistically.
And that's where traditional knowledge, you know, is so important.
We got to know who we are.
We've got to see that reflection of ourselves if we're going to change.
And that's one thing that the land can
do and that is reflect who we are.