REVIEW: Fire Country by Victor Steffensen

As Australia recovers from the trauma of our “Black Summer”, many of us are looking to learn more about bushfires. Facing the threats posed by climate change, we seek to manage the land in the face of megafires that can devastate over 16 million hectares, kill half a billion animals, take away 29 lives and obliterate 2,500 homes. It is clear to many that current fire and forest management strategies have failed to meet the challenge, and stories have emerged of properties that miraculously escaped, seemingly protected by indigenous cultural burning methods. But what is “cultural burning” and how useful is it, really? Victor Steffensen’s Fire Country seeks not only to explore this, but to champion cultural burning as a superior method of land management.

Victor Steffensen

Fire Country is not only a timely publication, it is a comprehensive guide to its subject: passionate and persuasive, wide in its scope, and sure to be a classic. In it, Victor illustrates how land is burnt to control weeds and encourage the return of healthy bush foods and medicine. This is “cool burning”, where the flames are lower than knee height and the smoke is white, thin and wispy. The fire spreads slowly in a circle, allowing even the most unhurried fauna to escape. Canopy and tree trunks are protected, as the work involves only the understory. These burns aim to renew the land as an act of service. Victor writes, “Burn country like you are gardening for food, and like you are living off the land to survive.”

Victor Steffensen is a descendant of the Tagalaka people, and has spent decades as a consultant and mentor on traditional land management methods. Using storytelling as his mode, he places the fire knowledge and practice within culture and family, showing how knowledge is linked to both the knowledge holder and to the land, and that the land is knowledge itself. Victor shows that, like permaculture, cultural burning has its core principles and ethics, is scientific (not mystical), and is about integration. Fire management must work with the landscape. The decision of whether or not to burn is prescribed by the community ecosystem, and its success is contingent on timing and knowledge of conditions. This is not science as we currently recognise it, and you’ll see no instruments to hand. Instead moisture levels are gauged by the hand on the grass stalk, the long stick in the soil, and the reaction of a crushed leaf. The actions of animals and insects are key indicators; from the emu breeding season to the ant nest’s texture. Blossoms of flowers can even be indicators. This is truly reading the landscape.

As the subtitle of Fire Country promises, fire management could save Australia, but Victor is not just talking of asset and land protection. He sees a wider future for the nation in the knowledge being handed down and embedded in everyday practice for all of us. This an opportunity, a way to reconcile and evolve the culture together, for all to learn and to live closer to the land. We must reset to nature and get back to country. He feels that the people of Australia are ready to embrace this change, and I hope he is right.

Much of this book is defensively written against the sceptics, the fearful property owners, and the stubborn bureaucrats, as well as the racists who would see the practice as primitive. But the author is optimistic and works with many RFS groups and pastoralists to reconcile the thinking, believing that a wider dialogue between us all is vital to “strengthening the knowledge.” Although this book isn’t a burning manual, it offers us a definitive introduction, and is sure to be a landmark in the literature of both Indigenous culture and land management. Even more than that, Victor has written a heartfelt tribute to his Elders, and a paean to mentoring itself. The author’s friendship with the wise brothers of the Laura township is lovingly observed, forming the backbone of the story. Knowledge sharing is the greatest of gifts and Victor values this. There is a plain-told elegance to his narrative, and he persuades without hectoring.

I suspect Fire Country is one of the most important books I’ve read in years, as I find it already informing my view of land and life. We must be in service of nature if we are to survive, not just protect, and observation is key. There is so much more going on. That fire is used in the traditional smoking ceremony, the ‘welcome to country’, is telling of its value to Indigenous Australians. As Victor says, “The fire is just the beginning of understanding the important journey ahead for us all”. This book will hold much interest for the fans of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, and deserves wide attention.

Please note: $1 from every copy sold of this book is being donated to Firesticks Alliance Indigenous Corporation – for more information, please click here.

Fire Country

How Indigenous Fire Management Could Help Save Australia

by Victor Steffensen

Delving deep into the Australian landscape and the environmental challenges we face, Fire Country is a powerful account from Indigenous land management expert Victor Steffensen on how the revival of Indigenous fire practices, including improved ’reading’ of country and undertaking ’cool burns’, could help to restore our nation.

Victor developed a passion for traditional cultural and ecological knowledge from a young age, but it was after leaving high school that Victor met two Elders who became his mentors, particularly to revive cultural burning...

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Robert O'Hearn

Robert O'Hearn is the non-fiction specialist at Booktopia HQ. He has been a bookseller for over three decades and can't seem to stop. He is an aspiring apiarist and likes playing Joy Division songs on mandolin. He is generally harmless.

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