'Fire Country' - a book response

This was a book I wanted to read as soon as I knew it was available. I had already heard Victor Steffensen speak at an Indigenous burn at a friends' property in Warwick, Queensland, in April 2018 (see photographs below). I have intentionally called this blog a "response", not a "review" of the book, because I want to come to the book as a student and a respecter of knowledge, not as someone who deems they have either the right or the capacity to critique what has been written here.

When I saw Victor lead an Indigenous burn I watched as he first interpreted the country on which we stood, and then predicted how the fire would behave ... "going fast through the ironbark, slowing in the gum and then petering out after that." He lit one patch with a match sized flame using no accelerants.  The fire burnt out in a circle, a calm, slow, safe burn.  Within five minutes we were standing where the fire had been. The ground was already cool enough to touch. We had seen the animals move away, spiders and grasshoppers. Then, beckoned by the smoke, dozens of black kites came in and worked the fire margin.

Victor inside the fire circle.

Grasshopper returns to black ashes.

Black kites swooping through the smoke. Notice how low the flames are.

I came away from that event wishing I had taken better notes. I wanted this book to be a replacement for the notes I hadn't taken. Some chapters in particular fed my ecologist heart.

Here is an extract from pages 155-156 which could almost be an extract from the talk given before the burn I attended.

… You must apply the fire respectfully and with a proper announcement so everything knows - land, animals, spirit.

Then it is important to light up in one spot and in the right spot so that the fire introduces itself to the land slowly. Allow the first ignition point to burn for fifteen minutes before putting other fire into the country. The fire starts off slowly, letting out the smell of smoke so that everything will know it is coming. Giving all the animals time to respond to the fire and move to safer areas. Because we don't burn all the country at once, the animals do not have far to go to get to safe ground. 

The fire will burn from one spot in the form of a circle, slowly getting bigger as it moves along. The fire burning in a circle gives all the animals a 360-degree escape route outside of the flames. The right conditions of the vegetation curing calms the flame down so that the animals, big and small, can get away. Tiny, little insects of all walks of life would make themselves visible as they crawled out of the grass and up the trees for safety. They know that being in the trees means they are safe, since the right fire will hardly leave a fire scar on the tree trunks. The more insects seen climbing the trees, the more healthy the land. All those insects escaping the fire, thousands of lives saved instantly that are important to the lifecycles and are food sources to larger animals.

But Fire Country is not an ecologist's journey with fire. It is the story of an Indigenous knowledge system that has been asking to be heard, and asking for permission to once again manage and heal country. Victor has been one of the significant voices for that knowledge system.  Fire Country is fundamentally a story about Victor's passion, vision and frustration in having that knowledge system heard.

A digression about disconnection

Given that this is a response and not a review I will digress into some of the thoughts that emerged for me as I read the book. In Chapter 14 Victor speaks of a journey to Finland, where he meets with elders of the Sami people. A discussion emerges about the causes of the mistreatment of country in Finland and the similarities with Australia.  "We soon came to the agreement to call the ones with no respect for culture and Mother Earth the disconnected people," Victor writes.

As I consider the push and pull forces which triggered and sustained the colonisation project in Australia, I am left to consider this label 'the disconnected people'. 

Convicts were certainly disconnected people. Firstly disconnected from their own families by distance and for those from the 'working class', disconnected from the lawmakers in England who exerted power over them through transportation. As a result of the changes brought by the industrial revolution they were disconnected from the agrarian life, and its associated sympathies for nature. Many were denied access to 'common' land during the enclosures or the highland clearances of the 18th Century.

Those who came to either police the convicts, or to attempt free settlement, were disconnected people.  They were were more pushed out of England than pulled toward Australia.  

For those of the aristocracy who made their way to Australia, Australia was a testing ground, a place to prove yourself and thereby gain entry to a particular place in society back in England or Scotland. Many of the significant names in Colonial Australia had short stays in the land. Having done their time in Australia, they would return 'home'. Similarly marines and suchlike did a 'tour of duty' in Australia. You do not listen to land if you do not intend to stay.

Pastoralists and later agriculturists sought to bring England to Australia, modifying landscape in a manner unsympathetic to the way it had functioned for millennia.  This imposition on the landscape was an imposition with disastrous consequences for the health of the land. 

For the pursuit of the riches buried in the land, e.g. during the gold rushes, the concept of respect for Country is just a hindrance (as the recent behaviour of Rio Tinto proves).  Often the goldfields were populated by men, not families, and if they had families they may well be in other parts of the world, like China. Australia was not their home nor did they intend it to become so. This must limit connection with and respect for country. Australia was a land to be mined, not a landscape to be heard and understood.

For this reason Victor's work is even more significant, because we need to hear this other, older narrative in order to live sustainably within Australia.

For me Fire Country sits with two other works I have read in the last decade; Bill Gammage's (2011) The biggest estate on earth: how Aborigines made Australia and Bruce Pascoe's (2014) Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? Both these books have also sought to bring honour to Indigenous knowledge. Both authors, like Steffensen, make the point that if you don't understand how Indigenous knowledge shaped the landscape then you can't understand the landscape.

If you have heard Victor speak, either in person or on TV, this book is a great read to help you understand his passion.  If this book is your introduction to him then I am sure it will have you yearning for an opportunity to be on country and watch a fire being placed in the way he describes.