Home ›› 11 Apr 2022 ›› Opinion
It’s first light, near a place called Deaf Adder Gorge on the western edge of the Warddeken Indigenous Protected Area. Northern Australia’s tropical heat pummels Arijay Nabarlambarl as he jumps out of a helicopter and strides toward a fire. Low and snaking, the flames have scorched the bone-dry wetlands, leaving singed earth and black-socked paperbark trees. The 25-year-old falls in behind two other rangers, and a symphony of leaf blowers drowns out the crackle of fire. The trio methodically walks the perimeter, blasting leaf litter from the edges back onto the fire to keep it from spreading.
They’re one of three groups of Indigenous rangers in this remote pocket of Arnhem Land, about 160 miles east of Darwin, fighting a late-season wildfire, triggered by lightning, that has fingered off in several directions. In some patches the flames leap in tall spinifex grasses; in others they creep shin-high into the crevices of sandstone formations.
Nabarlambarl pauses to assess his section of the blaze. He’s been a ranger since he finished high school; the job gave him a chance to move from the town where he was educated back to his ancestral land. In the eight years since, he’s learned the fire stories from his elders, stories that span the tens of thousands of years his people have inhabited the land. He kicks at smoldering bark from the bottom of a tree, preventing the fire from gripping it. “It’s looking good because of the early burn and the creek nearby,” he explains. Nabarlambarl wipes his brow and gazes through the smoke. The land is home to a host of endemic and threatened species, including the black wallaroo, the northern quoll, and the white-throated grasswren. It brims with stunning waterfalls, rock formations, rivers, and unspoiled forests. Even though it’s burning, it’s undeniably beautiful.
The blaze is just one of 53 that Warddeken’s rangers worked to suppress last year in the late dry season. Between August and December, fire is relentless. Tropical savanna is the most fire-prone landscape on the planet, and up to one-third of northern Australia burns every year.
But fire isn’t just the problem—here, it’s also the solution.
During the cool of northern Australia’s early dry season, when moisture lingered on the land, Nabarlambarl and his fellow rangers weren’t fighting fires; they were lighting them. From April to July each year, rangers walk hundreds of miles armed with drip torches, setting the land alight, and conduct prescribed burns from the air, dropping incendiary pellets from helicopters.
Moist vegetation, low winds, and lower temperatures at that time of year mean the fires they light are smaller and less intense, typically burning out overnight. If the land is burned gently, the wildfires that will inevitably come later won’t be as destructive. It also gives the rangers a fighting chance at extinguishing them.
Protecting the environment with fire, and from fire, is a role Aboriginal rangers take seriously. They are the land’s owners, its caretakers, and they have a deep, spiritual connection to it.
“I love being out on country,” Nabarlambarl says. It’s what made him become a ranger. It’s what brought him home.
Fighting fire with fire is not a new concept. Fire management is used by Indigenous people all over the world but has gained renewed attention. As the climate warms and wildfires become more extreme, forestry experts globally are calling for a return to traditional practices.
In Arnhem Land, lighting early dry-season fires was once systematic and widespread. Fire was used for hunting, for regeneration, for ceremony. Aboriginal elders say fire brings the land to life again; after a burn, the land is reborn. Even now, it’s common for Aboriginal people to deliver their own fire management—to see land that needs fire and simply take a match to it.
Like many Indigenous Australians, Terrah Guymala has been comfortable with fire since childhood. Now 56, he recalls lessons from his elders about using fire: to drive kangaroos toward hunters; to create smoke for rituals, particularly around death; to burn each type of vegetation at the right time of year. Guymala is a senior traditional owner for Manmoyi—one of the outstations in and near Warddeken’s 5,400 square miles (nearly the size of Connecticut). Owned by 36 clan groups, the area is managed through a complex system of customary law. “Back in the day,” Guymala says, “this land was full of people, and they used to manage the fire.” Land bereft of its people—“empty country,” he calls it—is why wildfires began consuming the landscape.
Nationalgeographic
