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Fire Ecology Volume 8, Issue 3, 2012
doi: 10.4996/reecology.0803001
Jones: Fire-Stick Farming
Page 1
Forum Article
INTRODUCTION TO FIRE-STICK FARMING
Aaron M. Petty
Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods,
Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Northern Territory 0909, Australia
Rhys Jones was not a re ecologist, and he was the rst to admit that. What Rhys Jones did
understand was time—deep time. By his death in 2001, Jones had become the pre-eminent Aus-
tralian archaeologist, with a research portfolio that spanned from Tasmania to New Guinea.
Among his many achievements, Jones helped establish the time of human occupation of Australia
at 40 000 years.
When Rhys Jones published Fire-Stick Farming in 1969, the Australian state operated under
the doctrine of terra nullius, which established that the continent was uninhabited at the time of
European discovery and there for the taking. Aboriginal people had only just gained full recogni-
tion as citizens within the constitution in 1967 and were still over twenty years away from having
their native title claims recognized and terra nullius negated in the High Court’s Mabo decision
in 1992.
In 1969, ecology itself was seen as terra nullius, governed by homeostatic forces driving
communities toward climatic equilibrium. The best humans could hope for was to stunt the drive
to climax for their own exploitative advantage. Few ecologists (e.g., Odum 1969) considered hu-
mans as part of ecology, but then usually from an agronomist standpoint. Hunter-gatherers were
just that—at best active hunters of game, but otherwise catch-as-catch-can gatherers of what their
environment offered. Fire ecology, such as it existed, was dominated by the discourse of thwart-
ed climaxes—of re prevention and re suppression. However, in the heavily settled areas of
southern Australia, the failures of this policy were becoming apparent and re managers had be-
gun experimenting with large-scale burning to reduce fuel loads (Pyne 1991).
Fire-Stick Farming began with a question as simple as it was radical: “We imagine that the
country seen by the rst colonists before they ringbarked their rst tree was ‘natural.’ But was it?”
Inspired by the extensive re management he saw practiced by Aboriginal communities across
central Arnhem Land, and appreciating the antiquity of Aboriginal occupation, Rhys Jones an-
swered in the negative. This insight, that Aboriginal people managed the landscape through re to
make it more productive and had been doing so for millennia, was revolutionary. The use of the
word ‘farming’ was intentional—it simultaneously challenged the notions that Aboriginal people
were passive creatures eking out a rude existence in a wide brown land, and that re was inherent-
ly destructive. Indeed, Jones went a step further and suggested that Australian biota had adapted
over millennia to a distinctly anthropogenic re regime and, signicantly, that removal of that re
regime following European colonisation was detrimental to plant and animal communities.
Perhaps the fact that Rhys Jones was not an ecologist was all to the good. Unbound by the
ecological dogmas of the time, he was able to ask and answer a simple question, and leave it for
later scholars to uncover the details. Since the publication of Fire-Stick Farming, we have an in-
creased appreciation of the variability and antiquity of re in Australia. For example, re was
clearly prevalent in Australia well before the arrival of humans and, at least at broad scales, cli-
mate remains the principal driver of re regimes (Mooney et al. 2011). Nonetheless, the evidence
of widespread, systematic, and careful application of Aboriginal re across Australia is now in-
Fire Ecology Volume 8, Issue 3, 2012
doi: 10.4996/reecology.0803001
Jones: Fire-Stick Farming
Page 2
controvertible, and Aboriginal people drive major re management projects across north Austra-
lia (Russell-Smith et al. 2010).
It is not often that a scientic paper can herald a cultural and scientic revolution, but Fire-
Stick Farming was the right paper at the right time for Australia. The paper has signicance out-
side of the antipodes, however. Perhaps the biggest lesson of Fire-Stick Farming arises from the
fact that what Jones wrote about was, ironically, not particularly novel—extensive records and
notes on the indigenous use of re existed since the time of the rst explorers (Gammage 2011).
Terra nullius is a convenient ction of settler societies worldwide and it is all too easy to ignore
the achievements of displaced peoples. Given the ubiquity of re practice by indigenous cultures
worldwide, our task now is not to debate whether indigenous re has or had an inuence on eco-
system patterns and processes, but to begin to explore how, when, and why different peoples
practiced re management over the ages (Coughlan and Petty 2012) in order to better understand
the role of anthropogenic re in ecology.
REFERENCES
Coughlan, M.R., and A.M. Petty. 2012. Linking humans and re: a proposal for a transdisci-
plinary re ecology. International Journal of Wildland Fire 21: 477-487. doi: 10.1071/
WF11048
Gammage, B. 2011. The biggest estate on Earth. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, Australia.
Mooney, S.D., S.P. Harrison, P.J. Bartlein, A.L. Daniau, J. Stevenson, K.C. Brownlie, S. Buck-
man, M. Cupper, J. Luly, M. Black, E. Colhoun, D. D’Costa, J. Dodson, S. Haberle, G.S.
Hope, P. Kershaw, C. Kenyon, M. McKenzie, and N. Williams. 2011. Late Quaternary re
regimes of Australasia. Quaternary Science Reviews 30: 28-46. doi: 10.1016/j.quasci-
rev.2010.10.010
Odum, E.P. 1969. The strategy of ecosystem development. Science 164: 262-270. doi: 10.1126/
science.164.3877.262
Pyne, S.J. 1991. Burning bush: a re history of Australia. Holt, New York, New York, USA.
Russell-Smith, J., P. Whitehead, and P. Cooke, editors. 2010. Culture, ecology and economy of
re management in North Australian savannas: rekindling the Wurrk tradition. CSIRO Pub-
lishing, Collingwood, Victoria, Australia.
Fire Ecology Volume 8, Issue 3, 2012
doi: 10.4996/reecology.0803001
Jones: Fire-Stick Farming
Page 3
In recent years there has been increasing
interest in the effect of man on the Australian
environment. Forests have been bulldozed,
swamps drained, heaths sown with trace ele-
ments, beaches chewed up, and the litter of the
mid-twentieth century spread everywhere.
That this is deeply affecting the countryside is
obvious to all and causes concern to some.
G.P. Marsh saw the same thing happening to
the face of America during the last century,
and doubtless the Roman intelligentsia of the
rich provinces of North Africa gave the matter
some thought as the wheatelds around their
villas turned slowly into desert.
In most discussions a contrast is made be-
tween a “natural” environment as opposed to
an “articial” one. We imply that the former
represents the climax without the effects of
man, and as examples of it we think of bush-
land around our cities, the national parks, and
remote areas. We imagine that the country
seen by the rst colonists before they ring-
barked their rst tree was “natural.” But was
it?
Antiquity of Man in Australia
The white man has been on this continent
for 200 years in some places and less so in
most others. Before he arrived, the continent
had been colonized, exploited, and moulded
by other men—the Australian Aborigines and
their ancestors for tens of thousands of years
[Figure 1].
Australian archaeology, in a decade’s ex-
citing research, has produced sequences of
man’s activities back into the Pleistocene in
many places. The accompanying map [Figure
2] summarizes our present knowledge of man’s
antiquity in various parts of the continent; it
can be seen that by 20 000 to 30 000 years ago
he had colonized and extended his range
throughout the inland plains of Australia and
by 20 000 years ago had reached the southeast-
ern coast.
For a long time there has been a tendency
to regard Aborigines, like most other hunters
and gatherers the world over, as passive slaves
of the environment, in contrast to the impact
of agricultural or industrial man, who is seen
as the master of nature, the initiator of ecologi-
cal change. In recent years, however, the eco-
Figure 1. Mannalargenna, an Aborigine from the
east coast of Tasmania, holding a burning re-stick.
(Watercolour painting by T. Bock, in the National
Library, Canberra.)
FIRE-STICK FARMING
by Rhys Jones
Research Fellow, Department of Prehistory, Australian National University, Canberra, A.C.T.
Fire Ecology Volume 8, Issue 3, 2012
doi: 10.4996/reecology.0803001
Jones: Fire-Stick Farming
Page 4
logical effects of Aboriginal technology have
been reinvestigated, and work by anthropolo-
gists on the living culture and by biologists on
the environment suggests that these were enor-
mous. They are still shaping our lives, even in
areas where Aborigines have not roamed free
for 100 years.
Fire and the Aborigines
Aboriginal man’s ecological impact was
mostly due to hunting, gathering of plants, and
re. By far the greatest effects were caused by
the use of re.
A study of Australian ethnographic litera-
ture will show that bushres were systemati-
cally and universally lit by the Aborigines all
over the continent. Explorers from Tasman
onwards, seeing Australia from the sea, report-
ed that the coastlines were dotted with res.
Peron, in 1802, sailing up Derwent in south-
east Tasmania, said that “wherever we turned
our eyes, we beheld the forests on re.” When
men explored inland, the entire horizon was
often lled with smoke from Aboriginal res,
and anthropologists have reported regular sea-
sonal rings over hundreds of thousands of
square miles in central and tropical Australia.
Tasmania
In Tasmania it was customary for the Ab-
origines to carry their smouldering re-sticks
with them, and they set re to the bush they
walked along. G.A. Robinson, who lived with
them for the best part of 5 years, has hundreds
of descriptions of their setting re to the bush,
of distant Aboriginal res, and of large areas
of countryside freshly burnt by them.
The ecological effects of these burnings
have been studied by Tasmanian botanists,
who can only account for the distribution of
modern vegetation zones in Tasmania in terms
of a long history of intensive Aboriginal re
pressure [Figure 3]. Many factors are involved
in the distribution, such as soil type and aspect
and climatic change, but a long history of r-
ing has reduced the Notofagus-dominated rain-
forest in many places through a mixed euca-
lypt-rainforest phase to scrub and, eventually,
to sedgeland and heath. W.D. Jackson sees the
coastal sedgeland of western Tasmania as hav-
ing been largely formed and extended as a re-
sult of constant ring, and as such it is a hu-
man artefact.
In eastern Tasmania, ring produced and
maintained the open savannah woodland or
parkland which greeted the rst colonists, with
their ocks of sheep. Here and there are ex-
tensive, open, treeless areas or “plains” cov-
ered with Poa grassland. These plains have
been formed by repeated ring, and once there
was a dense mat of grass on the surface it
would have been kept clear not only by man
Figure 2. Summary of the present knowledge of
man’s antiquity in Australasia: squares indicate
carbon dates between 21 000 and 30 000 years ago,
triangles between 11 000 and 20 000 years ago, and
circles between 5 000 and 10 000 years ago. The
broken line represents the 100-fathom line which
would have been the approximate coastline more
than 10 000 years ago. (Map by the author.)
Fire Ecology Volume 8, Issue 3, 2012
doi: 10.4996/reecology.0803001
Jones: Fire-Stick Farming
Page 5
but also by the grazing of macropods, native
hens, and other animals.
Eastern New South Wales
The savannah woodland, merging into
open plains, characteristic of central and west-
ern New South Wales, is similar in many
ways to that of eastern Tasmania and, again,
has been heavily modied by Aboriginal
burning. In 1848 Major Thomas Mitchell, the
explorer, said with brilliant insight of these
park woodlands:
Fire, grass, kangaroos, and human inhab-
itants seem all dependant on each other for ex-
istence in Australia… Fire is necessary to
burn the grass and form those open forests, in
which we nd the large forest kangaroo; the
native applies that re to the grass at certain
Figure 4. The bush immediately after an Aboriginal re, northeastern Arnhem Land, 1967. Note the burnt
grass, leaving a savannah, park-like distribution of trees. (Photo: Nicholas Peterson.)
Figure 3. The east coast of Tasmania in 1802, showing smoke from Aborigines’ bushres. (Engraving
after C.A. Lesueur, from the Nan Kivell Collection, National Library of Australia, Camberra.)
Fire Ecology Volume 8, Issue 3, 2012
doi: 10.4996/reecology.0803001
Jones: Fire-Stick Farming
Page 6
seasons, in order that a young green crop may
subsequently spring up and so attract and en-
able him to kill or take the kangaroo with nets.
In summer, the burning of the long grass also
discloses vermin, birds’ nests, etc., on which
the females and the children who chiey burn
the grass, feed. But for this simple process, the
Australian woods had probably contained as
thick a jungle as those of New Zealand or
America instead of open forests.
Arnhem Land
Arnhem Land, like other areas of tropical
Australia, has a marked seasonal climate with
a wet and a dry season. The Aborigines orga-
nized their life according to this pattern, and
the ring of the bush during the dry season
was a decisive part of their economy. In 1853,
a visitor to the short-lived British settlement of
Port Essington commented: “About the middle
of the dry season, the natives set re to the
grass which is abundant everywhere, and at
that time quite dry… The conagration
spreads until the whole country as far as the
eye can reach, is in a grand and brilliant illu-
mination.” [Figure 4.] The Aborigines still do
this, and the role of ring in their total econo-
my has been extensively studied. The res
spread rapidly through the tall dry grass to the
bases of the trees, and their ecological effects
are maintenance of the open parkland appear-
ance and inhibition of the spread and abun-
dance of non re-resistant plants.
N.B. Tindale accounts for the presence of
patches of eucalypt and open plains in the
Cape York rainforest as, again, being due to
Aboriginal ring.
Why Did Aborigines Burn the Bush?
We can try to answer this question at sev-
eral levels of sophistication:
• For fun: Anthropological friends of mine
have asked Aborigines why they were
tossing lighted matches into the bush from
the back of land-rovers in which they
were travelling. The answers have ranged
from “it’s fun” to “it’s custom.”
• Signalling: In the deserts, res were used
for signalling purposes either between
bands or within them, so that the foraging
people could know each other’s where-
abouts. In Tasmania, Aborigines tracked
each other for peaceful or warlike purpos-
es by re spotting, and Robinson records
women, abducted by sealers onto offshore
islands, signalling to their kinsmen on the
mainland by lighting great res.
•
To clear the ground: Both in western Tas-
manian tea-tree scrub and in Arnhem Land
grassland, the best way to clear a path is to
set re to the bush. This removes the un-
dergrowth for easier travelling and also
kills snakes and other vermin.
• Hunting: In many parts of Australia a rec-
ognized method of hunting was to set re
to the bush and club or spear the animals
which broke cover. Foraging over the
burnt area also revealed animals such as
lizards hiding in holes or burnt to death on
the ground.
• Regeneration of plant food: After ring,
the Australian bush shows remarkable
powers of regeneration. Eucalypts throw
out new leaves, and grasses grow afresh
from the burnt ground. Many of the veg-
etable foods eaten by the Aborigines are
more palatable when young—for exam-
ple, ferns, grasses, leaves and shoots of
trees. By promoting the regrowth of
grasses and young trees, man also pro-
vides a food supply for grazing and
browsing animals. Aborigines will return
to a burnt area after rain in order to hunt
the game drawn there by the plants. This
promotion of regrowth through ring is
exactly the same process as that practised
by modern farmers burning off the stubble
in a wheateld, or by Welsh hill shepherds
burning off the mountainside each winter
Fire Ecology Volume 8, Issue 3, 2012
doi: 10.4996/reecology.0803001
Jones: Fire-Stick Farming
Page 7
to kill the old bracken. In all cases, what-
ever the long-term effects may be, the im-
mediate result of burning is to increase the
quantity of edible plants for man and his
beasts.
• Extending man’s habitat: It is a thesis of
mine that, through ring over thousands
of years, Aboriginal man has managed to
extend his natural habitat zone. In Tasma-
nia, the climax vegetation along the west-
ern coast would be rainforest, which, ac-
cording the distribution studies of the Ab-
origines, was not readily usable by them
and was seldom penetrated. By burning,
however, aided possibly by post-glacial
climatic oscillations, man was able to
push back the forest and replace it by sed-
geland which is rich in both animal and
plant food. In eastern Tasmania, human
ring increased the extent of the mosaic
pattern of open sclerophyll forest and
grassland plains. This is optimum habitat
for some macropods, such as the Forester
Kangaroo, and the plains provided extra
food for the kangaroos, wallabies, emus,
and native hens on which the Aborigines
fed. Mitchell, in the passage quoted
above, clearly understood the symbiotic
nature of man, grassland, and kangaroos.
Increased Food Supply
It is interesting that, through ring, man
may have increased his food supply and thus
probably his population. At the most general
level, ring of the bush, in the same way as
clearing a forest to create a eld, increased the
proportion of solar energy per unit area of the
ground that man could utilize.
Perhaps we should call what the Aborigi-
nes did “re-stick farming.”
Was this deliberate? In some cases, yes; in
others, no. Robinson records that a park-like
landscape in Tasmania had been formed so as
to give cover to the kangaroos. “This has been
done by the natives: when burning the under-
wood, they have beat out the re in order to
form clumps,” he writes. R. Gould reports that
Aborigines in the desert are quite clear that
burning will attract kangaroos once rain has
fallen.
On the other hand some of the effects take
thousands of years to become recognizable,
and no primitive people could possibly docu-
ment these processes. However, it is in some
ways as irrelevant to me whether or not the an-
cient Aborigines knew what they were doing
as it is to paleontologists whether or not the gi-
raffe knew why his neck was growing. If we
are interested in the operations of laws of na-
ture, we have to analyse the effects of certain
actions or physical changes and see whether
they are advantageous to the animal or culture
involved. Taking a Darwinian line, according
to the “principle of the survival of the ttest
economy,” to “explain” the acceptance and de-
velopment of a cultural trait we have to show
its adaptive value.
Firing, because of its great adaptive value
to hunters and gatherers, became an integral
part of the economy, and its presence through-
out most of the hunting and gathering and ag-
ricultural economies of the world implies that
it has a high antiquity and great importance in
human evolution. Fire was man’s rst “extra-
corporeal muscle.” Let us not forget that the
power released by the disastrous Hobart bush-
re on 7th February, 1967, was equivalent to
two atom bombs.
Results of the Removal of
Aboriginal Fire Pressure
Although re has been an important factor
in Australia for millions of years, natural res
being lit by lightning, etc., the arrival of Ab-
original man increased the re frequency by an
enormous amount. This produced and main-
tained disequilibriums, with the articial ex-
tension of the range of pyrophytic plants. With
the arrival of the Europeans, the Aborigines
and their re-sticks were promptly removed,
Fire Ecology Volume 8, Issue 3, 2012
doi: 10.4996/reecology.0803001
Jones: Fire-Stick Farming
Page 8
and the effects of the cessation of regular burn-
ing were quickly noticed. Settlers in eastern
Tasmania in the 1850s commented that open
sclerophyll forest became littered with bark
and young shoots, with the grass becoming
sour and weak. On the open plains of Surrey
Hills in highland north Tasmania, the shep-
herds were increasingly frustrated by the
growth of scrub, which, by 1890, had obliter-
ated most of the open land. The rainforest in
Tasmania has spread from its gullies, and large
areas of southwestern sedgeland have become
covered with high, dense scrub.
In New South Wales, foresters have re-
marked that the maintenance of eucalypts on
many high-quality sites depends on re; other-
wise, it would be replaced by other more toler-
ant genera. The resurgence of the cypress pine
(Callitris) in western New South Wales may
depend on the reduction of re frequency.
Some animals may have become adapted to a
high re regime and are more rare when this is
reduced. It is interesting that Leadbeater’s
Possum, once thought to be almost extinct in
Victoria, increased its numbers after several
large res had provided it with its preferred
habitat.
In the dry sclerophyll forests of Tasmania,
Jackson calculates, forest litter accumulates at
the rate of 3 to 25 cwt [Editor’s note: Imperial
cwt = 112 pounds] per acre per year to a steady
level of 30 tons per acre. Fires in these forests
with full fuel complements become totally un-
controllable, with vast damage being done to
plants, animals, and man. It is ironical that a
policy of re prevention may have brought our
bush and forests up to their present dangerous
state, and the series of catastrophic res in re-
cent years may be the result of discontinuing
the Aboriginal custom of regular burning. I
have been interested in recent weeks to read
that a policy of burning-off may be initiated as
a new method of forest conservation.
Fire and Conservation
I am no botanist and would not venture a
discussion on the long-term effects on plants
and soil of ring or non-ring. However, as an
anthropologist, I can state that at the time of
ethnographic contact with the Aborigines, and
probably for tens of’ thousands of years before,
res were systematically lit by Aborigines and
were an integral part of their economy.
What do we want to conserve? We have a
choice. Do we want to conserve the environ-
ment as it was in 1788, or do we yearn for an
environment without man, as it might have
been 30 000 or more years ago?
If the former, then we must do what the
Aborigines did and burn at regular intervals
under controlled conditions. The days of “re-
stick farming” may not yet be over.
FURThER READING
Jackson, W.D., 1968 : “Fire and the Tasma-
nian ora,” Tasmanian Year Book. 50-5.
Hobart.
Jones, Rhys, 1968: “The geographical back-
ground to the arrival of man in Australia
and Tasmania,” Archaeology and Physical
Anthropology in Oceania, 3, 186-215.
Merrilees, D., 1968: “Man the destroyer,”
Journal of the Royal Society of Western
Australia, 51, 1-24.
Stewart, O.C., 1956: “Fire as the rst force
employed by man,” in Man’s role in chang-
ing the face of the earth, ed. W.L. Thomas.
University of Chicago Press, Illinois, USA;
115-33.
Tindale, N.B., 1959: “Ecology of Primitive
Aboriginal Man in Australia,” in Biogeog-
raphy and Ecology in Australia, ed. A.
Keast, R.L. Crocker, and Christian. The
Hague.
Reprinted from Australian Natural History
16(7): 224-228 (September 1969).
