CR I want to come back to that particular farming approach in a minute. But just before we leave the fire, particularly there’s discussion about Indigenous land management, fire management, and that also takes a lot more people to do it. Can you talk us through the theory of that and how it works?
BP I’d also like to mention that the East Gippsland Shire refused to take possession of that map for reasons I can’t understand. And it’s a real shame because it’s proof of Aboriginal occupation of the land and proof of land management. It’s a great tool. But let’s get on to the good news, which is the old Aboriginal fire regime is really slow and I was taught it by an old man from Mallacoota and I taught it to my son and we’re both in the CFA and it is such a beautiful thing to do. When we dress up to go to a fire, we dress up as if we’re going to war, we’ve got a helmet, we’ve got a visor, we’ve got gloves, big coats, big trousers, big boots. And really the old Aboriginal fire was done by people with bare feet. And if that – if you can’t walk through that fire, it’s too hot.
And this is why we damage Australia, because we think we’ve got to do it quick, it’s got to be done today. And so we have canopy fires where there’s destruction everywhere, animals get killed and it’s unnecessary. But once again, in order to do the kind of fire that we’re doing on the farm and around the district now, you need people on the ground. So, we the other day burnt maybe ten acres and we had seven people. Now the CFA couldn’t tolerate that, far too many people, far too little ground burnt. But we can literally walk through that fire. I had my grandkids with me and these little kids are walking backwards and forwards through the fire because it just creeps along and it leaves little oases. So, animals are allowed to hide in that oasis and it’s a peaceful day.
CR The Aboriginal approach, the kind of cool burning approach, is a small fire that just creeps along the ground. And what’s the intent, what’s the difference there? What do you achieve by just doing this kind of smaller fire?
BP You don’t want to bake the soil, for a start, because if you get an intense fire, you cook that really rich part of the topsoil. And in Australia, often it’s only that deep anyway. And so it’s a dangerous thing to do economically, you’re killing soil. And so how do you recover the soil? Chemicals. It compounds, it becomes – capitalism is happy to spend money on chemicals, but not on people. And we just need to reverse our thinking because we can build soil by this slow fire and you don’t do it one day, you do it as many days as you can at the right time in the season. And it’s intolerable to a capitalist system to have people engage in that kind of activity but the old Aboriginal life must have had this as a routine. Everyone thinks that all Aboriginal life happens in the Northern Territory which discounts a lot of what happens down south. But we have got film today of people just chucking matches into the spinifex as a matter of course, to keep the country safe, not to make it dangerous. To keep it safe.
CR This has a couple of positive effects. I mean, let’s firstly talk about the animals, how do they respond to this kind of cool burning and how does it contrast to when you just light up the whole forest?
BP A lot of animals are cooked in those fires that the CFA and DELWP light today because they’re started with incendiaries. It’s like Dresden, let’s bomb it, get it over and done with quickly. We had a fire about two months ago and it was a lovely day and the fire went beautifully and you always see good things in the bush when you’re looking at the ground. And we were wondering what was happening and we came across a whole lot of praying mantis and they were literally walking away from the fire. And they’re a prehistoric creature and just walking away from the fire, we were just laughing at the irony of a praying mantis escaping from the fire, it was glacious.
CR That’s just how slow it is. As you say that takes time, it takes energy. I mean, it protects the canopy by just burning slowly on the ground. But what effect does it have on, for instance, the grasses on the – is there a positive effect on those actual grasses as well?
BP We’re trying to return our farm to perennial plants. The old people had perennial tubers, they had perennial grains, they had perennial fruit trees. Everyone can imagine a perennial fruit tree but the grains and tubers were not planted every year, they were just encouraged and they’re encouraged from fire. Our best kangaroo grass this year was where we burnt last year and it’ll happen again this spring, our best grass will be where we’ve burnt. We don’t want to burn there every year, but we know that we have to, for kangaroo grass, we have to do it every two years, that’s about nutrient replacement. You get two or three stalks above the ground, but the root mass is like that. So, it’s got a huge generator of life and growth, so a light scorch across the top of the ground, a bit of carbon replacement, bang up it goes.
It’s a wonderful way to farm and a lot of Australian farmers get a bad rap from Barnaby Joyce because they’re much more intelligent than that and a lot of farmers want to return to this, they can see the common sense. Most farmers love the ground, not all acknowledge the Aboriginal pre-history, unfortunately, but most people who live in the country actually like being in the country. To think that Australians might really love their country and because of that love, might want to care for it. And because of our desperate need to save the Earth, might look for gentle ways to do it. I think it’s a possibility, I hope it’s not a dream. We can’t afford dreams.
