Welcome to 100 Climate Conversations and thank you so much for joining us. Today is number 28 of 100 conversations happening every Friday. The series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, climate change. We are recording live today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse museum. Before it was home to the museum, it was the Ultimo Power Station. Built in 1899, it supplied coal powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system right up into the 1960s. In the context of this architectural artefact, we are shifting our focus away from an old coal past, forward to the innovations of the net zero revolution. I’d just like to let our audience know as well that today our conversation may include the names of people who have died.

I’d like to start by acknowledging the Traditional Custodians of the ancestral homelands upon which we meet today, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We respect their Elders past and present, and recognise their continuous connection to Country, never ceded. I’d also like to extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples joining us here or listening in today.

My name is Nate Byrne, and I am absolutely thrilled to be hosting 100 Climate Conversations throughout Sydney Science Festival. This lovely and extraordinary person sitting next to me is Victor Steffenssen, who I have the absolute pleasure of speaking with today. Victor Steffensen is an Indigenous writer, filmmaker, musician and a traditional knowledge practitioner. He’s a descendant of the Tagalaka clan from northern Queensland. Much of Victor’s work is based on the arts and reviving practical, traditional knowledge values, particularly Aboriginal fire management with Aboriginal and non-Indigenous communities. He’s the co-founder of the Firesticks Alliance and the author of Fire Country, which explores how Indigenous fire management can help save Australia. We are so thrilled to have him join us today. Please join me in making Victor very welcome.

Victor, you’re a Queenslander. You grew up in the beautiful rainforest town of Kuranda in Far North Queensland. Can you tell us a bit about your experience growing up there?

Growing up in Kuranda. Well, it’s a rainforest town and Djabugay Country belonging to the Djabugay people and such a wonderful place to grow up. And growing up there in the early 70s and in the place that was a large Aboriginal community and also a large hippie community as well. And growing up there was amazing because we had the river and growing up down the river and like camping and eating fish off the coals and playing the guitar and lots of music. Everyone could play the guitar in Kuranda and lots of beautiful bands like Nantucket Band and inspiring older generations around the music in the arts. And it was such, such a wonderful place to grow up.

It’s a great part of Australia for sure. And a chance encounter for a fishing trip to the small town of Laura when you were 18, led you to meet Elders in that community who were incredibly formative figures in your life. Can you tell us about the significance of that time for you?

Well, growing up, I was always interested in Aboriginal knowledge and culture because of my family roots, my mother’s side. And for us it was always a gap because for us with Tagalaka and up in the Gulf Country, for my mother’s people, grandmother’s people, you know, that knowledge was, a lot of knowledge was lost and people were displaced because of the large gold mine that happened in 1890, right in the heart of our Country, traditional homelands. And that made loss of language, so I’ll never be able to speak our language because of those times. And there was a lot of massacres in that Country. And so, when you look at getting all that story as a young boy, it’s really hard, when your grandmother was, couldn’t tell those stories and or your mothers would say, ‘Oh, you know, my mother wouldn’t tell me and if we should ask, they use to give us a flogging because they were scared.’

So, I grew up in that sort of way of trying to understand about our knowledge and culture and all that sort of stuff, and identity. And so, as I grew in little Kuranda town and grew up with so many Indigenous people and from different parts of Australia, around Cape York and those areas, I wanted to search for more. And when I left school, that’s all I wanted to do and right from a teenager. So, heading to Laura was a fishing trip. Yeah. And just wanted to go fishing for that trip but on that trip, I didn’t realise that was going to be destiny and meet the two of my most important mentors of all, which was Dr Tommy George and Dr George Musgrave, which are Awu Laya Elders, Kuku-Thaypan Elders and they were neighboring clan groups to the region, to our clans.

And so, I worked a lot with neighboring clans in the region and picked up as much as I could through being a ranger, as my first job was the Aboriginal Ranger in Laura. And those two old men were my boss, you know, and really good bosses too, because they were really strict and they were very cultural and had so much information, they were walking encyclopedias. And we fell in love with each other, and we found a family kin between each other and when them old fellas learned where I was from, they actually talked about how the languages were shared across and they met Tagalaka people in the 1920s that could talk their language. And when I found out that, that’s when I anchored there and started to learn the Awu Laya language. And that’s what I, the language I can speak today. But I’m the only speaker and I’m not a fluent speaker at all to the whole language, but a lot of the language. But all people are gone now and there’s no one to talk to.

And meeting them old fellas was like, you know, I’m not going to see that knowledge lost again. And when I saw those young people around us, around the community and stuff, and they weren’t picking the knowledge up. And then when I went to other areas and the young people weren’t picking the knowledge up. And when you hear Elders from all over the world and around Australia, they’d always say the same thing, ‘Them young people aren’t picking that knowledge up, they’re not learning, and we need to get them out on Country.’ It was so such an aspiration for every Elder and I think everyone would agree with that, you know. And so, for me, it was like we can’t lose anymore because of what we’ve already lost and what I personally have lost through my own connections. And so, I made it my business to work with them old people and revive that knowledge because that’s what they wanted to do too. They just wanted to teach them young people, get that knowledge down at the schoolhouse and be around Country all the time. And so that started a whole relationship that went on for 15 years or more of just running around the bush, learning and of course, started to record that on a video camera as well.

Let me take you to the start of that period, at 19. Before Indigenous fire methods were being recognised by National Parks, you were recruited to help the National Park Rangers burn Country at Rinyirru National Park using Western techniques. The way you write about it is very confronting, quite disturbing as well. What was that experience like and how was that a turning point for you?

Well, back in the 90s, which isn’t that long ago but it seems like a long time ago now when you look at the times and how they’ve changed. Back in the 90s, Indigenous fire management wasn’t on the card, you know, and those old people, you know, they knew all their Country like the back of their hand and they knew what they wanted to do to manage their land and they had that wealth of knowledge that was thousands of years old. And when we went out on Country with them old people, and we’d always go fishing and hunting for pig or looking for barramundi and when we were out on country, the old fellas would always complain, like, ‘Oh, look at the grass and look at the weeds and look at the state of the Country. It’s very unhealthy, we need to start managing it.’ And I would hear this in my ear all the time, you know, and I would just say to them, ‘Well we got to do something about it, or let’s do something, let’s start burning.’

But that was impossible because we had pastoralists that didn’t want fire and they didn’t want to listen to Aboriginal people too. And we also had national parks that were, back in them times and up in that area, and still in places were very redneck and wouldn’t listen to Aboriginal people and there was no chance in the world and we had to have meetings and go to meetings with national parks just to get a fire permit, just to bring up the idea to burn a little bit of Country. And it got to the point where they wouldn’t fall in our favour. And so, one day we were driving along in the car and I would hear the old fellas say, ‘Look at that country, look how horrible it looks. We’ve got to burn it.’ And I would say, ‘Burn it old fella, burn it.’ And I was that young fella going, ‘Burn it, let’s just do it.’ And they would say, ‘No boy, no boy because of the boss man.’ And back then, you see, like my grandmother scared to talk about language and scared to talk about her knowledge and share that with my mother. It was the same syndrome. It was a syndrome of the boss man, you know, we’ll get in trouble if we exercise what we know. And that boss man for them was the National Parks officer, it was the police and it was also the pastoralists, the three P’s and those fellas, that was the boss man to them. And so it was like, ‘No, the boss man.’

And so from there we would drive along again on another day and it’d be like, ‘Oh, boy, look at the grass, look at the Country.’ And I’ll say, ‘Well, burn it old fella.’ And then one day, Poppy, he said, ‘All right, I’ll burn it.’ And I just went, ‘What!’ and put the brakes on. And we stopped and I just couldn’t believe that he had said he was going to burn it. Then he opened that door up and I had old fella TG in the middle, you know, it was a like a tray-back ute and had Poppy on the passenger side. And he opened the door and snuck outside the door and creeped across the side of road in front of the car. And then he went over and lit it up and come running back like a little kid, that just did something wrong, you know? And that fire, beautiful, just went ‘tswoosh’ and just beautifully burnt across that landscape. And then we jumped in the car and we started driving back and it was like, you know, it was like really silence.

And you can hear, you can feel in the air, you can feel, I could feel in the old people that, they were like little kids, like, ‘Oh we’re going to get in to trouble, you know? And then we got to the camp spot, we saw the pastoralists and straight away the old fellas said, ‘Let’s get out of here’. And I just went, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’ And so we went and grabbed our bags that we left in the bush and grabbed our tent, whatever, swag back then, and put it in the back of the truck and we said, ‘See you later’, and took off and left the pastoralists there. But when we drove away there was one bag we left behind the tree and I was like, ‘Oh no.’ And the old fellow said, ‘Go back boy, you run back, don’t drive back.’ So, I stopped the car, jumped out, ran back to get that bag and as I was running back there was the smoke coming through the trees moving towards those pastoralists, and they were looking right at it. And then they looked at me and went, ‘You, you’ve been lighting fires. We told you people you can’t light fires in this country.’ And it was just mayhem, it was like attack. So, I grabbed the bag and took off.

Then from there, you know, that started the confrontation and started National Parks talking and started a lot of things, we started to light across the National Park without asking them because they would cancel our permits and we got more confrontation. But that led to doing more burns, that led to doing workshops and that led to getting it more recognised in our region. And today now, we’re still trying to get that more recognised properly. It’s still not there yet. But there has been a lot of change since those times, and these days I’m a lot softer. It’s not like as, you know, hard like it was back then and like, you know, hardcore. But these days I realise that we’ve got to be softer, but we’ve still got to be persistent and we still got to be practical because we’ve still got a long way to go for this Country to really change and to really change that whole new leaf of how we need to look after this landscape better into the future through the First Peoples knowledge of this Country.

That fire, that Poppy lit, you just spoke about it, just beautiful, and I can picture it just like crunching across the landscape. How is that different from the time you’re in the back of a ute doing the Western way?

Oh, the Western way. When I was about 19 or so or 20 and they came into town there, them National Park Rangers, and ‘Oh, you know, you want to come and burn on Park with us. We want some people to come, and we’ll employ about three people.’ And we said, ‘Okay, we’ll go.’ And the old fella says, ‘Yeah, go, go and do it with them.’ So, we went with them and did that and stayed on the Park for about a week and burnt Country and they said, ‘Okay’. Back then we have no shoes on, you know, we never had any safety equipment, we just had clothes that we wore normally, you know.

They said, ‘You get in the back, we’ll drive in the front in an air-conditioned cab, you get in the back and you hold a flamethrower.’ And they had this big black flamethrower thing and it was connected to a big drum of petrol, that was mixed between diesel and petrol. And basically, when I pressed the trigger went from here to about five metres to the pole there, away. It was like ‘Phoosh!’ And then next to me was another Elder who had a big water hose, and he was wetting like this, on the side, making a firebreak with water, while I was flamethrowing on this side and we’re going, ‘This is silly. What are we doing? Why are we doing this?’

And anyway, we drove off and we started doing the work and the flame thrower and it was, the grass was dry, and it was the wrong time of year and it was just ludicrous. And as we were driving along, the fire just took off and it was like a firestorm behind us. And anyway, as we were going along and the next minute, the car stopped, and the fire just went straight over us and the old fella, we all yelled out, ‘Go, go, go.’ And the fella dropped the clutch and took off on the truck and the old fella next to me, like as I flew, the flame was on me and I dived off the truck to get out of the fire, and the old man next to me because of the car took off so quickly, he did a front somersault off the back of the ute, landed straight on his back and then that flamethrower I threw, got tangled around his leg. And as the car drove that way, he was getting dragged along by the flamethrower, it was such a funny thing, but it was so dangerous. And then I’m chasing after the car, ‘Ah stop, stop.’ And get that old fella, pick him up, he was alright, we have a laugh about it, but still oh, this is so stupid. And then we look back at Country and it was just engulfed in fire, and we just went, ‘Man, we can’t do this.’ And after that we never went back again. And I never, ever, ever worked and were doing those burns with those agencies again, you know.

There’s a big distinction you make between the two practices of burning where the Western way follows roadways, fence lines, the Indigenous way follows Country. And I wonder if you could explain what do you mean by Country and why Country needs fire?

Well, Country is our mother, and as everyone would know, Mother Earth and, you know, all of it the water, the rivers, all the different ecosystems, all the different species of trees, everything is Country right across. And that whole thing is life and property, to Aboriginal people and should be for everybody. And the importance of that Country is so, so important and the management of the Country is so strict. And when we talk about Country, it’s a responsibility and healthy landscapes has been something that has been passed down from generation to generation for thousands of years, because the whole economy, which is the wrong word for Aboriginal people, was held in landscapes, to have plenty of resources, have a healthy Country, have clean waters, plenty of fish, plenty of fruits and trees.

And every area has their own specific, unique gift that other Countries don’t have. And that was so important to trade and so important to ceremony and hosting other clans and groups that come into their Country. It was a really proud thing, and it was also really important to kinship. So, healthy Country is something that is a part of, is why Aboriginal people have been sustainable for thousands and thousands of years, and that means that a whole social side of Aboriginal people in our social governance is all aligned with natural law. And that is what Country means, it should be reflection of who we are, and it should be who we are. And when we look at today, it’s not like that, it’s separated, people are separate from Country and not a part of landscapes.

So, Country is something that we’re immersed in and it’s something that we need to be immersed in today and it’s inevitable that we should be immersed in that. And when we apply fire to that, it’s applying a practice that has been applied for thousands of years into specific soil types, specific trees, and reading all those different trees and Country and every single area has a different reaction to heat and different fires. And some Countries don’t need fire, but at the end of the day, the whole landscape has evolved with people and that’s what people don’t understand, is that when you look at the way people look at Country now, they think, ‘Oh, Mother Nature it’s on its own, lock it up, it’s separate.’ But they don’t understand that this landscape and the natural landscape has evolved with people for thousands of years, and people have been a part of that picture for thousands of years. And that’s helped evolve the grasses, helped evolve the trees. That’s helped evolve the diversity with all the different ecosystems and ensuring that they all keep their identity.

All of that was Country and people together and people evolving with nature. And yes, you can say changing nature, changing Country, but evolving with Country to its best possible point where it can be the most productive. And that productivity is based on diversity and identity. And when we have diversity and identity, then we have access to all the resources, and we have access to a very healthy landscape that helps to provide food from plants to animals and also to people.

There are so many benefits to fire on the land here in Australia, but it’s got to be the right fire, at the right time, when it comes to cultural burning. How, in particular, is it a solution to how we respond to climate change?

It’s crucial that we’re managing the land properly, and that’s one thing that we’re not doing properly, and that’s one reason why we’re in so much problems, and we have the issues that we have within our environment and that’s why we have the issues of climate change and all those things. And climate has been changing for thousands of years, it always changes. And we speed it up today, but it’s really about adaptation and that’s what we should be talking about and not talking about, ‘It’s climate change, we need to set up more alarms and more alerts that tell us when to run and when something bad is going to happen.’ Where’s the preparedness? And managing land?

And when we look at Indigenous cultures and people around the world, they manage landscapes. And when you have a healthy landscape, then the landscape is prepared for the unprecedented time. It’s prepared for the drought around the corner, it’s prepared for whatever comes up because the land’s healthy and the trees are old and it’s all structured. And so, when we look at the fire, it’s – we’re in a very complicated situation. Because the fires evolve for so many thousands of years with landscape and have helped structure the grasses to be the right grasses in the right soils and the right plants in the right place, it’s very layered. And now that we have a landscape that has weeds and we have cleared land as well, where Country has got young plants and don’t have the Elders anymore. And when I say Elders, I don’t just mean the people. I see the old growth trees and all the old forests and all the different ages within our landscape through vegetation and animals and everything, which creates a whole community. And when you have a healthy community and you have old growth and old plants and trees in your Country, then you have more resilience, and you have a healthier landscape. And you have a landscape that’s more prepared for the unpresented times.

But we have landscapes now that all the trees are the same age and they’re growing in mayhem and they’re causing mass extinction. There’s all these problems with our landscape. And now we have African love grasses, we have buffel grasses, we have other introduced grasses that are smothering our native grasses and are causing mass extinction by killing all the food sources on the Country. And so, applying the fire is like medicine. We need to apply it even more strategically than how the old people used to do it before, because back then they were maintaining the land, they were maintaining a healthy landscape, which became quite easy because when you’re healthy, you don’t get sick as much, it’s easy to look after yourself, you know that in yourself and so the land is the same. And so, when people were maintaining Country, before colonisation, fire wasn’t needed as much, it was a healthy land.

But now with the Country the way it is now, we need to apply fire more strategically. So, burning one place three or four times because of the different types of vegetation to ensure that we don’t light them all at the same time, that create too much heat for the soils and to spark the wrong seed banks. And so, there’s all this information and all the practitioners need to know this. They need to understand the identity of Country and what Country is supposed to look like, and that takes years to learn. And when we look at the current situation on how Western land management is managing our landscapes, they’re nowhere near as close to that care and to that love in landscapes, it’s more a military operation. And that becomes a whole another layer of suppression on our landscape that is putting the wrong fires, the wrong management, sparking the wrong seed banks, which also adds to destroying the food sources in the land, make it harder for animals, that keeps burning our trees and our canopies and setting them backwards instead of growing old for a thousand years, and continuing having that healthy landscape as part of our main focus. And that is what needs to be our main focus.

We need to get away from the alarms and warnings and we need to start getting out there and managing our land properly, just like Aboriginal people have done. And that is a healing phase. And that healing phase for us is going to be a long time, and that’s going to be going on for generations, for hundreds of years from now. And if we don’t start doing that now, then we’re not going to see positive indicators of success through landscapes and also through socially as well through our communities. So, it’s really important that we are doing programs that are practical, that is action, that is getting out on Country and is applying the ‘praction’, like I mention in Fire Country and start being aligned with our landscapes more and that is something that we’re still not doing today, not even close.

I was going to come to praction later, but since you brought it up, what is praction?

Praction. Yeah. Well, it’s our own little world we made up, you won’t find it in the dictionary, obviously. Like eroding fire Country, like learning from them old fellas and the old people, they would always talk about, ‘Here boy, look at this.’ And teach me this and teach that skill and then they go, ‘You’ve got to go praction now.’ And what they mentioned is that you got to go practice, you know, it was just the way that they talked the English, you know, and they owned English their own way and it was such a lovely thing, when you hear them old people speak their own words in English, you know, so cute, you know, and so amazing.

And so praction was always said to me by them, ‘You praction, boy, praction, praction.’ But everything that they would tell me to praction was always a very special land management application or a very special way of extracting food from the Country that, that didn’t take that food away from the Country that made sure it continued to grow or putting fire in the landscape that benefited the plants and the animals and the water, it benefits everything on the landscape. So, a holistic way of applying an action that is good for everything and in return we get what we need out of it. And so that became something like when I was writing Fire Country, it was like, ‘Well, what is the word in English for that? Where we are doing action that is good for the whole environment and it doesn’t destroy the environment.’ And so, it’s our contribution that aligns with our responsibility as people. There wasn’t a word I could see or fine for that. So, [I] resorted back to the memory of what them old people used to tell me, praction. And so, I said, ‘I’ll call it praction in Fire Country. ‘ Praction is the action aligned with natural law that we apply to Country that benefits everything on the land, including ourselves.

Actually, let me quote you to you. You summed it up really nicely, actually, talking about cultural burning, you end up with sort of this mosaic on the landscape of places that have been burned earlier in the season, places that will be burned later in the season, and places you’re burning now. And there was just this line, just in mid chapter that I really loved. ‘It is perfectly locked together in connectedness.’ And you mentioned there as well that fire is medicine. And you describe the Country as being sick. Your mentors saw that and knew that and knew the solution. Western authorities maybe felt a little bit differently about the situation. Landholders, governments against cultural burning at one point very much. How did you go about fighting that opposition?

Just ignored them. You know, if you jump through the hoop, then you’ve got to jump through the hoop, you know, and sometimes you don’t have to jump through the hoop, you just go around it. You know, it’s like getting the first fires going, we just put it in and from there, the reactions from that will happen, you know? You’re dealing with the truth, you’re dealing with the landscapes and what I always say to them old fellas, it got to the stage when I would travel down south or travel to other people’s Country and help them with this sort of thing and always say to them old fellas, ‘You know, I’m a bit worried about what people are going to say or what these agencies are going to do or they’re going to take, get us in trouble or put us in jail, or whatever.’ And the old fella said this to me, he said, ‘Don’t worry.’ He said, ‘As long as you stick with the knowledge and long as you stick with the Country, everything will be all right.’ And that’s been what I’ve done, right from there, is listen to them and do exactly that.

And so, everything that I do is on Country, everything I do is with the people from that Country, so that’s all good. And they’re the spokespeople for their land and everything that we do is giving the Country a voice. And so, the Country responds. And just like when we read Country and there’s a whole language that comes from the land, then we look at the trees, there’s a whole wealth of stories and knowledge that come from one tree. And then everywhere you look in the bush land, you know, there’s all this information that just bounces out and it’s just incredible, it’s like a book, you know? And so, when you get the land speaking to people who don’t know that language and they don’t understand it, like a Rural Fire Service or some National Park or some people that are very skeptical or some third-generation farmer, ‘I’m third generation.’

I would say to them, show them the land. Well, look, look what’s happening. You know, look at these trees, this is why they look like that. This is why you’ve got no grass, this is why this plant here is taking over this Country and they don’t belong next to this tree, it belongs over and that soil type. And I would explain to them, and I’d be like, ‘Whoa!’ And then I would say, ‘Now I’m going to light that fire and it’ll go out that tree that changes, and then it’ll go out there. And that fire won’t burn that plant, but it’ll kill this plant. The canopy won’t burn, and it’ll trickle around like this and go out.’ And they’ll go, ‘What? You said that before you lit the fire.’ And this is exactly that. And then they just go, ‘Whoa!’. And that is an experience and that has been the ticket and the key to getting people to understand. And that’s the only way that people will understand, is to give them that experience and to allow them to see it for themselves and they can’t argue with Mother Nature.

And so anyone, anyone who goes up against what we’re saying and what the Country is trying to tell you, they got no chance against that. And so, I stuck with the landscape, stuck with Country, stuck with the practical application, and always seen the indicators of success for everyone to see it and say, ‘Well, there you go, it’s in black and white right there, right in reality.’ And so, that just changes people. And so, you get farmers that are like, ‘I’m third generation and you can’t tell me about the land and I’ve been here for three generations, I know it like the back of my hand’, go, ‘You know, I didn’t know this Country like I thought.’ And some even come up to me and say, ‘You know, I’ve contributed to killing this land and I didn’t realise until today.’ And other people it was like, ‘I’m a greenie, I don’t agree with fire in any way, or cause.’ And then turn around after one hour on Country and go, ‘Fire is good for the land’, and then run off and be an advocate for fire. And then their wives are going, ‘Oh gosh.’ And then ringing me up and going, ‘You turned him into a fire freak now.’

And it’s been that mentoring community, mentoring community, mentoring community and stay away from bureaucracy, stay away from the red tape, stay away from jumping through hoops and just get everyone in the community involved. Like having the school there, having the old Farmer Brown there, having a local fire, Rural Fireman there or the local fire warden and having the, you know, the mob there, of course, always the ones that are there and always the ones that make the invitation and do the talking as well. And when you got the whole community there and you’re doing a practical application, nothing can interfere with that. And so, there’ll be some fella like down the street going, ‘Oh, you know, you shouldn’t be doing that, etc.’ What’s the government going to do? They’re going to say, ‘Oh we’re going to arrest you all. Because you’re all doing something, you’re all trying to look after the land.’ And you all trying to do it together and everyone’s smiling and everyone’s having this experience that’s really amazing.

And that bit-by-bit and place-by-place really helped over the years to get that awareness out and to get people to say, ‘Well, we should be doing this.’ And when those big fires went off down south, Indigenous knowledge hit the roof and all over the world were looking at Australia and were coming in and saying, ‘Indigenous fire management, Indigenous fire management.’ And when the next big fire happens again, which it will, it’s going to happen again, where? Why aren’t we doing Aboriginal fire management? You know. And so that’s going to re-occur and re-occur but what’s causing that momentum is not me, it’s all of the communities and everyone together advocating for this and creating that experience for everyone and getting them to continue to be an advocate for that in their own regions.

And that’s the whole way of doing things, you know, it’s not about telling people how you burn, it’s not about, ‘Oh, I’m going to go and save the world.’ It’s about spinning them cogs and influencing everybody and getting this out to all the communities to build their own capacity to carry this firestick and to carry this responsibility on and to rebuild that knowledge. And that’s something that government can’t do, and that’s something that institutions can’t do. And that’s what’s needed if we’re going to change those institutions, we need to see communities doing the practice on Country with everyone involved. And that’s what we’re focused on. Yeah.

I’m noticing here a really clear distinction. And you’ve said all of the words, the way that we’ve been managing the land recently, it’s like a military operation. And you even used a flamethrower, which is a weapon and then the response also has to be a military operation to things like the summer of fires that we had that year. The alternative seems very light footed, connected to Country, literally walking through and picking and choosing exactly how you do these cool burns, which are self-limiting, right, and don’t do this huge amount of damage. I wanted to know, what are the different considerations as you’re walking through Country, that you need to make depending on each ecosystem?

Yeah, well, it’s putting people back into the land and putting it back into the land aligned with the memory of the land. And that’s what we’ve got to do. And so, when I’m working with the communities, I’ve got to say to them, this, say, this whole, say there’s a whole area of acres and it’s the site that they want to manage and a lot of the times, you know, we end up saying, ‘Well, we have to walk through the landscape and we’ve got to burn this first and we’ve got to do this because of its sickness and the problems that it has. We can’t just wait until it all goes dry and burn it because it’ll be an inferno because of the wrong vegetation that’s in those soils.’ And so, it’s, you’ve got to put a love into the Country and that love is crucial because love is what has evolved that landscape through, with people. And that’s what the Country remembers.

The Country has a memory and that is such a beautiful, beautiful subject to talk about, memory, and the memory of the Country, because the Country remembers people and remembers what people used to do. And the animals remember that too and have that knowledge. And that’s why when they respond to our fires, they fly into the fire, and they come for the benefits of that fire. And even the little insects know when they climb the trees, they know in the canopy they’re safe because for thousands of years the fire’s always been cool. And so, they know it’s safe up there. And so, the actions of the animals and the response of Country all align with our knowledge and align with the knowledge that we apply and when we apply that knowledge and the responses, the way that it says, and it’s a positive response, it shows that we’re on the right track and we’re doing the right thing for that Country.

So, that memory, it remembers people walking through the land and applying fire accordingly to that Country at the right time and what that Country remembers is just the sound of footprints and just the sound of people’s language. And then they might have just heard the flickering sound of the fire going through and the birds and the sound of Country. And that’s what fire was for thousands of years. But now they come through and it’s like a big fire truck come along to that same piece of Country now, after all those thousands of years, and they all come in with these spacesuits on and clown suits and they’ve got helmets on and big boots and they start these fire engines and they don’t know what to expect when they light the fire, they’re expecting the worst to happen.

So, their intentions and the energy they have is expecting bad things to happen and not love and not like gardening and permaculture sort of techniques of looking after land and doing it for food and health. And so, they come along now and they light all that up and with drip torches and using fuel and then they start the motors and there’s lights flashing, then they’ll run a bobcat through the bushland and do a fire break through the whole Country and the Country goes, ‘Whoa!’ And they kick down the front door and they put fire everywhere all at once and burn everything all at the wrong time of year too. And so, the Country goes, ‘Whoa!’, it’s a shock to the system because it don’t remember that and it never has remembered that and it never had experienced that until today.

And so, the response is totally different and totally opposite to what we see with the right way of applying management and love to Country, which means more time as well. And so, from there, it’s like a military operation, like I said before. And everyone’s just there for life and property, it’s all about protecting houses. And they don’t realise that healthy landscapes will protect their houses and will give us so much more opportunity. But it’s such a, the wrong way to do things and when you apply shock to the landscape, you’re going to get the wrong response. You’re going to get the wrong plants grow or nothing grows at all, no animals come back, the trees have got no leaves.

It takes a long time to shoot back, all these problems. And that’s why, if you can picture in your head, what it’ll look like in the future for our fire practitioners, it’s people walking through the Country, protecting our soils, not disturbing the soils, and applying the fire and doing it in a way that burns in patterns and designs and keeps the Country rich and green and that’s going to take like, full time work. And it’s not just fire, you know, whereas today’s fire practitioners like dropping a drip torch out along the window, sometimes even driving along, holding a drip torch out the window and it’s like a big line of fire. And just carelessly putting fire in the landscape, you know, we can’t do that.

What we got to be doing is also seeing landscapes and saying, ‘Well, we’ve got to cut out vegetation and so a lot of communities are learning that they actually got to cut vegetation, we’ve got to prepare land before even we put fire in because of the situation and the health levels. And all the different health levels and all the different applications of fire, there’s so many layers of that and that takes, that’s a whole new leaf. And this nation’s not skilled for that and there is no practitioner skill to look after the land that way. And that’s why it’s important that we’re training people and we’re building that, we’re doing the work and we’re training young people at the same time. And it’s really important that we get rid of that mentality, that military capacity that is taking over our culture and taking over that social benefits, that’s, we’re not going to go far with that and as you can see, look what’s happening.

And so, get away from that mentality and how we as a socially and as a people, how we align with our landscapes, need to align with that landscape, to its memory. And that means, you know, more time and love in the landscape and people being more, walking through, being more careful with landscape, which means thousands of more jobs and a whole exploration of when we get healthy landscapes, then the doors of opportunity open around social enterprise, around change in our economies. If we listen to the land, we will improve our agriculture, we will improve so many sectors of our lives today that molds our social structures more closer to natural law and more aligned with our landscapes. And that has been why Aboriginal people have been sustainable for thousands of years, it’s because that social governance is aligned with land and Country. And why simply getting people on Country and applying this knowledge back to land is so crucial.

It’s not because we’re putting fire back in the landscape only, it’s to start that big snowball of learning so much more from Country because when we make it healthy and we bring the stuff back again and the right plants back and animals, then we learn more from our land. There’s a whole wealth of benefits sitting there that people don’t even know about and if we don’t care for the land then we’ll never access them into the future.

You’re the co-founder of Fire Sticks Alliance. What are the goals?

Firstly, it’s a community-based organisation and its non-for-profit and the whole aim for Fire Sticks was built from communities involved in the network and been coming to workshops and being involved in all that work. And the plain objective of Fire Sticks is two things: is to help the communities and help the regions build their capacity to manage their own lands, to help them find funding for themselves and to help get the support they need to learn more about this knowledge and to help rebuild that knowledge back on their Country, help to inspire that community mentorship. And the other side of the coin is to, you know, is to attack that policy stuff too, and get this government listening and building partnerships around this so that there’s a whole wave of support coming from that grassroots way of looking after the land and what we need to be doing.

Because when we look at all the agencies they’re all running off in their own directions and it’s a fragmented structure. They’re all competing with each other, none of them are working with each other. They’re all running off with different land tenures as well and separating even the land and cutting it up and different ways of managing it. And we need to pull all that into behind the right way too, and pull them all in together and start teaching all the agencies how to work the right way with the communities and how to work the right way with each other and to align ourselves with the right goals into the future that, you know, that reach those goals that are 500 to 1000 years down the track, not these little 30 year goal of, ‘By 2030, we’re going to get this much percentage of carbon out of the air.’

You know, that’s so, so weak for me. We need to see, ‘Oh for the next thousand years and for generations and generations, we want old growth forests back and we’ve got to start now doing this.’ And we got to start looking after this land and we got to start to work together and pull all these agencies all together and we all got to share the same successes and we got to put our shoulder behind the right processes and reskilling this nation and getting a stronger culture aligned with our landscapes and ensuring that the oldest culture in the world continues in this country.

Because when we look at, you know, the way that Western people see the land, it’s like, ‘Oh, endangered animal. You know, we got to focus on the endangered animals and focus on this.’ But they don’t realise that people are part of that landscape too, and that the need for Aboriginal knowledge and culture to be on the land is crucial, that’s part of the landscape and that’s where a lot of the solutions are too. And so, Fire Sticks is just about that and but certainly not about creating another RFS or machines everywhere and fire stations everywhere or managing other people’s Country, no way.

It’s about boosting the capacity of the communities and for the regions to do it for themselves and to build their own dreams and to see all the opportunities that can come from that. And so we’re hoping to stretch away from fire, not just fire but going into education, into youth programs, into, you know, we’re looking at the economy stuff as well and how we turn weeds and harvest it off the Country instead of burning them and how we can take stuff off the Country and turn it into oils or turn it into some product. And that’s what we want to see Western science support it, this knowledge. Support it in ways of innovation that align with healing landscapes and not creating drones are going to put out the fire wall, continue to put steroids on the same way of looking at land but getting science to help us with creating those opportunities for communities and for people and while we’re healing landscapes at the same time.

Talk to me about cultural fire credits. What are they?

Yeah, well, getting the cultural fire credit was something really important. You know, it was about getting more investments that goes to the community and a credit that was developed by Aboriginal people and a credit that was more easy to understand. I mean you talk to anyone about the carbon credits, they go, ‘Oh yeah, it’s really hard to understand.’ It’s like measurements and, you know, maths and they’re looking at something they can’t see. Let’s all look at something we can’t see and let’s look up and away from the land.

You know, like that, just that alone is getting our attention away from reality and is again getting people thinking the wrong way. And obviously carbon’s an issue, but it’s related to a whole landscape. And so we wanted to create the credit to be more aligned with Indigenous indicators and what we see as a successful way of looking after Country and dealing with carbon, which is bringing the grasses back, bringing back the old growth forests, making sure that when it’s burnt the canopies aren’t scorched, making sure that the right timing is done and we’re getting that right response from Country and not just that environmental response that you see from the land that people can see and investors can go, ‘Oh, I can see where my money is going. I can see, look, it’s improving.’

They’re also seeing the social side, so the building of knowledge is also in that and also employment and social wellbeing is a part of that and bringing that environment and Country together and continuously to paint that picture, so people get it. And that credit was just another way of getting investment in that stream and not taking anything away from the carbon stuff and what that’s done, you know, I’m not here to down that, but I am here to say that it doesn’t align with the way that we think. And we need to be more clearer, it needs to be easier for people to understand and we need to see clearly the benefits that are aligned with the work we need to do ahead into the future.

As the necessity for cultural burning and other Indigenous management practices and knowledge systems becomes increasingly clear to Western science. We’re slowly getting it, right?

Slowly, yeah.

What is your message for how Western science should interact with First Nations knowledge systems?

Well, they need to get behind us and they need to work with us, and they need to come and say, ‘Hey, how do we support you?’ And not things like questions like, ‘Well, how do we learn from Indigenous knowledge? And how do we take that on board to our way of thinking?’ Oh God, we’re sick of that approach. You know, it’s really about, you know, get over here and give us a hand. Ask us what we need, you know, ask us how you can help us. Don’t just come over and take information and run off and go, ‘Okay, now we know this, and then we’re moving this way.’ Because it takes too much time, it’s a waste of money and at the same time, you know, like we haven’t got that time. And what we need to be doing is changing the paradigms of all of that.

We need to be changing the paradigms of research, that is real research that shows clear benefits to the communities, that we show that the communities are part of delivering that research and that people on the ground are doing it practically and that they’re all one. And so, when we’re teaching and rebuilding the practitioners on Country and getting communities to inspire their practitioners back on Country, we’re also looking at setting up scholarships through Fire Sticks around the PhDs around the data and the monitoring and collecting all that data. And so that’s part of the team employed full time as a part of the management team, not someone who blows in for two weeks and go, ‘I’m going to do a little test here.’ You know, get away from that.

We need research and community and environment and work and management to be one thing, and that is where knowledge base will become strong. And so, for science, we’re still waiting for the day for them to actually come to the table properly and actually say, ‘What do you need? How do we help you? And let’s give you the capacity to show us what you’re trying to show us.’  

You’re a musician, an author, a film maker, clearly a storyteller. What role do those skills that you have, play in communicating your work?  

Yeah. Oh, it’s everything, you know, like, it’s all one thing. And when people say to me, ‘Oh, how do you do all that stuff?’ I just say to them, ‘Well, it’s all along the way.’ Because when you go to a place, you know, you can film, make a little film on that case study you just did with that community and they love to do that too, because it’s about getting that knowledge out there and getting their perspective out and representing their region. So, filming became a big part of that, you know, and also music and storytelling and that’s what the kids need, you know, and all the younger ones.

But not just the kids, but all the adults, too. They need all that simplicity too, in terms of learning and knowledge and to make it more fun. And when we look at the earlier days, having those confrontations with National Parks and having those heated meetings and banging your head against the wall and the pain of jumping through those hoops, you sort of get to the point where you go, ‘Man, this is just, this is wasting my life. I don’t want to do this in my life.’ And so, you want to do things that are more fun. And when you think about it, well, that’s what the mobs did in the old days. It was ceremony and dance and not quite to what music and dance is today, but it was still handing knowledge down through those mediums of story and through paintings and through dance and song. And so that’s a big part of culture and it’s a big part of handing and passing knowledge on to the next generations. And that passing knowledge on to the next generations is such an important phrase.

People take it for granted because if we’re going to keep a knowledge base stable for thousands of years, then it needs to be passed on to the next generation and it needs to be made sure that our next generation do exactly what is being done by the other generations to actually keep that Country healthy and to keep that vision stable and that’s what people did. And so, through song and dance, it’s that way of doing it that’s more aligned culturally too, but in a modern way, but also a way that you can have more fun and engage the children and engage the adults, like I said, because all the adults are at the same level of learning as the kids anyway, they’re all at the same stage of learning the basics. And so, getting into the children’s books and doing the music side of things is not just something that I love to do, but it’s also a very effective way to get people to learn and listen and to do it in a way that is more fun and away from all that confrontation and away from all that world of bitterness and competitiveness and just put more colour into our world, you know, around what we need to be thinking about and what we need to be doing.

We’re seeing the effects of climate change more and more. Do you think we are at a turning point for doing things differently?

Well, definitely at a turning point, you know. We have to be at a turning point. People, the general population, they want to see the change. And I reckon a lot of people will yell out now and say, ‘Yeah, we want change. We want to start looking after the land.’ And people are frustrated, you know, it’s the system. This is not about black and white anymore, you know, because corruption and colonisation has affected everybody. It’s not just Aboriginal people that are affected by colonisation, but everybody’s affected by it because the way they think. It’s just simply being afraid of fire and the fear has molded people’s minds to a point that, man why are people thinking that, you know, it’s a product of how people think.

And so that’s why it’s so important that we’re working with people this way and trying to help them with this information and making it accessible for them to do that sort of thing, it’s just so, so important and we can’t do that if we don’t get the opportunity to demonstrate that and apply that to communities. And so that turning point needs to be practical. And that’s what’s happened through the work, and it’s been inspiring communities, it’s been spinning the cogs everywhere and to get everyone motivated and inspired. And that is a cultural thing, that is a community thing, that’s what we need to do because it’s the system, it’s the systems, it’s not working for us. Even a National Park person, be a great person, the great, great individual, you know, as soon as they put that uniform on, oh, gosh, it’s like, ‘Oh, no, you can’t do that, Victor. Oh, no, you shouldn’t do that. Oh, no, we can’t do that because of this.’ Take the uniform off, it’s like, ‘Man, we should have this happening right across the country’, you know.

And so, it’s, you know, there’s good people working in those organisations and we’re all bound by this invisible thing that is not who we really are. And it’s not, doesn’t come from our landscapes and is contributing to the problems that we’re dealing with. And we’ve really got to get out of that space and become that turning point. That’s why we want to involve Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and we have workshops in the regions, even the mob invite all the whitefellas into their projects because they’re all mates anyway. And there’s so many good people out there, white, black, brindle, brown, so many out there, but it’s the system that’s in the way and we’ve got to boot it out and we got to send the dinosaurs back to the Stone Age. We’ve got to do that because they’re killing us.

Finally. What does Australia look like? I’m not going to say ten years, 20 years, 1000 years, 5000 years, 10,000 years from now. What does it look like?

Well, beautiful Country, old trees. And when you go to the water, the water’s clean. You see sand again on our riverbanks, not mud. You look in the sky and it’s like you can’t even see the sky because there’s so many birds in the air, the sounds of the of all the birds piercing through your ears. You walk through the Country, and you see people walking through, looking after it. You see trees that are beautiful and clean because we’ve started to harvest naturally from the landscape and put that through our economy system. We see farms that have got different crops and we’ve got crops that are, even some plants that come from our own Country that need less water, less problems. We see whitefellas and blackfellas together and a strong culture together.

We see Aboriginal culture still alive and well and they’re all in our own Country and we see disadvantage going away. We see less suicides and drug problems because people find themselves and they find their identities, and it’s not a dream, you know, it’s inevitable that we have to achieve that goal. Otherwise, there’ll be nothing left. Otherwise, we’ll be going to the museum to look at a kangaroo or look at a koala and we don’t want to look at a stuffed animal, you know, we want to see it in their own environment. We see kids going to school and being taught by so many mentors from all over the country and seeing all these mentors and having a window into the landscape. And we see children that are inspired to go outside and into the Country and not looking at a computer screen. And we see technology evolving with the landscape as well, and technology that doesn’t solely enhance artificial intelligence, but technologies that’s more around about preserving and advancing natural intelligence and keeping those old values and taking it to the stars but without our feet leaving the ground.

That’s what the world should look like into the future. And that’s what will come if we listen to old knowledge systems and if we listen to the planet. And that’s going to be something that’s going to be a huge, huge corner to turn. But it’s an exciting one because once people get a sniff of that, then once people see the work that needs to be done, then they want to throw their lives at it. And that’s a whole ’nother level of aspiration and a whole ’nother level of motivation, because what that does is it creates the dream job and it gives people their identities back and it gives them a job to do that is so, so beautiful and, and such a wonderful thing to do with your life. And I think that’s what’s missing for a lot of our young people, for Aboriginal youngsters and also for non-Indigenous people, is that hope and that’s what we need to paint for them. So, every one of us is the turning point today and I really feel that we are the turning point.

Thank you.

Yeah. Thanks.

To follow the program online, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can also visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording like this one. You can go to 100climateconversations.com and just search for 100 Climate Conversations in your pod catcher of choice.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.