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Paper short abstract:

Cape York Peninsula, far north Australia, is a landscape that has been socialised by fire over millennia. While Aboriginal burning regimes have continued from pre-colonisation to the present day, contemporary fire knowledge is the result of a complex intercultural co-production of knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

While touted in tourism materials as a ‘wilderness’, Cape York Peninsula, far north Australia, is a landscape that has been socialised by fire over millennia. Aboriginal peoples' burning practices have resulted in a fire-adapted and fire-dependent landscape, and today a diverse range of land managers in Cape York engage in fire management. Aboriginal traditional owners, settler-descended cattle graziers, and Park rangers each implement early dry-season burning, intended variously to encourage fresh growth and reduce the vegetation’s fuel load, minimising the risk of hotter, out-of-control wildfires later in the season. These ‘cool burns’, alongside an additional type of burning called ‘storm burning’, are considered to comprise an effective fire regime. Fire knowledge originated with Aboriginal traditional owners. However, decades of engagement in the multi-ethnic pastoral industry have resulted in contemporary burning practices that are interculturally mediated. The Australian government’s carbon sequestration scheme (widely seen as a partial solution to environmental issues and Indigenous economic disadvantage) has further transformed local burning practices, generating new forms of burning and critique. As such, even in Cape York, where fire regimes have continued from pre-colonisation to the present day, fire knowledge has shifted and changed, with further transformations likely due to the changing climate and spread of invasive species. Through examining the intercultural context of burning in Cape York and complicating simplified narratives around static and unchanging Indigenous knowledges, I question what it means to talk about cultural burning here and, in doing so, disrupt some of the accepted wisdom around fire management in Australia.