Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon fieldwork with non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal bushfire managers in northern and southern Australia, this paper critically reflects on how indigeneity is being articulated in contemporary contexts in order to authorise different ends in the face of a flammable future.

Paper long abstract:

Settler Australians have long been aware that, prior to the arrival of their European forebears, the Australian continent was subject to extensive anthropogenic burning for millennia. Anthropologists, archaeologists, historians and others have periodically (re)discovered this dimension of Aboriginal peoples and their histories (Healy, 2008), frequently finding in it a source of hope for their own security. Thus, just as the forefather of Australian fire science wrote in 1973 that the 'only way' to prevent bushfire disasters was to burn the land 'in much the same way as the Aborigines did prior to the advent of the white man' (McArthur, 1973), a celebrated historian has recently argued that settlers will 'become truly Australian' once they revive the fire practices and culture of precolonial Aboriginal peoples (Gammage, 2011). In this way, bushfire has at once been a site of loaded and contested symbolic investment - both in terms of settlers' attempts to acquire indigeneity and contemporary ideals of Aboriginal culture and tradition (Neale, In Press; Martin, 2013) - and, until recently, minimal engagement with Aboriginal people. Drawing upon fieldwork with non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal bushfire managers in northern and southern Australia, this article critically reflects on how indigeneity is being articulated and mobilised in contemporary contexts in order to authorise and imagine different ends. The article closes by suggesting that one of the most potent functions of indigeneity is not only to legitimate the various actors involved but also to provide stability in the face of an obscure, changing, and threatening flammable future.