- Title:
-
Traditional Aboriginal Land Management
- Date:
- June 2004
- Organisations
- National Museum of Australia
-
Location:
-
Australia,
Australia
Overview
Aboriginal people have been in Australia for perhaps 60,000 years. For all that time they have had to live with fire. We do not know exactly how fire has been used by Aboriginal people over time in different places. However, we do know that Indigenous people used it for thousands of years for warmth, hunting, communication, ceremonies, cooking, warfare, encouraging regrowth, and providing a fire-safe environment. Different patterns were used in different places, and probably at different times. Most historians describe Aboriginal use of fire as ‘firestick farming’ — the deliberate use of fire to control the nature of an environment. This appears to have been to create a patchwork of different stages of regrowth in different areas.
