Fire Management

Healthy burning

Burning country the right way is our most powerful tool for land management.

Our ancestors always used fire to keep country healthy, but when our people moved off country onto stations and into missions, settlements and towns, fire began to go wrong. Balanda (non-Indigenous people) told us our traditional way of burning was wrong and we shouldn’t be lighting fires at all. Without people managing fire the right way, there was less early dry season cool burning and much more late dry season uncontrollable wildfires, destroying food and homes for our animals and damaging plants that don’t like too much fire.

In the late 1990s we got together with our neighbours and created a new way to go back to the old ways of burning. Under the cutting-edge project we called the West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement Scheme, governments eventually recognised the importance of controlled burning in reducing greenhouse gas emissions because they stop big, damaging wildfires sweeping across the landscape. Income from this work is our biggest source of funding for ranger jobs and work that keeps country and people healthy. Importantly, this is not Government funding and we are proud of being involved in such a globally important enterprise right from the start.

Mimal once had the worst record of late hot fires but we’ve turned that around and country is becoming healthier from doing fire the right way. We talk to landowners and do early burning that uses up old fuel and sets up firebreaks on country. We use modern tools like satellite maps, trucks and helicopters but we are still following the old methods. Fire is our strength and we are always improving our knowledge and skills in planning early burning.