Taking Fire: The Historical and Contemporary Politics of Indigenous Burning in Australia and the Western United States

Abstract

Large bushfires in recent years around the world have sparked debate and interest in fire management; a world warming through industrial combustion is a world turning to Indigenous fire practices for solutions. Yet even as Indigenous Australians increasingly assert pyro-identities, non-Indigenous Australians have struggled to understand Indigenous burning practices and the nature of antipodean fire. This thesis examines the historical and contemporary politics of fire and how they relate to changing understandings of Indigenous burning in Australia and the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries. It examines public and institutional debates after large bushfires, discussions about management of public lands and shifting representations of Indigenous burning through analysis of royal commission transcripts, newspaper articles and other public discourse, policy submissions, institutional archives and academic published material. The thesis explores the relationship of environmentalism to fire and Indigenous burning, the contradictions of 'wilderness' and the politics of race and identity. It charts the development of competing understandings of fire and Indigenous burning in academic disciplines as well as the entanglement of Indigenous burning with the politics of land management and institutional rivalries. Through a comparison of the mutual entanglements and divergences of Australian and American fire management and conceptualisations of Indigenous burning, the thesis demonstrates the historical and transnational context of Australian fire. It argues for localised understandings of fire and fire management, perspectives that are attentive to cultural and ecological specificities. Perceptions of Indigenous burning have inspired policy-making and they have also been appropriated for legitimation, with profound consequences for cultural politics and ecological communities. Finally, the thesis charts how Indigenous burning has been transformed in the imagination and discourses of non-Indigenous Australia: from academic curiosity to political incendiary - and, increasingly, to a lived reality.