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Through a combination of programs and cost sharing, we were able to carry out aerial burning on Cape York properties to reduce fuel loads and connect early season fire breaks. The funding programs included Healthy Farming Futures, Reef Trust III and Indigenous Land and Sea. Cape York NRM partnered with South Cape York Catchments and Cape York Weeds and Feral Animals to conduct the program over a mixture of land tenures for landscape scale outcomes.

The cooperation from stations and land holders was greatly appreciated, and we were able to join up and tie in burns with neighbours. We put in effective breaks from Melsonby and Bonny Glen, right through to the Holroyd Plains, and tied in with National Park and Olkola early burns at (Lakefield) Rinyirru and (Rokeby) Oyala Thumotang National Parks.

Covid-19 restrictions made logistics tricky to organise. However, all things ran fairly smoothly as the country cured in different areas, and was fortunate to have Ella as a family member for ground support and safety skeds. Thanks to the stations and landholders’ for their hospitality, avgas and willingness to work together, and the pilot’s expertise and local knowledge. Less road traffic from the covid enabled the opportunity to get some road-side burns in to protect properties from wild fires. It all went well with over 20,000 ignition points. We hope to secure funding to continue and potentially expand next year, and include more properties to ease the threats of wild fires on Cape York. We will see how effective this program has been at the end of the wild fire and storm burn season.