“If we're going to reverse the damage that's done to this country, if we're going to bring back the old growth in forests – if we’re going to bring back one of the oldest cultures in the world to be strong in every part of this country, then we all need to work together.”
Victor Steffensen, Lead Fire Practitioner of Firesticks Alliance and author of “Fire Country”, is changing the Australian landscape, one Indigenous Fire Practitioner at a time.
As Australia suffers from biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, and cyclical natural disasters, Victor implores us to restore the Australian Country identity: by putting Indigenous land managers back in charge, and back on Country.
But first, he says, we need a renewed land management governance structure – one covering both the governance of traditional, Indigenous knowledge and the governance of Indigenous land management as a whole. One inspired by the cohesive, shared leadership order of Indigenous governments, rooted in shared responsibility, shared traditional knowledge, and thousands of years of experience.
Transporting his audience back a few thousand years, Victor highlighted that by maintaining a healthy landscape, each mob ensured a healthy social kinship with the next – as Indigenous responsibility for the land was essential in holding together their social structure. Continuing on to regale his audience with stories of Indigenous traditions and social expectations, Victor was really underlining the importance of everyone – each person, each mob – working together.
“It’s a team effort. The country is too big,” he explains. Enter the role of Firesticks Alliance, an Indigenous led network with aims to re-invigorate the use of cultural burning by facilitating cultural learning pathways to fire and land management.
Investing in Australia’s fire practitioners of the future by rebuilding Indigenous shared knowledge in mob communities, Victor says Firesticks is about pulling everyone together and building out the land management capacities of regions – so the load can be shared across the country.
By restoring Indigenous land managers, we can begin to heal our country with the knowledge that cared for it for thousands of years before. But it’s more than that, Victor notes, by training the Indigenous in their own ways, on their own Country, Firesticks is ‘putting back culture’.
Watch Victor Steffensen's plenary speech from the 2022 National Landcare Conference here
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