‘Unprecedented’ Australian bushfires directly affected one in eight Indigenous people

One in eight Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia were directly impacted by the 2019-20 bushfires, the bushfire royal commission has heard.

And according to a study of the geological records of large fires in Australia’s history, the summer bushfires were “unprecedented”.

The royal commission into national natural disaster resilience heard 15 witnesses on cultural burning on Thursday at the end of three days of hearings focused on hazard reduction.

Bhiamie Eckford-Williamson, an Euahlayi man and academic from the Australian National University, told the royal commission that 96,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, including 35,000 children, were affected by the fires that burned in Queensland, New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory and South Australia this summer.

That amounts to 29% of the Indigenous population in affected states, and 12% of the national Indigenous population.

And the Indigenous population in areas hit by bushfires was 4.6%, double the population in the state as a whole, meaning that Indigenous people were “disproportionately affected”.

Despite this, he said, there had been an “extraordinary absence of Aboriginal people” from post-fire inquiries, and a lack of recommendations or policies specifically geared to acknowledging or reducing the impact on Aboriginal people.

Eckford-Williamson gave evidence in a panel alongside the University of Wollongong researcher Vanessa Cavanagh, a Bundjalung and Wonnarua woman and former firefighter researching the role of women in cultural burning; associate professor Michael-Shawn Fletcher, a Wiradjuri man and paleo-ecologist from the University of Melbourne; and Dr Timothy Neale from Deakin University.

Eckford-Williamson said that the cool-burn techniques used by Aboriginal people could not be appropriated into western fire management processes, or divorced from the context of other Indigenous land management practices.

“Simply put, if Aboriginal people are not in control of the preparation [and] implementation of burning then it is not cultural burning,” he said.

That is what happens in the NSW national parks and wildlife service, which told the commission that while Aboriginal people undertook low-intensity cultural burning, it also had parks staff who undertook “culturally-informed burning”.

Fletcher said a study of the geological record showed no records of a fire event equivalent to the 2019-20 season, with fires stretching from Queensland to Victoria.

“In that sense these fires are unprecedented in the geological record,” he said.

He said that records from colonial settlers in Victoria showed a “universal shift from an open to a woody or forested landscape following the British invasion and the removal of cultural burning from the landscape”.

He added that while global heating was undoubtedly increasing the fire risk, the landscape now had “demonstrably more fuel in the modern forested region … today than when they were under Indigenous cultural burning”.

All four experts said there should be a national coordinating body that supported and conducted research on behalf of local groups conducting Indigenous land management practices, and that funding for that work, which currently runs on one- to three-year cycles, should be made permanent.

Scott Falconer from the Victorian Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning told the inquiry that until the cultural burns program began in 2017 there had not been any cultural burning on the landscape for at least 150 years. Since then, 20 burns have been conducted, and more than 100 have been identified by the six traditional owner groups involved in burning in Australia.

NSW also did not conduct any authorised cultural burning on public land until 2017, Queensland started supporting the practice in 2007, and the NT has been supporting it since 1981, when the joint management of national parks first began.