Fighting fire with fire

Via a video call, Dr Rohan Fisher presents me with a digital mosaic. He is zooming in on the North Australia & Rangelands Fire Information (NAFI) map of Arnhem Land as he screenshares, telling me it is easier to show rather than tell. Darker and lighter green patches show early dry-season burning in this corner of the Northern Territory, the result of rangers working on Country from January to June. Their movements across the land and in the air are evident in the coloured waves of backburning and fuel reduction, building a patchwork across the land – jigsaw pieces that, on the map, morph into blue and red dots for active fires recorded in the past 24 to 48 hours.

Fisher is a fire scientist at Charles Darwin University, and is one of the researchers who update the NAFI system, using a combination of automated and manual satellite mapping to track fires across the continent. He points out the ridges and troughs of older and younger blazes, showing me patterns of months-long work and preparation.

“If these breaks weren’t there already, these fires would be almost as big as that Barkly fire,” Fisher says, his voice measured as he clicks the mouse across the Barkly Region, a massive area with the town of Tennant Creek at its core. “The early dry-season burning is not a completely magic solution – we’re still getting these fires pop up, but it does mean that they move slower and there are opportunities strategically to pull them up.”

In contrast, Fisher shows me another fire on pastoral land towards the Queensland border that has moved 60 kilometres in the past six hours, unbroken. “It’s not just about putting in fire – but it’s really putting in fire in a really thought-out and strategic, sophisticated way,” he says.

There is good reason for this. In the Top End, the end of August brings winds and embers as the dry season begins to morph into the pre-monsoonal build-up. Hot gusts blow across the region, from Arnhem Land to the Tanami Desert, whipping up accidental and deliberately lit fires.

For much of September, a vast area of the Barkly Region was on fire. Tiny blue, red and purple dots proliferated in swathes on the NAFI website, from near Rockhampton Downs, east of Tennant Creek, all the way to Epenarra around 200 kilometres south. Every couple of hours, another bushfire alert was sent, pinging into my inbox as the tally of burnt land grew to close to half the size of Tasmania. The Barkly Highway was shut, and Tennant Creek was briefly under stand-by to evacuate as firefighters waited to see if the blaze would jump the Gosse River and sweep towards the town.

The central Barkly Region was still burning uncontrolled in October. Although the fire died out on the western front, it erupted again further to the east, the marks of burnt land showing in “fire scar” colouring on the NAFI website. Other fires appeared, swelled and moved across Central Australia as the dry season waned, with Alice Springs covered in smoke, and fires near Yuendumu, Kalkarindji and elsewhere burning for weeks on end.

During this period, Bushfires NT and the Territory’s Fire and Rescue Service extended an already lengthened fire danger area to make the entire Northern Territory a fire danger zone until February next year.

For traditional owners and Indigenous ranger groups across the Top End, fire is a necessary and natural part of the ecosystem, something that must be introduced regularly in order to regenerate the land and keep it healthy. In Arnhem Land, helicopters and Troopy four-wheel drives are now part of a heritage of fire management that’s thousands of years old.

Jennifer Ansell is the chief executive of Arnhem Land Fire Abatement (ALFA), a not-for-profit working with 11 Aboriginal ranger groups and their host organisations to operate six savanna fire management projects. She outlines the huge amount of effort that goes into managing the 86,000 square kilometres that her organisation works across. “It’s a continuous cycle to actually undertake these projects,” Ansell says. “Throughout the wet season, the rangers are doing consultations and planning with landowners, and with their neighbours, so that the planned burning can start as soon as the grassy fuels are ready on the ground. The rangers have got huge tracts of country to cover and to support landowners to get out and do burning on their country, and so that takes many months.”

By the time the hot winds blow, there’s a mosaic of burnt firebreaks across the landscape, providing opportunity to defend against unplanned wildfires. Ansell mentions more than once the need for proper resourcing to be able to manage fire in a culturally appropriate way. For the ALFA projects, that is a minimum of around $6 million a year on top of funding to operate business-as-usual ranger operations.

The NAFI website shows more than what has been aflame this year. Datasets stretching back to 2000 show a 52 per cent reduction in fire frequency between 2000–06 to 2015–21. In the face of a worsening climate crisis, active land management across Arnhem Land has reduced the risk of wildfires.

‘‘It’s really, really, really incredible,” Fisher says. “Why doesn’t everyone in Australia know this and understand that under even more extreme climate change conditions, these guys up north are doing some of the best work in the world?”

To Fisher’s scientific eye, the Barkly fire, which burned on land that was largely unmanaged, wasn’t a result of climate change. He says it was a result of the massive fuel load that grew uncontrolled during the recent La Niña climate pattern, and “would have occurred regardless of climate change or not”.

“Climate change certainly doesn’t make it easier,” he adds. “But just the fact that we’re not spending the resources to get people out on Country doing the work – which reduces fuel load to reduce fire – and the problem with just attributing it to climate change, is it just takes people’s agency away in order to do something about it.”

With fewer inhabitants, open grassland, low scrub and more pastoral-held lands than across the Indigenous homelands of Arnhem Land, fire management in the Territory’s south is not as established. Gareth Catt, the desert partnerships manager at the Indigenous Desert Alliance (a similar organisation to ALFA that works across Central Australia), describes the work that his organisation does as both urgent and thinly spread.

“It’s a negative state that we’re in,” he says, “where people aren’t engaged in the landscape in the same way, at the same scale.” Catt explains that fire needs to be seen as something that’s put into the landscape, at varying scales over time, over a long period of time. “We can’t just wait until there’s a huge amount of rainfall and the entire landscape is flammable.” He also stresses that having an engaged community that has funding to carry out this regular management work is critical.

Landscape regeneration from smaller and more frequent fires is easier than the larger and severe burns, which reach far higher temperatures and burn everything at once. The swing towards larger fires has been exacerbated by changing weather patterns, but also the proliferation of invasive grass species such as buffel and gamba, which grow quicker than native grasses and are the perfect kindling for an unattended campfire.

Catt says treating the landscape as a living, breathing entity would go a long way towards changing the “disengaged nature of modern Australia”, in which environmental values sit at odds with what the landscape actually needs – more fire, carefully introduced by the right people at the right time.

This month, the “knock ’em down” winds will come to the Territory, brutal and persistent in their strength. Coupled with the lighting storms that range across the Top End, fire will be everywhere – sparked by humans and bolts to the earth – grasses up in flames. In places such as Arnhem Land, the work done for months prior will mean there is little threat. Elsewhere in the Territory and across Australia, it may be another story.

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