Culture, Ecology and Economy of Fire Management in North Australian Savannas: Rekindling the Wurrk Tradition

Culture, Ecology and Economy of

Fire Management

in North Australian Savannas

REKINDLING THE WURRK TRADITION

Jeremy Russell-Smith art Peter Whitehead art Peter Cooke

CSIRO

Publishing

© Tropical Savannas Management CRC 2009

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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Culture, ecology and economy of savanna fire management in Northern Australia: in the tradition of Wurrk / editors: Jeremy Russell-Smith, Peter Whitehead, Peter Cooke.

9780643094024 (pbk.)

Includes index.

Bibliography.

Savanna ecology – Australia, Northern.

Prescribed burning – Australia, Northern.

Burning of land – Australia, Northern.

Wilderness areas – Fire management – Australia, Northern.

Russell-Smith, Jeremy.

Whitehead, Peter J.

Cooke, Peter.

333.74099429

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Front cover (clockwise from top left): planning meeting of traditional owners and others (photo: Peter M Cooke); on-ground patch burning (photo: Peter M Cooke); line of strategically placed fires ignited from aircraft (photo: Peter M Cooke); MODIS satellite image showing active areas of fire and scars of previous fires (http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/); early dry season preventative burn lit in sparse Spinifex on the Arnhem Land Plateau (photo: Peter M Cooke)

Back cover: aerial prescribed burning ignitions along the mid reaches of the Mann River (photo: Peter M Cooke)

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The work described in this volume reflects an ongoing partnership comprising a large number of individuals and organisations. The Tropical Savannas Cooperative Research Centre is thanked foremost for providing critical resources, including for the publication of this book, but even more importantly, for the cultural and intellectual space that enabled and supported us collectively to embark on the 10-plus year journey described herein. Other critical funding and support has been provided through: Australian Government sources including the Community Development Employment Program, Natural Heritage Trust (now Caring for Our Country), Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change), Land and Water Australia, and the Natural Disaster Mitigation Program; Indigenous (Aboriginal) communities and their representative organisations, including Adjumarlarl Rangers (Kunbalanya), Djelk Rangers and the Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation (Maningrida), Jawoyn Association (Katherine), Manwurrk Rangers and the Wardekken Land Management Limited (Kabulwarnamyo), Mimal Rangers (Bulman), the Caring for Country Unit at the Northern Land Council, and the North Australia Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance (NAILSMA); the Northern Territory Government’s Department of Natural Resources, Environment, the Arts and Sport, and especially its rural fire management agency Bushfires NT; two CSIRO Divisions – Sustainable Ecosystems, and Atmospheric Research (now Marine and Atmospheric Research); the Remote Sensing Section of the Western Australia Department of Land Information (Landgate); universities – Charles Darwin University, Australian National University, University of Queensland; and ConocoPhillips Company. Senator Robert Hill, as Federal Minister for Environment, gave early support to the initiatives on which this program built.

Expert reviews of chapters or sections of them were provided by Jon Altman, Sally Brockwell, Garry Cook, Nicholas Evans, Rolf Gerritsen, Lindsay Hutley, Lynda Prior, David Ritchie, Steve Sutton and Dick Williams, as well as the editors. Ian Thynne provided advice and support in regard to governance issues. The International Journal of Wildland Fire and its publisher, CSIRO Publishing, are thanked for permission to reproduce in full two papers (Chapters 9 and 13) independently reviewed and recently published in that journal.

Cameron Yates and Felicity Watts from Bushfires NT generated the maps. Photographs were mostly provided by the authors, but we are particularly grateful for permission to use historical images held by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (Chapter 3). Thanks are due to all individuals who gave permission for their (contemporary) images to be reproduced in this book. Otto Campion authorised use of an image including his deceased father.

Finally, we acknowledge the critical influence of key individuals from both Indigenous and western scientific knowledge traditions who have actively helped inform and promote cross-cultural perspectives concerning wurrk and landscape fire management, respectively. Based on our own experience, for western Arnhem Land those ideas have been substantially influenced by Nipper Kapirigi, Billy Gunbunuka, Rhys Jones, Mick Kubarkku, and George Manyita (all deceased); Lofty Bardayal Nadjamerrek AO, Chris Haynes, Dean Yibarbuk, Jack Djandjomerr, Mary Kolkkiwarra, Bill Birriyabirriya, Ruby Bilindja, Jimmy Kalarriya, Peter Biless, Otto Bulmaniya Campion, Matthew Ryan, and George Djanggawanga. We trust the contributions in this volume add usefully to that continuing discourse.

Note: Some images include Indigenous people who are now deceased. Please respect family and regional protocols in relation to displaying images of deceased people when using and sharing this book.

The editors

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Jon C Altman

Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research

The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia

Alan N Andersen

Tropical Savannas Management Cooperative Research Centre, and

CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, PMB 44, Winnellie, Northern Territory 0822, Australia

Damian Barrett

Sustainable Minerals Institute

University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia

Peter Biless

Ngarridj subsection, Djordi clan

c/- Warddeken Land Management Limited

PO Box 785, Nightcliff, Northern Territory 0814, Australia

Ruby Bilindja

Ngarridjdjan subsection, Wurrbbarn clan

c/- Warddeken Land Management Limited

PO Box 785, Nightcliff, Northern Territory 0814, Australia

Bill Birriyabirriya

Bulanj subsection, Kardbam clan

Marrkolidjban Outstation

c/- Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation

PMB 102, Winnellie, Northern Territory 0821, Australia

Kym Brennan

Tropical Savannas Management Cooperative Research Centre, and

Department of Natural Resources, Environment, the Arts and Sport, PO Box 496, Palmerston, Northern Territory 0831, Australia

Peter Brocklehurst

Tropical Savannas Management Cooperative Research Centre, and

Department of Natural Resources, Environment, the Arts and Sport, PO Box 496, Palmerston, Northern Territory 0831, Australia

Garry D Cook

Tropical Savannas Management Cooperative Research Centre, and

CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, PMB 44, Winnellie, Northern Territory 0822, Australia

Peter M Cooke

Tropical Savannas Management Cooperative Research Centre, and

Warddeken Land Management Limited

PO Box 785, Nightcliff, Northern Territory 0814, Australia

Jack Djandjomerr

Kamarrang subsection, Bolmo clan

Marlkawo Outstation

c/- Warddeken Land Management Limited

PO Box 785, Nightcliff, Northern Territory 0814, Australia

Andrew C Edwards

Tropical Savannas Management Cooperative Research Centre, and

Bushfires Cooperative Research Centre, and

Bushfires NT, Department of Natural Resources, Environment, the Arts and Sport, PO Box 37346, Winnellie, Northern Territory 0821, Australia

Murray Garde

School of Languages and Linguistics

The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia

A Malcolm Gill

Fenner School of Environment and Society

Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 0200, Australia

Lindsay Hutley

Tropical Savannas Management Cooperative Research Centre, and

School of Environmental and Life Sciences, Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Northern Territory 0909, Australia

Jimmy Kalarriya

Kodjok subsection, Wurrbbarn clan

c/- Warddeken Land Management Limited

PO Box 785, Nightcliff, Northern Territory 0814, Australia

Sarah Kerin

Parks Australia North

PO Box 71, Jabiru, Northern Territory 0886, Australia

Mary Kolkkiwarra

Kodjdjan subsection, Wakmarranj clan

Kabulawarnamyo Outstation

c/- Warddeken Land Management Limited

PO Box 785, Nightcliff, Northern Territory 0814, Australia

Mick Kubarkku

Balang subsection, Kulmarru clan

formerly of Yikarrakkal Outstation

Western Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Australia

Robert Levitus

Anthropos Pty Ltd

Canberra ACT 2600, Australia

Adam Liedloff

Tropical Savannas Management Cooperative Research Centre, and

CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, PMB 44, Winnellie, Northern Territory 0822, Australia

Stefan Maier

Satellite Remote Sensing Services, Western Australian Land Information Authority, and Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Northern Territory 0909, Australia

John McCartney

Tropical Savannas Management Cooperative Research Centre and

Parks Division, Department and of Natural Resources, Environment, the Arts and Sport, PO Box 496, Palmerston, Northern Territory 0831, Australia

Mick CP Meyer

Bushfires Cooperative Research Centre, and

CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, PMB 1, Aspendale, Victoria 3195, Australia

Brett P Murphy

Tropical Savannas Management Cooperative Research Centre, University of Tasmania, and Bushfires NT, Department of Natural Resources, Environment, the Arts and Sport, PO Box 37346, Winnellie, Northern Territory 0821, and School of Plant Science, Private Bag 55, Hobart, Tasmania 8001, Australia

Bronwyn A Myers

School of Environmental and Life Sciences

Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Northern Territory 0909, Australia

Bardayal Lofty Nadjamerrek AO

Wamud subsection, Mok clan

Kabulawarnamyo Outstation

c/- Warddeken Land Management Limited

PO Box 785, Nightcliff, Northern Territory 0814, Australia

Paul Purdon

Environment, Heritage and the Arts

Department of Natural Resources, Environment, the Arts and Sport

PO Box 496, Palmerston, Northern Territory 0831, Australia

David Ritchie

Department of Local Government and Housing

GPO Box 4621, Darwin, Northern Territory 0801, Australia

Jeremy Russell-Smith

Tropical Savannas Management Cooperative Research Centre, North Australia Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance, School of Environmental Research, Charles Darwin University, and Bushfires NT, Department of Natural Resources, Environment, the Arts and Sport, PO Box 37346, Winnellie, Northern Territory 0821, Australia

Jon Schatz

Tropical Savannas Management Cooperative Research Centre and

CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, PMB 44, Winnellie, Northern Territory 0822, Australia

Stephen Sutton

Bushfires NT, Department of Natural Resources, Environment, the Arts and Sport, PO Box 37346, Winnellie, Northern Territory 0821, Australia

Felicity A Watt

Tropical Savannas Management Cooperative Research Centre, and

Bushfires NT, Department of Natural Resources, Environment, the Arts and Sport, PO Box 37346, Winnellie, Northern Territory 0821, Australia

Peter J Whitehead

Tropical Savannas Management Cooperative Research Centre,

Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Northern Territory 0909 Australia

Richard J Williams

Tropical Savannas Management Cooperative Research Centre, and

CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, PMB 44, Winnellie, Northern Territory 0822, Australia

Steve Winderlich

Parks Australia North

PO Box 71, Jabiru, Northern Territory 0886, Australia

John CZ Woinarski

Tropical Savannas Management Cooperative Research Centre, and

Department of Natural Resources, Environment, the Arts and Sport, and School of Environmental Research, Charles Darwin University, PO Box 496, Palmerston, Northern Territory 0831, Australia

Cameron P Yates

Tropical Savannas Management Cooperative Research Centre, and

Bushfires NT, Department of Natural Resources, Environment, the Arts and Sport, PO Box 37346, Winnellie, Northern Territory 0821, Australia

1

Challenges and opportunities for fire

management in fire-prone northern

Australia

Jeremy Russell-Smith, Peter J Whitehead, Peter M Cooke and Cameron P Yates

INTRODUCTION

In the southern summer of late 2002 through to early 2003, large bushfires ravaged somewhere between 20 000–30 000 km² of mostly forested terrain in south-eastern Australia. The southeast corner of Australia is the most densely populated portion of a mostly arid, flammable and very sparsely settled continent. Terrifying images of huge fires sweeping onto the smoke-enshrouded outlying suburbs of Sydney – and of the fast moving inferno that engulfed over 500 homes in the western suburbs of the nation’s capital, Canberra – played out across the global media. At the time, much of southern Australia was in the grip of a prolonged and savage drought and, for an already nervous populace, these images presaged the enormity of an emerging climate-induced increase in numbers of days of extreme temperature and associated wildfire activity and diminishing regional water availability in the decades to come (CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology 2007; Garnaut 2008). The even greater loss of life and property in the 2009 fires in rural Victoria will undoubtedly drive intense re-examination of present approaches to fire prevention and response.

An important political response to the 2002/3 southern Australian fire crisis was establishment of the Council of Australian Government’s (COAG) National Inquiry on Bushfire Mitigation and Management (Ellis et al. 2004). This was the first ostensibly national bushfires inquiry in a long history of such inquiries following fire ‘disasters’ in various southern Australian settings – commencing with Justice Stretton’s formative report into the Black Friday fires of 1939.

As part of its terms of reference, the COAG inquiry undertook an assessment of ‘the facts in relation to major bushfires in the 2002–03 season’. The report observed (p. 6) that whereas ‘community and media interest during the 2002–03 fire season focused on fires that affected about 3 million hectares in south-eastern Australia … in the same fire season, however, around 38 million hectares was affected by fire in northern and central Australia’. In fact, this figure represents only the Northern Territory, where, between April 2002 and March 2003, fires

affected 28.6% of the jurisdiction. Although these figures include an exceptionally large area of fire in arid central Australia in 2002 following the most significant rainfall for decades in 2001, and the subsequent build-up of flammable grassy fuels, the inquiry also noted (p. 16) that 210 000 km² of the Northern Territory’s tropical savannas region is affected by fire in an average burning year.

Three weeks before the report’s release on 31 March 2004, two of the authors of this chapter (Peter Cooke and Jeremy Russell-Smith) – invited as representatives of northern Australian Indigenous and research interests, respectively – participated in a small ‘invited specialists forum’ to review the then close-to-complete draft document. The draft presented to us at the time reflected simply a deep lack of cultural understanding and appreciation for the vast landscape scales and resourcing issues confronting fire management in fire-prone regional and northern Australia. Among the various significant issues we documented are:

a lack of understanding of the continental scale of, and the need to provide support for, the use of fire as a management tool for production, conservation and cultural management goals – as opposed to being concerned singularly about risk-management and emergency-response issues – especially in southern Australia

a general lack of recognition that the largest areas of annual fires (and wildfires) occur predominantly in northern Australia – and periodically in the arid centre – and that current fire regimes are exerting significant impacts on regional biodiversity, environmental, greenhouse gas emissions, human health, social and community values. In fact, in the (subsequently amended) summary on page 1, the draft report found that, despite over a quarter of the Northern Territory being burnt by wildfires in 2002, there was ‘little detrimental impact’ in that year!

a limited appreciation of the necessity for landscape-scale remote sensing applications for informing regional real-time fire management operations, and regional and national policy agendas

a lack of comprehension of the national and global significance, challenges and opportunities surrounding greenhouse gas emissions from savanna burning

a total lack of understanding of contemporary and emerging social demographic issues in regional and northern Australia: particularly opportunities and requirements for engaging Indigenous (Aboriginal) skills and knowledge in developing economically viable fire-management enterprises and partnerships.

While acknowledging that the final report did in fact begin to address several of our seemingly ‘parochial’ concerns as expressed to the meeting – and subsequently to the authors in frank correspondence – this recent national inquiry usefully illustrates a contemporary stereotypical national policy focus on bushfire management in Australia. We acknowledge that risk-management and emergency-response issues in densely concentrated southern Australian electorates are legitimate political prerogatives that need to be tackled. In response to this generic national policy myopia, however, we recognise that key challenges for the fire-prone north include: setting out a cogent and compelling case that savanna fire-management issues do warrant national attention; that we are in the process of developing novel, collaborative regional approaches for delivering environmentally, culturally and economically sustainable solutions; and that such solutions provide useful examples for fire management in various other regional, national and international savanna contexts. The obligation to communicate the elements of this case provides a first strong motivation for compiling this book.

Figure 1.1 Images for the Darwin region, Northern Territory, 8 June 2008, illustrating fire-affected areas at different imagery scales: (a) Landsat, (b) MODIS, (c) AVHRR. All images display red and near-infrared bands.

FIRE MAPPING AND CONTEMPORARY BURNING PATTERNS

Our contemporary understanding of fire patterning in northern Australian landscapes has been informed largely through the application of satellite imagery at three scales of resolution. Dating back to the early 1980s, relatively fine-resolution LANDSAT imagery (pixel sizes ~0.1–0.5 ha, depending on the sensor; Figure 1.1a) has been used in a large number of regional studies – including assessments included in this book (Chapters 9 and 10) – for characterising savanna fire regimes (e.g. fire extent, seasonality, frequency, interval-between-fires and patchiness) and addressing attendant ecological, greenhouse and land-management issues. With individual scenes with a dimension of 180 × 180 km, combined with relatively high cost (at least to date) and relatively infrequent sampling (every 16 days), this imagery has been applied typically in spatially and temporally limited regional snapshots or, more rarely, in multi-scene, decadal studies of regional fire regimes such as for Kakadu, Litchfield and Nitmiluk National Parks (Chapter 10).

Since the late 1990s, continental-wide understanding of the occurrence of fires has been developed substantially from daily observations made through application of the relatively coarse resolution (~1.1 × 1.1 km pixels at orbital nadir) Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) instrument on the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) series of satellites (Figure 1.1c). Currently, assembled fire observation data derived from AVHRR are available from 1997 for the whole of the continent, and from 1990 for Western Australia and the Northern Territory (Craig et al. 2002; Meyer 2004).

More recently, a second continental-scale sensor – the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS; 250 × 250 m pixels), with purpose-built daily fire detection and mapping capabilities – has become available (Figure 1.1b). Both AVHRR and MODIS have a sample swath exceeding 2000 km in any one overpass, and both sensors enable automatic detection of active fire ‘hotspots’, and post-fire assessments and mapping of burned or, more appropriately, fire-affected areas. Hotspot data derived from both satellite sensors are routinely made available within hours of satellite overpasses on a number of Australian fire management websites:

http://www.firewatch.dli.wa.gov.au

http://www.firenorth.org.au

http://sentinel2.ga.gov.au/acres/sentinel.

Fire-mapping products are also available from the first two listed sites. The ‘firenorth’ – or North Australia Fire Information (NAFI) website developed by the Tropical Savannas Cooperative Research Centre – also provides fire-mapping products derived from MODIS imagery (Figure 1.2).

Collectively, these remotely sensed data sources and website portals have started to transform widely held misperceptions that bushfire events – and their social, environmental and economic implications – are a particularly southern Australian phenomenon. On the basis of continental mapping of large fire-affected areas (> ~2–4 km²) for the period 1997–2004 derived from AVHRR imagery, Russell-Smith et al. (2007) observed that 76% of total mean fire affected area (508 000 km² p.a.) occurred in the northern savannas. Expressed as a proportion of continental land area defined by rainfall classes: a mean of 0.6% of southern Australia (53% of continental land area) was affected by fire each year; 5% of central Australia (25% of continent); and 23% of northern Australia (22% of continent). These general patterns are reflected also in updated (1997–2007) continental mapping of the frequency of large fires derived from AVHRR imagery (Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.2 Examples of fire mapping from the North Australia Fire Information website (www.firenorth. org.au): (a) an overview of the Top End region, (b) a subset of Kakadu and western Arnhem Land. Pink and red dots indicate fires in the previous 6 and 24 hours, respectively, with blue dots indicating fire locations over the preceding week. Coloured areas represent fire-affected areas mapped by month (see legend in the bottom right-hand corner of each map).

At a continental scale, fire extent is substantially explained by rainfall seasonality; that is the ratio of the amount of rainfall received in the wettest to driest quarter (Russell-Smith et al. 2007). In the monsoonal north, intense bursts of high summer rainfall, separated by an extended annual dry season (southern winter and spring) ‘drought’ – during which next to no rain may fall for 6 months or more – drive an annual cycle of elevated fire risk, alternating with periods of little or no fire risk. In the arid centre, erratically variable periods of above average rainfall and subsequent high rates of plant growth may alternate with dry periods extending over several years to decades. Susceptibility of landscapes to fire therefore changes over longer than annual cycles, but very large wildfires occur with some regularity: fuelled mostly by grassy fuels such as Spinifex. In parts of mesic southern Australia (especially forested regions), vulnerabilities increase with fuel accumulation over many years, so that when fires occur, mostly in summer, they can be extraordinarily intense.

Figure 1.3 Frequency of large fire-affected areas (>~2–4 km²) derived from AVHRR imagery, 1997–2007. North of the line indicates the tropical savannas region as defined by the Tropical Savannas Cooperative Research Centre.

For the tropical savannas (Figure 1.3), mean annual rainfall declines rapidly from more than 2000 mm in parts of the far north to about 500 mm in southern regions (Figure 1.4). The annual mean extent of large fires follows this general trend (Figure 1.5). Significantly, modelling of fire extent with a range of biophysical variables (e.g. antecedent rainfall, or fire, in previous year(s); or land use) suggests that rainfall is sufficiently reliable in the north to support annually recurrent burning (Russell-Smith et al. 2007). With declining, less-reliable annual rainfall, fire propagation relies on cumulative antecedent rainfall for the development of adequate fuel loads and fuel continuity (Allan and Southgate 2002; Meyer 2004).

A critical salient feature of contemporary savanna fire regimes concerns the predominance of fires occurring in the latter part of the dry season: typically under severe fire weather conditions (periodically strong south-easterly winds, high temperatures, low humidities and fully cured fuels). For example, of the annual mean 351 000 km² of the tropical savannas region affected by large fires over the period 1997–2007 (Figure 1.3), 67% occurred in the late dry season months of August–November. Fire regimes dominated by frequent, large, late dry season fires are commonplace in many regions of northern Australia, especially the Kimberley region in the north-west, the Top End of the Northern Territory, and western Cape York Peninsula (Figure 1.3). Contemporary north Australian fire regimes are having significant impacts on regional biodiversity values, and have significant implications for greenhouse gas emission estimates and related carbon dynamics (Chapters 8, 9, 12 and 13).

Figure 1.4 Mean annual rainfall distribution, 1976–2006 (Bureau of Meteorology).

Of particular relevance here, ‘prescribed burning of savannas’ is listed as an accountable activity under the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol, and although only recently ratified by Australia, Australia’s National Greenhouse Gas Inventory (NGGI) reports annually on savanna burning emissions. Typically, accountable greenhouse gas emissions annually contribute between 1 and 3% of Australia’s NGGI (AGO 2007). However, following international convention, Australia’s NGGI considers only emissions of the accountable greenhouse gases methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) – CO2 itself is not accounted for because it is assumed (often incorrectly, see Cook et al. 2005; Chapter 12) that CO2 emissions in one burning season are negated by vegetation growth in subsequent growing seasons (IPCC 1997). Nevertheless, CO2, together with more reactive species (e.g. the ozone precursors, comprising CO, volatile organic compounds and oxides of nitrogen) that are released into the atmosphere over a typically long burning season are likely to have a substantial impact on regional atmospheric composition, and its inter-annual variability.

Figure 1.5 Contemporary Australian fire seasonality and extent, summarised in classes defined from Australian rainfall records 1969–2004, and fire mapping derived from AVHRR imagery 1997–2004; refer to Russell-Smith et al. (2007) for details.

Achieving significant greenhouse gas emissions abatement, and more effective savanna landscape fire management generally, are thus components of the same integral problem – how do we practically and economically reduce the incidence and extent of contemporary late dry season wildfires?

THE ECOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL LANDSCAPES

Why has it proved so difficult to manage Australia’s savanna landscapes to avert unwelcome change, despite the absence of intense population pressures?

Ecology

Savanna environments are relatively intact structurally and many areas are recognised for their important biodiversity values, including major centres where there are many endemic plants and animals that occur nowhere else (Woinarski et al. 2007a). However, there have been losses of ecological function – chiefly evidenced in biodiversity declines – at a number of levels and across large areas (Woinarski et al. 2001; Franklin et al. 2005). Scattered richer patches of the landscape are asked to maintain natural production, but at the same time support economic (agricultural and pastoral) production. More resilient and reliably productive environments (such as wetlands) are valued highly by many different interests or sectors (Jonauskus 1996). Despite increasing demand for water, our rivers are mostly unregulated. Many rivers carry high wet season flows, but most cease flowing during parts of the annual dry season. As a consequence, primary industries (agriculture and mining) rely heavily on groundwater extraction: even in the high rainfall areas.

Temperatures are uniformly high, and often very high. Rainfall is intensely seasonal (wet–dry tropics) with no equivalent to the more equable wet tropics of the east coast of Australia. In the seasonal tropics, the timing of the onset and cessation of wet conditions is highly unpredictable. Evaporation rates greatly exceed precipitation for most of the year. Hence the length of the growing season is highly unpredictable, but often short. Extreme weather events (storms and cyclones) are common and recur on a range of spatial and temporal scales. Landscapes are old, frequently reworked and highly weathered. Soils are often of low fertility or low water-holding capacity and, in many settings, highly erodible and so limiting for agriculture (Woinarksi and Dawson 2002).

Many areas of northern Australia contain exploitable concentrations of minerals and fossil energy, some of which are already in production and many others under development. Mineral extraction often involves relatively low-grade deposits requiring movement of large quantities of overlying or intervening rock, which build long-term problems of acid formation during the subsequent oxidation of waste and drainage from it (e.g. Harries 1997). On-site processing can add to pressures on water availability and also compromise water quality.

Society

It is more difficult to present a comprehensive statement of the social and economic character of the savannas. Most routinely produced demographic and socioeconomic data are presented to jurisdictional or regional boundaries that do not align with biophysical domains. The outline we present here is therefore based on a number of individual studies and one-off estimates made over the last few years.

The human population of the savannas is relatively small (495 000 in 2006), widely dispersed and 18.7% Indigenous. Average population density of 0.29 persons.km–2 is low by Australian (2.5 persons.km–2) and global standards, and lower still away from major centres. Excluding the larger centres of Darwin and Townsville, there is 1 person for each 700 ha (0.14 persons.km–2). By any standard, the tropical savannas of Australia are sparsely inhabited (Taylor et al. 2006) and the scope to marshal human resources for intensive land management correspondingly weak.

The proportion of the population that is Indigenous is much greater outside the major centres. In the Kimberley, nearly half of the population is Indigenous; in the Northern Territory savannas outside Darwin, it is more than 70%; and in very remote regions generally, more than 90%. Nationally, 45.4% of the population living in areas classified by the Australian Bureau of Statistics as very remote is Indigenous (Taylor 2006). In the Northern Territory, most indigenous people (70%) live on lands held under Aboriginal communal title (Taylor 2003). As highlighted by Taylor (2006), this means that Indigenous people and their institutions predominate over most of the Australian land mass, and the northern savannas in particular. The closeness and durability of association between people and place – and connected obligations to land and dependence on it – are recognised over much of north Australia in use of terms such as ‘on country and ‘caring for country’ to indicate much more than location.

The savanna population is growing, with an increase of 8% between the 1996 and 2001 Censuses. The rate of increase is higher among the Indigenous population, which grew by 14.9% compared with 6.5% in the non-Indigenous community. Non-Indigenous population growth is confined largely to the major centres. Projections to 2021 see a continuation of higher rates of growth in the Indigenous population (25.7%) over this period than the non-Indigenous population (14.8%) (Taylor et al. 2006).

At regional scales, rates of population growth are highly variable, both through time and by location: being strongly influenced by shifts in immigration and emigration of non-Indigenous people tracking employment and other economic opportunities. Sites of high local Indigenous population growth are often poorly matched to areas of likely job growth (Taylor 2003).

Morbidity and mortality rates are unacceptably high among the Indigenous population, and proving resistant to simple correction (Burgess et al. 2005; SCRGSP 2003). Educational systems have broken down in many remote areas, so that many Indigenous people suffer from poor literacy and numeracy and experience difficulty in taking advantage of any mainstream employment opportunities that may be available in the regions (Collins 1999).

Compounding this educational deficit, the savanna is subject to other knowledge deficits. The formal scientific understanding of regional environments and natural resources is weaker than in more densely settled jurisdictions because of historical and contemporary limitations on technical capacity and research investment. Our understanding of regional human demography is limited by dependence on Census data aggregated to inappropriate boundaries. Regional economies are weakly characterised and their dynamics poorly understood.

In contrast to these formal knowledge deficits, many Indigenous people have very detailed knowledge of the landscapes and resources for which they are responsible, but mechanisms for applying this and other local knowledge are poorly developed and often contested (see e.g. Brook and McLachlan 2005; Gilchrist et al. 2005).

Economy

Like its ecology, a key defining attribute of the mainstream savanna economy is its geographic patchiness and variability through time. Volatility is associated with low enterprise diversity, dependence on variable commodity prices and extractive industries, and relatively small size (e.g. NTG 2006). A recent (2006) estimate of gross incomes from mineral extraction in the savannas (excluding coal) is about $6 billion p.a. Pastoralism – with a total herd of nearly 5 million cattle – generates incomes of about $1.4 billion annually.

Tourism – which is highly dependent on access to natural environments and related activities such as recreational fishing – generates expenditure exceeding $2 billion p.a. and is an important source of employment, although in some locations costs of servicing tourists may be high compared with benefits captured locally (Greiner et al. 2004). Approximately 8% of the savanna population is engaged in tourism or hospitality industries, but employees are mostly non-Indigenous.

The formal savanna economy is very open, which is reflected in a very high ratio of imports and exports to gross product, with little local production of manufactured, or otherwise highly processed, items and limited value-adding to exports. Correlation between unemployment and employment rates is weak: reflecting gaps in local and regional labour markets and consequent importation of skilled and semi-skilled labour during economic upswings. Many savanna residents enjoy well-above-average incomes, but a mostly unemployed and growing regional Indigenous population is on chronically low to very low incomes (e.g. Taylor 2003).

It follows that, at the regional scale, multipliers (measures of the extent to which money circulates and stimulates additional activity in the economy) from activities such as pastoralism and mining are low, because local communities are often poorly placed to provide the goods or services sought by these industries, including labour. Multipliers from public sector investments in services such as health are substantially greater (Stoeckl et al. 2007).

Defence facilities and their personnel make a large contribution to economic activity. There is a strong general dependence on public expenditure, which is well above national per capita averages. A low capacity to raise revenue locally, combined with the costs imposed by remoteness, mean that maintaining services, especially in the regions, depends on national fiscal equalisation policies implemented through the Commonwealth Grants Commission (Morris 2003). Total subventions are based on the size of the population requiring services. It follows that funds needed to manage issues influenced more strongly by land area and biophysical pressures are often inadequate (e.g. Altman et al. 2007).

Operating mostly separately from the mainstream economy is an Indigenous customary economy based on direct non-commercial exploitation of natural resources (Altman 1987). That economy is stronger in the remoter areas, which there intersects with the mainstream economy chiefly through production of arts and crafts, which often draws on continued associations with country and the use of natural products (Altman 2003). In many parts of the savannas, Indigenous society has been substantially supported by welfare payments from the Australian Government. Some critical parts of that support are being withdrawn or restructured, so that need for productive engagement with the mainstream economy is increased.

Land use

The great majority of the northern savanna is used ostensibly for pastoral production, especially the grazing of cattle (Bos taurus and Bos indicus), and also sheep in parts of western Queensland (Figure 1.6). Most of this land is leasehold; that is, leased from state and Northern Territory governments. Despite the very small area used for mining purposes, such land use constitutes by far the greatest economic return to the regional economy (see above).

The predominance of Indigenous people living outside the major towns and associated rapid population growth is reflected increasingly in changing patterns of legal ownership of, and interests in, land. Recent available data indicate that around 19% of the tropical savannas region is presently owned or managed by Indigenous people (Figure 1.7a): ranging from 35% of savannas in the Northern Territory, to 6% in Queensland. Additionally, Indigenous interests in land – as expressed through determinations of and applications made for Native Title under the Commonwealth of Australia’s Native Title Act 1993 – indicate that, as of May 2007: determinations of Native Title have been granted for a further 7%, predominantly in Western Australia (Figure 1.7b); and Registered or Scheduled Native Title applications (i.e. still to be determined) cover more than 50% of the tropical savannas region, ranging from 41% of Western Australian savannas to 59% in Queensland (Figure 1.7c).

Summary

These observations, although sketchy and incomplete, illustrate some important features of land and resource management in northern Australia. Low human population density and weak infrastructure compromise capacity to manage pervasive damaging processes such as wildfire that require active intervention to manage their impacts (Whitehead 1999; Whitehead et al. 2002). However, the north Australian jurisdictions have historically found it hard to fund interventions demanding coordinated action over large areas, because their funding sources and models for allocating funds are often based on population.

Figure 1.6 Generalised land use (Commonwealth of Australia 2007).

Mainstream economic developments are rarely capable of complementing or substituting for government intervention. Developments such as mines are patchy in space and time and local or regional interests often find it difficult to connect to them. Immigrants responding successfully to development opportunities may stay for relatively short periods and export benefits as savings. As a consequence, the economic and related social benefits and environmental costs of savanna development can be inequitably distributed, with many Indigenous people remaining severely disadvantaged, especially in the regions, and despite being ‘land rich’.

Disadvantage for Indigenous people is compounded because distinct ‘cultural’ values may not be easily communicated and so receive inadequate consideration in areas subject to development. In most parts of the savannas, it is possible to identify people with particular ties to, and obligations to care for, sites subject to development. It is nearly always necessary to deal with complex cross-cultural issues and competing interests. Despite the sparseness of population, there is no terra nullius.

In part, this book is about new approaches to fill the gap between demonstrable need for active coordinated management of savanna environments, and the financial and human capacity to intervene effectively.

GOALS OF THIS BOOK

As we have seen, Australian regional perspectives on, and approaches to, the management of fire are strongly influenced by interplay among the frequency of fire, its intensity, the assets that are put at risk, and the resources that are available to assert control. In densely settled southern Australia, the dominant objective is to protect human life and property from the infrequent, but very intense, wildfires that can invade urban or peri-urban landscapes or smaller rural settlements. In central Australia, occasional huge fires sweep through the region: putting at risk built assets, pastures and the biota. In the last decade, the mainland extinction of an endangered macropod, the Mala (Lagorchestes hirsutus), was attributed to such a fire (Woinarski et al. 2007b). In the tropical savannas of northern Australia, which encompass about a quarter of the nation’s land area (or more than 1.9 million km²), fire is frequent, occurs over more than 6 months of each year, affects large areas and varies greatly in intensity. Instead of treating occurrence of fire as aberrant or as evidence of breakdown of flawed management systems, responses to fire risks should focus on the reasons for fire use and the ways in which fire’s active application can produce and, indeed, may be essential for delivering conservation and social benefits of local, regional, and national significance.

Figure 1.7 Current status of Aboriginal interest in land. (a) Aboriginal-owned or managed lands (Source: mapped from land parcel data provided by Indigenous Land Corporation 2008). (b) Determinations of Native Title (Commonwealth of Australia 2008a). (c) Native Title applications (Commonwealth of Australia 2008b).

Unfortunately, regional diversity is not always reflected in fire policy, and law imposed from mostly southern Australian capital cites: where approaches are dictated by an ongoing antagonism between threats to life and property presented by infrequent highly destructive fires, and demands to forgo regular fuel reduction burning in the interests of aesthetics, health effects on local human populations, and biodiversity conservation. Because fires are viewed as aberrations, too little attention is paid to the influence of fire management on carbon dynamics at the national scale and implications for global warming.

This book is about redressing this imbalance. We seek to articulate a distinctly northern Australian understanding of and approach to the management of fire, matched to the biophysical and social realities of the north. We examine in detail the biophysical and social determinants of fire regimes in one of the most fire-prone regions of a flammable continent. This book is also about the way the feedbacks from those fire patterns in turn influence the structure and function of the north’s ecological and social systems. We particularly seek to develop understanding of how – despite the many obstacles to effective management associated with remoteness, sparse population and limited transport and other infrastructure – management of fire can be improved for positive ecological and social outcomes over a large part of the Australian land mass.

The rationale for this treatment of fire management challenges and options in northern Australia derives from a number of key propositions. They are:

The natural and cultural assets of north Australian landscapes are highly valued by the Australian and international public and there is both a legal and moral obligation to protect those assets from ill-considered or inadvertent change.

Fire has shaped, and continues to influence, the structure and composition of northern Australian vegetation and other components of the biota, and hence the ecosystem services available from the savannas.

Contemporary fire regimes differ from those experienced in recent history, and in prehistory, and so are likely to be important contributors to change. An important driver of shifts in fire-management behaviour has been the movement of many Indigenous people away from their lands and the consequent breakdown of skilled fire management over large parts of the landscape.

Contemporary fire regimes in many parts of the savannas are demonstrably detrimental to natural and cultural assets and, in some cases, the damage is severe.

Knowledge of the spatial and temporal features of fire regimes needed to redress damage is growing, but remains limited. Nonetheless, it is recognised that total exclusion of fire from all or large parts of the savannas is impracticable and probably undesirable.

Irrespective of decisions about the desirability of different regimes in different parts of the landscape, capacity to implement effective change by asserting management control is presently limited, and this constraint is unlikely to be redressed in the short term by substantial increases in entirely public funding.

Improved understanding of the ways in which residents of remote northern Australia, and users of the regions resources, can make greater contributions by choosing and implementing more favourable fire regimes is therefore critical.

Indigenous people presently make up most of the non-urban population of north Australia: they own much of the land, have interests in most of the remainder, and their populations are growing rapidly. Indigenous residents have particular knowledge of, and cultural obligations for, the considered use of fire in land and resource management. Indigenous people will play a major role in determining and implementing improved fire management for north Australia.

The capacity of the north Australian population to participate in formal systems of fire management is compromised by low educational standards in many regions, and weakness of other critical institutions.

Effective management of fire for achieving an array of environmental, social and economic goals demands an unprecedented level of collaboration among private and public sectors, Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, which, in turn, will depend on building new institutions and organisations, as well as better use of existing institutions and structures.

We consider each of these propositions and use them, and connected arguments, to frame practical management models matched to the existing and projected circumstances of northern Australia and the people. We illustrate many aspects of our treatment by reference to the particular fire-management issues arising in a remote, culturally rich region of high biodiversity in western Arnhem Land in the Top End of the Northern Territory, and the creative methods that local people, researchers, government and private enterprises have developed jointly to deal with those issues.

A large part of our treatment is necessarily about biophysical aspects of fire: accumulation of fuel; sources of ignition; fire behaviour; the resultant spatial and temporal patterns of fire; impacts on landforms, vegetation and wildlife; effects on greenhouse gas emissions and carbon dynamics; the ways that those patterns might be modified by human intervention; benefits from interventions; and approaches to measuring all of these attributes and issues. We particularly focus on options for controlling greenhouse gas emissions on a range of timescales. But, in positing options for human intervention to improve outcomes from management of fire, it is essential also to consider the plausibility of the interventions proposed.

We approach the question of plausibility in several ways. First, we closely examine the social history of northern Australia (especially the Top End) to improve understanding of the way different groups interpreted their actions and influence on patterns of fire and their benefits. Second, informed by this historical analysis, we consider relevant aspects of contemporary northern Australia society to assess options to secure greater engagement of the present population in shared approaches to fire management. Third, and perhaps most importantly, we consider the relationship between the well-being of northern Australia’s human population and its use of fire. As well as examining closely how choices about fire use have in the past, and may in the future, directly influence livelihoods through effects on use of land and availability of resources, we also explore new opportunities that fire management may offer for some presently disadvantaged segments of the community to participate in the mainstream economy, and so build new capacity for continued improvement in fire-management performance. We consider the extent to which systems developed for fire management may underpin a larger suite of options for people in remote regions – with few other present or projected employment options – to deliver ecosystem services to regional, national and international markets.

ORGANISATION OF THIS BOOK

In 15 multi-authored chapters, this book deals with the key challenges and novel options for addressing chronic landscape-scale fire management issues in north Australian savannas through development of (1) collaborative, cross-cultural ‘two toolkit’ approaches, and (2) commercially supported environmental services programs.

The first section sketches the biophysical and social context of burning across northern Australia:

a sparsely populated region with few towns and limited infrastructure

a rapidly growing, but economically marginalised, decentralised Indigenous population with very substantial interests in, and customary responsibilities for, land

cattle production is by far the dominant extensive land use

mining and nature-based tourism provide the major economic drivers

as a consequence of this land use history, a vast relatively unmodified natural landscape, showing increasing indications that important components of the biota are suffering under prevailing management regimes.

We begin by showing that the Australian view of fire and its management has been almost exclusively shaped by relatively infrequent, but sometimes catastrophic, wildfires in rural and peri-urban areas of southern Australia – explaining why Australia has yet to come to terms with the realities of fire management in its remoter regions (Chapter 1). We provide ecological, demographic and socioeconomic sketches of the area of northern Australia known as the tropical savannas. We describe prevailing fire regimes and relate them to the biophysical and social features of the region that drive the present patterns.

Having established the broad context, we then narrow our focus: first to the Top End of the Northern Territory and ultimately to the area of western Arnhem Land, which is the principal subject of the book. A number of contributors set out what is known of the social history of the region and discuss how that history has shaped contemporary patterns of human settlement, and the distribution and behaviour of people in the landscape. David Ritchie (Chapter 2) describes how from the mid-1800s interactions between the settler and Indigenous populations led to quite rapid depopulation of large areas and interruption of long-established patterns of fire use. Introduced disease was probably the most potent influence on the size of the Indigenous population, with violence between settlers and Indigenous people and among Indigenous groups a secondary factor. Demands for access to resources held by settlers – particularly tobacco – strongly influenced the geographic distribution of the remaining Indigenous population, with many aggregating around mining settlements, pastoral stations and moving as groups with mobile parties hunting buffalo for their hides. An important conclusion from his work is reaffirmation of the centrality of fire use to Indigenous life, but a failure of settlers to respect, or even to recognise, its importance in meeting obligations to lands and so asserting rights over country.

Robert Levitus (Chapter 3) picks up elements of this history to describe in more detail changes in Indigenous life and fire use in the Kakadu and western Arnhem Land regions to the east of Darwin. He particularly emphasises the patchiness of resource availability and the influence this had on patterns of movement through the landscape. Freshwater wetlands developing west of the Arnhem Land Plateau more than 1000 years ago attracted people from many parts of the surrounding landscape, including the Arnhem Land stone country. It appears that groups moved from the stone country to the floodplains in the early dry season and returned to elevated sites during the wet. Post-settlement populations fringing the plateau were also much reduced by disease, but there is little evidence of the organised violence (massacres) that occurred in some other areas. He argues that the buffalo industry, which operated more or less continuously during the first half of the 20th century, created more benign interactions because the white hunters provided resources sought by Indigenous people, who brought skills and labour essential to the industry. His treatment concludes with description of the formal recognition and development of customarily informed Indigenous fire management practices in present-day Kakadu National Park and, in particular, ongoing tensions between the fire management aspirations of Indigenous landowners and the expectations and institutional requirements of management staff.

In Chapter 4, Peter Cooke explores the histories of the Wardekken – people of the rock country – who used, and still use, the western areas of the Arnhem Land escarpment as a centre of activity, even though they travelled outside the escarpment to exploit seasonal abundance of fish or other foods and resources. He examines post-settlement influences on occupation of the stone country: emphasising the importance of buffalo, mining (tin), tobacco (baki) and exotic religion (Jesus) on the ‘creation of a modern wilderness’, which is only now being re-occupied and the walking tracks and trade routes re-established. He describes the impacts of this emptiness on the country, motivations for return and the process of reoccupation from the 1970s to the present. He describes the central role that fire use and management has played in the process of re-occupation.

Murray Garde, Lofty Bardayal Nadjamerrek and other Indigenous collaborators (Chapter 5) then set down an Indigenous ‘language of fire’; a description of the behaviour and effects of fire and the behaviour and intent of the people who applied it to the management of their country and its resources. This remarkable linguistic and historical summary of exchanges of information and opinion – recorded over a period of more than 10 years – reveals patterns of Indigenous life in the stone country that persisted despite the pervasive, and sometimes extreme, social dislocations described in earlier chapters.