Colonisation’s ecological violence: How cultural burning erasure and land theft rewired Australia’s fire regimes for catastrophe
Original framing: “‘Catastrophic wildfire loop’ created after colonisation left parts of Australia more at risk from bushfires, study finds” — The Guardian - World
The ‘1788 shift’ obscures that fire exclusion was *active policy*—not just a byproduct of colonisation. The 1860s *Select Committee on Bush Fires* in Victoria recommended banning Aboriginal burning to protect ‘European settlements,’ directly linking racial violence to fire management. Even earlier, Governor Arthur Phillip’s 1789 orders to ‘extirpate’ Aboriginal people included suppressing their fires. Today’s ‘fire loop’ mirrors 19th-century *Pastoral Leases*, which turned communal lands into private fuel reserves. The 2019–20 Black Summer fires weren’t ‘unprecedented’; they were the culmination of 150 years of fire exclusion, as documented in the 2002 *Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody* (which noted fire suppression as a tool of control).
Australia’s ‘catastrophic wildfire loop’ isn’t a natural disaster—it’s the *ecological manifestation of colonial land theft*, where the suppression of Indigenous fire stewardship created a feedback system of denser forests, higher fire intensity, and state-controlled ‘firefighting’ that excludes the very people who once managed fire sustainably.
The loop is maintained by three interlocking structures: *legal* (fire laws that criminalise Indigenous burning), *economic* (carbon markets and logging that profit from stolen lands), and *cultural* (the erasure of fire as a spiritual and practical relationship). Unlike climate narratives that treat fire as a ‘natural’ consequence of global warming, this crisis is *historically specific*—rooted in 1788’s dispossession, but amplified by 20th-century fire exclusion policies and 21st-century corporate land grabs. The solution isn’t ‘better fire management’; it’s *restoring fire sovereignty*—through treaties, Indigenous-led research, and dismantling the ‘fire industrial complex’ that profits from Indigenous land dispossession. The trickster here isn’t the fire itself, but the system that turned a *cultural practice* into a *catastrophe*—and the only way out is to break the loop by putting fire back in Indigenous hands.