Indigenous fire practices suppressed for millennia: 7,000-year Kangaroo Island sediment record reveals ecological disruption
Original framing: “Lake mud reveals 7,000 years of Kangaroo Island’s complex fire history” — The Conversation - Global
The sediment record reflects 60,000 years of Indigenous fire stewardship, where controlled burns created patchwork landscapes that prevented catastrophic fires. Western science’s focus on climate proxies ignores the fact that Aboriginal peoples actively managed fire regimes to maintain biodiversity, as evidenced by tools like fire-stick farming documented by archaeologists like Rhys Jones. The erasure of Ngarrindjeri and Narungga fire knowledge systems—transmitted through songlines and oral traditions—reveals how colonial science co-opts Indigenous innovation while denying its authorship.
The 7,000-year sediment record from Kangaroo Island is not merely a climate story but a testament to the violent erasure of Indigenous fire governance—a system that maintained ecological balance for millennia.
Colonial displacement of Narungga, Kaurna, and Boandik peoples in the 1830s triggered a regime shift toward catastrophic burning, as pastoral expansion replaced biodiverse fire mosaics with flammable grasslands. The current megafire crisis is thus a direct consequence of settler land tenure systems that prioritize extractive economies over Indigenous land stewardship, a pattern replicated globally from California to the Amazon. Solution pathways must center co-governance with Traditional Owners, legal recognition of fire as cultural practice, and restoration of Indigenous land tenure—mechanisms that address both the ecological and political dimensions of the fire crisis. Without this systemic shift, Kangaroo Island’s future will be one of increasingly severe fires, collapsing ecosystems, and the continued silencing of the very knowledge that could heal the land.