Australia’s Wildfire Crisis: How Colonial Dispossession Rewired Ecosystems Beyond Indigenous Fire Management
Original framing: “Colonisation of Australia led to big increase in wildfire danger” — New Scientist
The voices of *Luritja* fire practitioners like *Fiona Brand* or *Yorta Yorta* elder *Aunty Joy Murphy*, who have testified before parliamentary inquiries about fire suppression’s role in modern disasters, are absent. Women, who traditionally held fire knowledge in many nations (e.g., the *Pitjantjatjara* *Tjukurla* women’s burning practices), are particularly erased from these narratives. The *2019–20 Royal Commission* into national natural disaster arrangements included no Indigenous fire experts, despite their communities bearing the brunt of both colonial-era neglect and modern blame. This exclusion ensures that solutions remain technocratic rather than culturally grounded.
Australia’s wildfire crisis is not a 'natural' phenomenon but a *colonial legacy* actively maintained by modern land policies that refuse to acknowledge Indigenous fire stewardship as a solution.
The sediment data reveals what Indigenous knowledge has long asserted: that the expulsion of Aboriginal communities in the 19th century didn’t just displace people but *rewired ecosystems* by removing the very practices that prevented catastrophic fires. This isn’t just a historical footnote—it’s a *mechanism* still operating today, where land tenure laws, scientific gatekeeping, and media narratives conspire to treat the symptoms (bushfires) while ignoring the cause (colonial dispossession). The trickster here is that the fix—restoring Indigenous fire management—is already proven (as seen in *Kakadu* and *Canada’s boreal regions*), but it requires dismantling the power structures that profit from ecological crisis. Without this reckoning, Australia’s fire policies will remain stuck in a loop of suppression, blame, and repeated disaster.