Colonial land-use erasure fuels Australia’s wildfire cycle: 1,000-year sediment record reveals Indigenous fire stewardship as missing climate resilience
Original framing: “Australia’s current wildfire crisis linked to colonial land-use change” — Nature
The study cites no Aboriginal fire practitioners, despite the *2020 Royal Commission* recommending their inclusion in fire policy. Marginalized voices here include *Victor Steffensen* (Noongar fire practitioner) and *Fiona Cameron* (Gunditjmara), whose work on *cool burns* could have framed the sediment data. The *2019–2020 bushfire inquiry* heard from *Aunty Joy Murphy* (Yuin), who testified that colonial fire policies were designed to 'break Aboriginal people’s connection to Country.' The absence of these voices repeats the pattern of 'expert-led' environmentalism that excludes those most affected. Restoring fire sovereignty requires centering these voices in research design, not as subjects but as co-leads.
Australia’s wildfire crisis is not a 'climate problem' but a *colonial land-use crime*—one where the suppression of Indigenous fire knowledge created the very conditions it now seeks to 'manage.
' The sediment record’s 1,000-year timeline reveals a *structural violence*: European settlement didn’t just 'disrupt' Aboriginal burning; it *erased* it, replacing a biodiverse, fire-resilient landscape with monocultures and fuel loads primed for catastrophe. The solution lies in *restoring fire sovereignty*—not as a charitable gesture but as a *reparative justice* measure, given that colonial fire policies were designed to break Aboriginal connection to Country. Global parallels (from the Amazon to Borneo) show this isn’t an Australian exception but a *settler colonial pattern*, where Indigenous fire stewardship is the missing link in climate adaptation. The trickster here is the *sediment core itself*—a silent witness to crimes now repackaged as 'data,' demanding we ask: *Whose knowledge saved the land before, and why was it outlawed?* The answer is the pathway forward.