Kimberley fire management benefiting Aboriginal culture, conservation and pastoralists
Aboriginal people, scientists, pastoralists and emergency services are finding that working together is the key to controlling bushfires in the Kimberley.
There's a lot more to the new bushfire prevention signs on the West Kimberley's Dampier Peninsula than just words seeking attention. The signs have been carefully designed to penetrate their target market with a message that resonates.
But this is not a strategy designed in a corporate boardroom by a team of advertising executives and marketing psychologists. The design comes out of a grass-roots process created by local people, and it's an approach delivering dramatic changes in parts of the Kimberley on a massive scale.
The roadside signs were developed collaboratively between the Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES) and local Aboriginal people. Students from the Ardyloon School at One Arm Point worked with the Bardi Jawi Rangers to produce drawings and a fire management message in the Bardi language. 'Moorrooloo noorrd, gorna booroo' means 'small fire, good country' and the sign features fire sensitive bush tucker such as the gubinge tree to emphasise the connection between culture and bushfire management.
Chris Sampi is a Bardi Jawi Ranger who lives in Djarrindjin on the Dampier Peninsula. He says that when DFES Kimberley District Officer, Lee Valance, asked locals to develop the sign it helped get the message through to the community.
"Lee Valance came along and instead of going to communities and just talk and talk and put up little signs which people can't see... we are more or less teaching ourselves...and also looking after our country," says Mr Sampi.
It's this process of collaboration that has already produced dramatic benefits for Aboriginal people, pastoralists and conservation scientists in the central and north Kimberley. A program called 'Ecofire' coordinated by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy which owns the Mornington Sanctuary in the Central Kimberley, brings land managers of a four million hectare area together to manage fire.
When Dr Sarah Legge started trying to control fire on the 3,000 square kilometre Mornington property ten years ago, she found that the area was too small for effective management.
"We were putting a lot of effort into trying to manage fire on Mornington and we were really struggling against these massive tidal wave type tsunami-fires that were coming from outside the property. We realised that we really can't change fire patterns on this property unless we're changing them next door, and next door to that," she says.
But what does a conservation scientist trying to protect biodiversity have in common with neighbouring cattle pastoralists and Aboriginal communities? When it comes to fire management the answer is 'quite a lot.'
Fire management in Northern Australia is all about using small cooler fires early in the dry season to prevent large hot fires late in the dry season.
"When fires burn late in the dry season when it's very hot, dry and windy they cover huge areas; they can go up to a million hectares," says Dr Legge.
These hot fires are devastating for the wildlife as they wipe out the habitat that Mornington Sanctuary was established to preserve, and they also completely wipe out the pasture grass that the Kimberley cattle industry depends on.
Strategic burning early in the dry season when conditions don't allow fires to engulf the entire landscape, produces small burnt areas which act as fire breaks. The burnt areas stop the development of the gigantic late dry season fires and protects habitat.
"So we picked species and attributes of the landscape that we thought were being damaged by fire, and we've been measuring them each year to see if they're improving," says Dr Legge.
"And across the board, our measures of all of those indicators are improving."
But what's good for wildlife is proving to be of dramatic benefit to pastoralists. Before this landscape scale approach to fire management, cattle stations were experiencing a catastrophic loss of pasture from massive late dry season hot fires every second year on average. But by working with their neighbours, pastoralists have reduced this to a less than one in ten year event and increased the carrying capacity of their properties producing real economic benefits.
"But that's not actually why most of them joined up, I don't think," says Dr Legge. "It's actually because they were interested in reducing the damage to country and in helping wildlife."
"They're living and operating on the land; of course they're emotionally attached to it. And with the Indigenous communities, likewise, they just have a very deep interest in the health and vigour of the country and they just want to look after it."
It's this common ground that has brought together a seemingly disparate group of Kimberley people from pastoral properties to Aboriginal communities and conservation sanctuaries. Together they manage fire over four million hectares and the benefits are plain to see.
The successful fire management in the Kimberley highlights the importance of engaging local people in the management of their country. The Ecofire project wasn't delivered by a fly-in-fly-out bureaucrat. Dr Legge has lived and worked at Mornington for ten years now and says scientists, pastoralists and Aboriginal people have been able to work together because they are neighbours who know each other and recognise their mutual interest in looking after the land.
"I'm talking to neighbours and people I bump into every day for a whole host of reasons, so extending the conversation to include conservation related things isn't as hard as it would be if I just dropped in as a stranger."
An unexpected benefit of engaging the people who live on the country in the management of fire has been the reduction of accidental bushfires.
"Before we started the coordinated fire management most of the worst fires that were affecting the central and north Kimberley weren't lightning strikes which is a common misconception, they were actually caused by people. It could be a campfire that got away. It could be a spark off a grader blade from a road contractor. It could be people hunting and not really thinking about where the fire they started was going to end up," Dr Legge says.
"I don't think we're getting the same number of thoughtless ignitions as we did seven or eight years ago. Because people own the project, they own the fire patterns in the project area, so they're just a bit more careful."
While wildfire is regarded as one of the biggest threats to conservation, pastoralism and cultural values across Northern Australia, a small and diverse group of land managers have been able to reverse this trend in an area over half the size of Tasmania.
"I guess we all just keep busily going about doing it, but every now and then I do sit back and think 'My God, what a massive thing such a small group of people have achieved.'"