The domestic fire interacted with other tools. Careful charring hardened digging sticks and spears. Heated waxes and resins made a useful glue for hafting. Warming a spear shaft could help in straightening it. Heating bark in ashes made it easier to mold into a canoe. Fire was probably used in preparing flint, perhaps even in quarrying it. Ashes served as a poultice for wounds and snakebites, for body decoration, for disguising the human odor. Fire cauterized wounds and assisted with the healing of ritual incisions. Fire applied to the base of trees replaced the axe, generating fuel for more hearths and firesticks. And fire made light. It gave humans the nighttime for story, ceremony, and companionship.
The hearth fire defined the human world, for through it Aborigines remade Old Australia. Thus, while Aboriginal vocabularies contained many words for fire, they carefully distinguished the hearth fire from the bushfire. The hearth fire was the origin of all other anthropogenic fires; without it human society was unthinkable. Europeans often marveled that, during inclement weather, Aborigines would huddle around a fire rather than forage or hunt, that they would rather go without food than without fire. No less marvelous was the fact that Aborigines would kindle multiple hearth fires on even the hottest days. “Whatever the weather …,” Bonwick concluded emphatically, “a fire was essential.” During the height of the Black War, Aboriginal Tasmanians listed the prohibition against fire—essential to avoid detection by marauding Europeans—as among the worst of the privations forced upon them. Without fire life was too hard, too cruel, too frightening to be endured.15
“THE WHOLE COUNTRY IS SHORTLY IN A BLAZE”
The constant rubbing of nomadic tribes against a tindered Australia was itself an environmental firedrill that littered the landscape with smoldering ignitions. A semipermanent campsite could be insulated from accidental fire by a preparatory burn; but those sites were only a fraction of the chronic fire setting that occurred, and even those burns typically ranged far beyond the actual site of occupation. When traveling, Aborigines rarely extinguished their ephemeral fires after they served their purpose. The fires simmered, their domain restricted only by the vagaries of the weather and the patterns of previous burning that limited their access to fuels.
To the casual eye this habitual unconcern with secondary consequences seemed careless. His interest “often aroused” by bushfires, Leichhardt pondered the Aborigines of Queensland “who light fires all over the place to cook their food but leave them unextinguished.” In the early days of the Swan River colony a reporter for the Perth Gazette was “persuaded” that “the origin of these fires is not at all to be attributed to any malicious intent at all on the part of the natives; they resort to their accustomed practice of lighting a fire in the bush, for the purpose of cooking and from the bush, being highly inflammable at this season, it extends with resistless violence.” In addition to their cooking fires and signaling fires, George Moore noted that Aborigines tossed aside individual firesticks when they no longer needed them. “The half-clad native starts with the lighted bark; as the day advances the warmth of the sun renders artificial heat unnecessary; the bark is discarded … A breeze comes … and the whole country is shortly in a blaze.”16
Signal fires were no less common and no less likely to be abandoned. Explorers rarely advanced into lands unwatched. Many of the smokes that announced the presence of natives to them were in fact announcements by Aborigines of the presence of the exploring party. Thus as Robert Logan Jack “approached the site of the old diggings, signal fires broke out on the Twelve Apostles, in advance of us in such a manner as to leave no doubt in our minds, that the ABORIGINALS (themselves unseen) were honouring our progress with their serious attention.” Some observers noted how a person “entering another clan’s territory lit a fire and placed green branches on it” so the smoke would alert the local Aborigines that the party was on a peaceful mission. Captain Hamelin reported from Tasmania how “one man was walking in front and carrying a brand with which he set fire to everything as they went along,” an act Hamelin understood as “customary when they want to stave off or begin a war among themselves …”17
With the firestick and combustibles usually handy, signal fires became a bush telegraph. The techniques were again continental. On Cape York Jack McLaren related how the Aborigines would overlay a flaming fire with green boughs, which proceeded to smoke heavily, then controlled the output with sheets of bark. In the Kimberleys A. B. Facey, lost and prostrate with illness, watched as three Aborigines “piled all the green bushes and scrub onto the fire which made a thick white smoke. Then one of them took the saddle cloth from Dinnie and kept putting it on and off the fire.” Although Europeans puzzled over the complex messages that such simple acts conveyed, the explanation is probably that the smoke only confirmed texts that were agreed upon in advance. In areas barren of distinguishing landmarks, a smoke column imposed a geodetic order to which foraging parties could orient themselves. Flames from coastal fires—pandamus palms made a favorite torch—similarly guided fishing canoes at night.18
While special smokes could convey special messages, the Aborigines themselves were a traveling smoke. Smokes blazed their trails, and to the fires that they abandoned Aborigines added others in a deliberate strategy of broadcast burning to assist travel through tall grass or dense scrub, to flush out game, and to sustain a preferred habitat. The great corridors of Aboriginal transit were broad paths of fire. And since humans need water frequently, those paths tended to follow watercourses or connected waterholes. “A great party of natives appeared to be travelling up the creek,” A. C. Gregory jotted into his diary, “as fresh fires are constantly seen to the northeast along its course.” Charles Sturt wrote that “although the river line was lost in the distance, it was as truly pointed out by the fires of the natives, which rose in upright columns into the sky, as if it had been marked by the trees upon its banks.” In his interminable journals Robinson reported open thoroughfares through otherwise dense Tasmanian scrub, the vegetation change corresponding to frequent transit and burning by Aborigines. His companions shunned unburned areas, on one occasion warning Robinson that he would never emerge from an almost impenetrable, unburned thicket. Elsewhere, even when “the country was a succession of hills covered with thick forest,” it was “rendered tolerable easy travelling by the recent burning of the bush by the natives.” In this way throughout Australia broadcast burning, by intent or accident, coincided with regions of travel. For a continent inhabited by a congeries of nomadic tribes, that realm was enormous.19
In Australia, as Geoffrey Blainey has imagined, “every day for millions of days countless fires had been lit or enlarged for countless purposes, and many of those fires had unintended effects.” Rhys Jones has estimated that in the better populated areas of Australia, an area of thirty square kilometers would have supported a band of roughly forty people. “Assuming that on average, three foraging parties of various types left camp per day, that each lit ten bushfires and that this happened on only half of the days of the year, then within that area, no less than 5,000 separate bush fires would be lit each year.” And this, he considered, is “a highly conservative estimate.” 20
Their kindling multiplied by several orders of magnitude the frequency of natural ignitions, and they imposed, even as they obeyed, new rhythms and new patterns. Increasingly, the geography of humans defined the geography of fire: the more humans, the more fire. Their traveling fires laid down a matrix within which lightning fire had to function. Fire seasons tended to follow the seasonal migrations of Aboriginal firesticks.
“TILLED HIS LAND AND CULTIVATED … WITH FIRE”
Other sites—neither camps nor corridors of travel—demanded additional fire practices. These