Burning Bush. Stephen J. Pyne

of the coast of the mainland.” Soon after landing Governor Phillip wrote to Viscount Sydney that “in all the country thro’ which I have passed I have seldom observed a quarter of a mile without seeing trees which appear to have been destroyed by fire.” Exploring the Derwent River in 1802, François Peron marveled that “wherever we turned our eyes, we beheld the forests on fire.” William Edward Parry exclaimed that “I never saw anything like the state of the country with the fires—literally as black as charcoal for miles together.” At Port Essington in Arnhemland, it was reported that “the natives set fire to the grass which is abundant everywhere, and at that time quite dry … The conflagration spreads until the whole country as far as the eye can reach, is in a grand and brilliant illumination.” The peripetic George Robinson routinely noted in Tasmania that “the country as far as we had come was all burnt off and there was fires in all directions.” Near King George Sound Archibald Menzies, with Vancouver’s expedition, found “but few places I travelled over this day but what bore evident marks of having been on fire.” There were “frequent marks of fire and general burnt state of the country everywhere.” George Vancouver himself spoke of “the very extraordinary devastation by fire which the vegetable productions had suffered throughout the whole country we had traversed.” At the Swan River colony John Wollaston entered into his journal how “for 50 miles through the forest a tree is hardly to be found which has not the mark of fire upon it”—a mark that prevails “so universally in Australia.” T. L. Mitchell concluded that “conflagrations take place so frequently and extensively in the woods during summer as to leave very little vegetable matter to return to earth. On the highest mountains, and in places the most remote and desolate, I have always found on every trunk on the ground, and living tree of any magnitude also, the marks of fire; and thus it appeared that these annual conflagrations extend to every place.” And so it went, in virtually every environment of Australia.³⁹

      Commentators not only catalogued bushfires among the exotica of this land of contrarities, but soon implicated fire as a cause of its singular peculiarities. The careful Charles Sturt, as knowledgeable as any explorer of his age, concluded that “there is no part of the world in which fires create such havoc as in New South Wales, and indeed in Australia generally. The climate, on the one hand, which dries up vegetation, and the wandering habits of the natives on the other, which induce them to clear the country before them by conflagration, operate equally against the growth of timber and underwood.” The “general sterility” of New South Wales he ascribed to “the ravages of fire.” Edward Curr thought that it would be difficult to “overestimate” the consequences of the Aboriginal firestick. “We shall not, perhaps, be far from the truth if we conclude that almost every part of New Holland was swept over by a fierce fire, on an average, once in every five years. That such constant and extensive conflagrations could have occurred without something more than temporary consequences seems impossible, and I am disposed to attribute to them many important features of Nature here.” Curr “doubted” whether any other group of humans “has exercised a greater influence on the physical condition of any large portion of the globe than the wandering savages of Australia.” To the ubiquitous bushfires Europeans even attributed the blistering winds from the interior that scorched coastal settlements.⁴⁰

      The interplay between natural and Aboriginal ignitions, the subtle synergism of varied fires and varied biotas, the actual pattern of fire regimes—all have to be understood within the context of particular places and times. But there can be little doubt that the firestick brought anthropogenic fire everywhere to Australia, that Aborigines used fire consciously and systematically, that they powerfully, perhaps irreversibly, reinforced the trends by which fire pervaded Old Australia. But just as the ecological consequences of fire involve more than the sum of its separate effects on individual flora and fauna, so the character of Aboriginal burning appears to embrace more than the sum of its separate instrumental uses.

      In describing the cycle of contemporary burning by the Gidjingali of Arnhemland, Rhys Jones lists among the reasons for fire their desire—their understood obligation—to “clean up the country.” Other observers have echoed the sense with which Aborigines consider the role of fire as a restorative, and their use of broadcast burning, a moral imperative. C. D. Haynes even concluded that this impulse “dominates all other reasons” for Aboriginal burning. Thus, while there were purposes for burning, each independently reasonable and justifiable as contributing to a livable habitat, overriding each was an ensemble effect, a perception that land unburned or burned badly was land unmanaged. Land rumpled with litter was “dirty” and disgraceful. What Aborigines typically did to prepare a site for occupation—to burn it over—they thus projected across the entire inhabited regions of Old Australia. That relationship was reciprocal: if fire made the land fit for humans, humans in return accepted an obligation to use fire to sustain the land.⁴¹

      It is an old drama, this replacement of the bushfire by the hearth fire. But it has been replayed in Australia in special ways. Aboriginal fire was not identical with any fire. It owed its character as much to Aboriginal culture as to Australian nature. It bound the material life to the moral life. It bridged technology to ritual, environmental manipulation to social myth. The revolutionary fires that raged during the Pleistocene raged also in the minds of men.

       7

      Fires of the Dreaming

      Goorda then led the men away from the blackened area and showed them the secrets of fire … “This is fire,” he said. “Guard it carefully so it will serve you and not devour you.”

      —RECORDED BY LOUIS A. ALLEN, “The Coming of Fire: the Goorda Myth”

      … the actual fire ceremony, the torch fight, seemed to be regarded as a kind of “clearing” ceremony … Whatever else it was or was not, it was extremely wild and picturesque from start to finish.

      —BALDWIN SPENCER, Wanderings in Wild Australia (1928)

      FIRE WAS AS INTEGRAL to the mental as to the material existence of the Aborigine. It was a universal accompaniment to Aboriginal ritual, and it became itself on occasion an object of ceremony. Storytellers frequently incorporated fire into legends as a routine participant in the mythological life of the Dreamtime, as a common vehicle for the explanation of natural and spiritual phenomena, and as a presence that cried out for explication, for fire both divided and brought together. It differentiated the human world from the nonhuman, yet it bridged the mental world with the material. It made possible a cognitive corroboree of Aboriginal culture.¹

      Remove fire and that spiritual universe would collapse. Spiritual invention depended on a material context of heat and light; the social life that sustained cognition pivoted around a fire. Without campfires, there would be no evening storytelling. Without torches and bonfires, there could be no ceremonial community after dark. Without the protective radiance of the hearth fire, Aborigines were defenseless against the evil spirits that marauded the night in search of souls to devour. Fire was ubiquitous in Aboriginal ritual and myth because it was ubiquitous in Aboriginal life.

      Yet those experiences and practices were only a beginning because the human revolution that fire helped make possible was ambivalent. Humans were not genetically programmed to start, preserve, use, explain, or otherwise live with fire, whose prevalence and power made it a profoundly varie-gated and even contradictory phenomenon, ideally positioned to explain and exemplify the specialness and ambivalence of human existence. So clearly, among the animals, was fire a uniquely human possession that its origins could be related to the origins of humans, and its exercise to the special duties and responsibilities incumbent upon humans. The possession of fire—at once both an extraordinary power and an exceptional danger—was an archetype for all human behavior.

      Humans had to explain fire and to define its proper usage. They had to substitute cultural codes for genetic codes. They had to record their knowledge and experience in stories, songs, ceremonies, paintings, rituals. They had to construct and populate a moral universe that would both prescribe and proscribe behavior. Accordingly, Aboriginal societies evolved an elaborate mythology