NARRATING THE ROLES OF ANIMALS IN CULTURAL BURNING
This project aims to produce stories of how First Nations people and animals co-construct cultural landscapes via the medium of fire. These narratives will in turn inform policy and practice in terms of landscape management in south-eastern Australia. Cultural burning is much more than hazard reduction. It is a relational practice in which humans, animals and plants interact and influence each other, producing particular kinds of landscapes with particular ecological profiles. These interactions are vastly different from colonial landscape management practices which operate on conceptions of human/nature distinctions and in which humans conceive of landscapes using technical frames of reference.
Cultural burning is a response to Country in which humans are embedded in ecological processes subject to the same processes as are other, non-human participants in the landscape.
THIS IS AN
INDIGENOUS GUIDED
PROJECT
funded by the ARC and Deakin University, in cooperation with Coffs Harbour and District Local Aboriginal Land Council, undertaken on Land Council land on the mid north coast of NSW. We the researchers endeavour to undertake this project with respect for this land’s Traditional Owners, Elders, and Ancestors, and for the critters who dwell in, upon, and above the land.
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RESEARCHERS
- Marcus Baynes-Rock
- Cassie McKechnie
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Steering Committee
- Shaun Hooper
- Oliver Costello
- Chels Marshall
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Guidance
- Tim Neale
- Matthew Smith
- Darren Skinner
