What is burning in Australia

Photo taken in Hyde Park, Sidney during Invasion Day Rally on Jan 26th 2020

Full text in PDF available here.

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Abstract

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This text was written as a response to non-Australian mainstream media articles around Australian bushfires 2019-2020, as well as a reaction to the same topic presented via numerous posts at social media and newspaper articles all around the globe. During my travel through Australia in January and February 2020 it emerged that there is a need for this text, as I was faced with the fact that there is a lack of authentic information and a lack of wider critical interpretation. This is tightly linked to this issue and other burning issues connected to the situation surrounding the fires raging in Australia and this is why people who are not from Australia get an entirely different idea about this.

On my journey, I was step by step coming across more and more painful background reasons for catastrophic bushfires by learning about the features of Australian landscape, the untold agricultural history of Australia’s First Nations Peoples and political implications of this, originating from the issue of land rights. I found that global climate change is only a partial cause of Australian bushfires 2019-2020, and that it is rather a trigger for other primary causes than a root cause itself.

Therefore, the goal of this text is to bring new arguments into the discussion, to find possible solutions that would enable these arguments to meet in a new constellation, in a reshaped discourse. The text is describing the tight, and to non-Australians mostly unknown connection between fire and the Australian ground by explaining the features of the landscape, the soil and plants, as well as the erased Aboriginal practices of maintaining the land. It speaks about the lost Aboriginal land and how Aboriginal fire management is of a crucial importance for wildfires in Australia. This is done here by counterpoising the two fundamentally different worldviews that meet in Australia since European settlers arrived there. The text examines palpable historical and contemporary consequences of colonial times on creating a fertile ground for the hazardous bushfires. Instead of a conclusion, the text ends with a conversation about the Aboriginal fire management, unknown to the rest of the world and yet extremely precious and interesting, called cultural burning deriving from ten-thousand-year-old Aboriginal practices. The complexity of cultural burning is met here in a practical and a metaphysical sense, through its huge potential in the prevention of new devastating fires in Australia and a potential for creating sustainable communities that are able to co-create with the Earth.

Full text in PDF available here.

Beware, it has 11 000 words!
Huge fires set huge texts on fire!