By Dongyun Kwon and Oliver Winn
A cultural burn took place at Spadonis Reserve as part of the Yarra Ranges Council’s Firsticks Program.
Cultural burning is a cultural fire practice used by First Nations people to improve the health of Country and its people.
It has been used for over 60,000 years to manage land, plants and animals.
The healing burn was led by the council’s firestick officer, Darren Wandin, and supported by the council’s bushlands team on Tuesday 20 May.
Darren Wandin is a Wurundjeri man who has learnt about cultural burning from his father, David Wandin, ‘Uncle Dave’, and other fire practitioners around Australia through the Firesticks Alliance.
Mr Wandin said cultural burning is different from other planned burning.
“A lot of the time, what most burns are looking at is fuel reduction. Fuel reduction isn’t the name of the game for us. What we’re looking at is diversity, so we’re looking at reintroducing and revitalising those species that are here,” he said.
“We understand that that soil layer that we’ve got is called a seed bank in ecological terms, (but) we refer to it as a memory bank. It’s like the identity of the place.
“When we apply fire, that’s like a medicine to help remind who it is. At the moment, we’ve got a lot of these weedy species (and) we’re trying to skim them off to get rid of them, then we can have the seed bank regenerate afterwards.”
Yarra Ranges Council Indigenous development coordinator Garry Detez said it was important to the council to apply the First Nations’ knowledge and resilience system back into the local landscape and communities.
“On the back of the Black Saturday fires from 2009, (Yarra Ranges) Council was looking at better ways to build a natural mitigation in the landscape, to provide healing into the landscape, but also to build resilience and healing into communities,” he said.
“We came across the ancient Aboriginal cultural practice of cool burning or cultural burning. It became evident to us that when Aboriginal people cared for the landscapes prior to colonisation, they’d managed to build a natural mitigation into the landscapes, because there’s no recorded evidence of a major bushfire that we’re aware of today over the last 6000 years.
“So that led us into a bit of a journey in trying to find where that expertise resided. And there’s clear evidence that Wurundjeri people certainly use cultural burning as a land management tool for thousands of generations.”
The Star Mail will delve into cultural burning in more detail through a further article and a video news package.
