How Aboriginal Hunting and ‘Cool Burns’ Prevent Australian Wildfires
Atlas Obscura — a global community of explorers and journalists who focus on unique places and stories — have featured Martu in their January edition, with contributing writer, Reina Gattuso, taking a look at KJ ranger’s work of reinstating cultural burns.
“There is a scar across Australia’s Western Desert. For millennia—no one is sure how many, though evidence of Aboriginal people’s presence in Australia stretches back 50,000 years—the Martu people used fire to hunt in the scraggly bush.
In a practice called cultural burning, they set low blazes patient enough for small animals such as bettongs and wallabies to flee their burrows before the fire reached them. Years of cultural burning cleared underbrush, creating a patchy habitat preferred by the small animals Martu people most liked to hunt, while simultaneously preventing massive lightning fires from consuming the land.“
