Caring for Country today

Start with the phrase itself, because it carries the whole idea. Caring for Country names something older than conservation: people and land bound in mutual responsibility, where tending the land and its living things is an obligation, not a hobby. The rest of the repair work hangs on that frame. On this coast, one of the biggest shifts in land management has been the effort to draw Traditional Owner knowledge and authority back toward the centre of it, visible in the 2024 recognition of Kabi Kabi native title over much of the region, and in the return of cultural fire.

That fire repays a pause, because it turns the abstract idea concrete. For tens of thousands of years, people lit the flame that ran across this country on purpose, with great skill: frequent, low, patchy, cool burns, set in the right season and weather, that cleared undergrowth, flushed fresh growth, spared the fire-sensitive patches and stitched the whole gradient into a fine-grained mosaic of recently burnt and longer-unburnt ground. Each world along that gradient wants a different flame. The wallum hungers for a burn; any flame harms the rainforest edge. The art was, and is, matching the fire to the ground beneath it. That knowledge is being carried back onto Country now. Practitioners and networks — among them the Firesticks Alliance, and the work gathered in Victor Steffensen’s Fire Country — are reapplying traditional burning, often in partnership with the very agencies that once fought to suppress it. The tool is going back into the hands that always held it.

It points to the idea that runs under every project in these pages, drawn straight from the ecology rather than from sentiment. You cannot care for this country by leaving it alone, because leaving it alone is not what made it. The open, park-like forests the first Europeans so admired, the mosaic of heath and woodland, the abundance of game: these were made, in large part, by that careful burning, not by its absence. The country the colonists called wilderness was a long-tended one.

Better to be careful with the claim than triumphant about it. The historian Bill Gammage argued at book length that these worked landscapes were deliberate; as with any big idea, the detail has been contested ever since, and the picture varies from one part of the continent to another. But you do not need the strongest version to reach the point that matters here. Enough of this coast was shaped by human hands that the largest ecological consequence of colonisation was not any one clearing or drainage but the abrupt removal of that custodianship: the breaking, within a generation, of a land-management system tens of thousands of years deep. The bargain the country had struck with fire was still in force; only the party that had kept it for millennia was gone. Two opposite failures followed, often in the same district. In some places fire was held back until the fuel banked up and the eventual burn came as a furnace, not a gardener’s flame. In others the country was burnt too often, or too hot, or at the wrong time, grinding down the diversity a gentler rhythm had held.

That is the hard lesson, and the useful one. This is not a landscape you can fence off and expect to stay as you found it. Doing nothing is itself a decision, and usually the wrong one. The “natural” landscape is a managed landscape, and it has to be cared for, actively and knowledgeably: the reserve kept, the weed pulled, the corridor replanted, the cool burn delivered on the right day. Other pages take those jobs up in detail. The thread that ties them together is one idea: care is a verb.

Good care asks for the skill these pages have tried to teach. Read the country, its rock and soil and water and fire, the web of partnership strung across it, the history written into it. Then act with the grain of all that rather than against it. A cool, patchy burn moving through open forest in the right season is that skill made visible: fire used as a tool rather than feared as a disaster, increasingly by the people who used it first. It is the oldest way of caring for this Country, and, read right, still the truest.