aptain James Cook, who in 1770 became the first European to sail along the east coast of Australia, saw so many fires that he called it "this continent of smoke." Adapted to lightning and dry heat, many native Australian plants need fire and can't reproduce without it. Most eucalyptus trees, for example, drop seeds only after they've been scorched, and their seedlings grow best in a bed of ashes. Some have evolved efffective ways of spreading flames: The candlebark eucalyptus, when ignited, drops flakes of burning bark that float on the wind and can start new "spot" fires several miles away. Aborigines thrived in this fiery land by learning how and when to burn it.
When white settlers reached the Northern Territory in the mid-nineteenth century, many native people died from introduced diseases or in violent confrontations with the newcomers. Ancient Aboriginal societies collapsed, and the survivors began to drift away from their ancestral lands, toward the fringes of towns like Darwin. Arnhem Land, which covers more than 37,000 square miles, was once home to clans of native people who lived scattered at regular intervals across the landscape. Today that wide swath of country is mostly empty. Arnhem Land's total population is about 17,000, two-thirds of it indigenous, and most of the people live in overcrowded government-issue houses in towns that have sprung up in the years since colonization.
With or without Aboriginal management, Arnhem Land and the rest of the Top End will burn -- the lightning storms that come with the start of the monsoons every year make that a certainty. Before the Europeans arrived, Aboriginal people set frequent small fires. "The paradox," says Bowman, "is that they used fire to make the landscape fireproof." When they lived in small groups scattered throughout the Top End, native people started blazes so often that the flames seldom spread far or grew too hot. The result was a patchwork of firebreaks, areas cleared of flammable grass and trees. Fires would peter out at the edges of previously burned areas, so that even in the scorching heat at the end of the dry season, they would not flare out of control.
The Top End is a place of extremes. Months of heavy rain follow a long stretch of dry heat. During the wet season, dense grasses grow taller than a man's head. In the dry, the plants turn to brittle, flammable straw. Nowadays, 50 percent or more of the Top End landscape will burn late in the dry season, ignited by lightning or by ranchers managing their grazing lands. In the flat terrain, these fires spread fast, growing hotter as they expand, and they can burn for weeks -- a drastic change from traditional native fires. These more intense blazes can have devastating effects on everything from parrots to palm trees. The same pattern echoes throughout Australia and the western United States, where indigenous people no longer burn the land. Understanding how they used fire to keep the ecosystem in balance, Bowman believes, is an essential step in finding new ways to manage today's catastrophic blazes.
Few ecologists have studied the use of fire by modern Aborigines, perhaps assuming that contact with newer technologies such as the match, the bullet, and the jeep has severed them from the knowledge of their ancestors. Most studies have focused instead on ancient deposits of charcoal or fossilized pollen, or on older trees scarred by past blazes. Anthropologists have interviewed native elders about burning traditions but have not conducted field studies to show their effects on vegetation. Bowman is the first scientist to undertake a controlled study comparing Aboriginal and unmanaged landscapes, using modern tools such as satellite imagery and GPS technology to demonstrate the continued power of ancient management techniques.
Conducting a scientific study with the Bininj on their remote Arnhem Land turf is a daunting prospect for any outsider. English is a third or fourth language for Aboriginal people here, who are more comfortable speaking one of the many native languages, such as Gunei or Gundjeihmi. Yet the language barrier is easier to bridge than the gulf between Bininj and Balanda points of view. In Aboriginal society, direct questions on such personal topics as the way a man burns the land can seem rude. The response can range from silence to long discourses on apparently unrelated topics, such as the nature of cloud formations in monsoon time or the mating habits of kangaroos.
It's impressive, then, that Bowman, a fast-talking, hyper-scheduled Balanda, has formed deep ties to the Rostron clan, who have adopted his family into their complex kinship system. Bowman's two sons, aged 4 and 10, are considered to be among Cyrus's many "fathers."
Bowman's humility helps him to straddle the cultural divide -- he makes no bones about the fact that Aboriginal people here understand far more about the life of the bush than the most distinguished ecologists in Australia's universities. What he shares with the people who live along the Cadell River is a sense of urgency, a drive to make sure that traditional knowledge is understood and recognized in both Balanda and Bininj societies while members of a fading generation of elders are still alive to pass it on.
