arly one morning, when the shadows of the eucalyptus trees are still long, Bowman and I follow Cyrus and Lindsay through a forest that burned just the day before. Amid acres of charred ground we see a stand of cypress pines, untouched by the flames. Low-intensity fires, explains Bowman, will often die out at the edge of a patch of these graceful trees, which cast enough shade to stifle most of the undergrowth that feeds the flames.
Bowman's fascination with native burning began when he was doing graduate work in Tasmania, where the indigenous population had been drastically reduced and traditional burning completely halted. "There are trees in Tasmania called King Billy Pines," he says, "and massive stands of them have died off in the last hundred years. You've got vast tracts full of the skeletons of these trees, testifying to a change in fire regime." Here in the Northern Territory, wildfires have grown so intense that the cypress pine is experiencing a similar decline. It was the plight of this species that drew Bowman to Arnhem Land in the first place. "If cypress pines were people," he says, "we'd talk about an epidemic. If you go to nearby places where no Aboriginal people have been living for 50 years or so, you can fly along in a helicopter and count dead cypress pines. They're just scattered all over the landscape." Here on the Cadell River, however, he has found an abundance of healthy cypress pines, evidence of the Aborigines' skillful use of fire.
Outside his brick and cinder-block house in the tiny outstation of Korlorbirrahda, Tom Rostron tries to suppress a look of disbelief. Bowman is explaining to him that in America, where I come from, people who light wildfires are thrown in prison. Tom, who describes himself only as an "old bloke," is one of the leanest people I've ever seen. One wrist hangs stiff at his side, badly swollen from a sprain or a cracked bone. He accepts a spare dose of the painkillers Bowman offers, but he'll let the injury heal on its own. He runs the fingers of his good hand through his hair and nods politely despite his skeptical expression.
Tom speaks in a mix of English and Gunei that's difficult for me to follow. When I ask how he decides when and where to burn, he just shrugs. The fires set by the Bininj are everyday events that happen when someone like Tom looks around and senses the country is ripe for burning, ready to be cleaned up.
Tom has retired to the quiet of his house, where no one is talking and the only sound is the deep thrum of a didgeridoo, the indigenous wind instrument made from hollowed-out branches of eucalyptus. "Ridiculously hot, eh?" says Bowman, setting up a camp chair in the shade of Tom's eaves. We're marooned here until some indefinite time when one of the Rostrons will be available to guide us. In the meantime, my heat-addled brain struggles to absorb Bowman's explanation of the most controversial and surprising results of his research.
To translate the patterns of indigenous burning into the language of science, Bowman has followed 23-year-old Joshua Rostron as he walks through his family's land. While Joshua uses all his senses to decide where to burn and hunt, Bowman uses his GPS, measuring tape, and calculator to determine the size of charred areas and the scorch heights on trees. He also uses satellite imagery to compare the patterns of fire here with those of uninhabited areas nearby.
Bowman has found that the Rostrons and their neighbors set the great majority of their burns late in the dry season. Yet even in these extreme conditions, their fires remain small and typically die out within a day. This flies in the face of accepted dogma among Balanda land managers, which holds that the only way to keep fires low in intensity is to light them early in the dry season, before the hottest weather turns the vegetation to tinder. Bowman's data show that the long-term pattern of Aboriginal burning is more powerful protection against intense flames than any army of firefighters modern Australia can hope to muster.
If Native Americans in California, trying to keep their ancestral cultures alive, could meet the Rostrons, they might feel an instant kinship. Members of several California tribes, including the Karuk, the Yurok, and the Miwok, are working to revive ancient practices of fire management that once guaranteed an abundance of plants used for food and toolmaking. After a century-long policy of fire suppression, the state is more vulnerable than ever to wildfires, and fire-adapted plants such as beargrass -- used in Indian basketry -- are dwindling.
