n our way to Korlorbirrahda, Bowman and I had stopped to visit with Otto Campion Bulmaniya of the Djelk Rangers. The Rangers program was started a decade ago, part of a movement of Bininj people seeking ways to keep traditional culture alive while becoming economically self-sufficient. Bulmaniya, a soft-spoken man with deep, worried eyes, has a tough job. His aim is to integrate Bininj and Balanda ways of burning to rehabilitate abandoned sections of Aboriginal land. But no one has yet found a reliable way to restore areas where Aboriginal burning has lapsed, so he must learn by trial and error.
When Bowman and I arrive at the Djelk Rangers' headquarters -- little more than three walls and a roof of corrugated metal standing on a stretch of dusty earth -- several Aboriginal men are chatting inside. Even in the shade of the roof, the heat stuns.
Bulmaniya leads us into the air-conditioned chill of a small office that is partitioned off in one corner. He sits at his computer and pulls up photos of himself and other Rangers leading groups of teenage boys through the woods. The Rangers teach high-school kids about the bush and when to burn it. As they see it, the best hope for the future health of both the land and the people is to encourage as many Bininj as possible to return to their ancestral homelands.
Bowman shares that belief and admires the Djelk Rangers. But he worries that the federal agencies that supply the group's shoestring budget may impose a white vision of fire, even in places where local people still live on their land. Early in this dry season, for example, the Rangers used helicopters to drop incendiary devices -- airborne fireballs -- on some remote areas.
Explaining this to me on our last afternoon in Korlorbirrahda, Bowman sighs and settles his sweat-stained bush hat lower on his brow. "It's all very complicated," he says. That phrase has become the mantra of our visit to Arnhem Land.
I wander away to Korlorbirrahda's "schoolhouse," a large awning that keeps out the rain during the wet season and today offers a precious refuge from the sun. A paper banner, curling at the edges, displays the English alphabet: A is for anteater, B for bandicoot, C for crocodile. The place looks as if no classes have been taught there for a long while.
In a corner, Cyrus plays ethereal music on a battered electronic keyboard that's wired to a car battery. A quarter of the plastic keys have broken off, but the music still sounds like a Windham Hill CD. Beside him, Lindsay leans on a spear, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the image of a monster pickup and the legend "American Trucker."
While Cyrus's music floats on the still air, firefighters in Montana and California are battling a series of wildland infernos that have raged for weeks. The hundred-year campaign of fire suppression in U.S. forests has led to heavy accumulations of dry vegetation that burn hot, causing bigger blazes than at any time in recorded history. Some Native Americans still pass on stories of the ways their ancestors once burned the forests and prairies, but in my homeland there is not one place like Korlorbirrahda, where people who have grown up with traditional burning can offer guidance on a way out of the fire dilemma.
As Bowman and I fly out of Arnhem Land in a cramped turboprop plane, I hold one of Otto Bulmaniya's photos in my lap. The picture shows an Aboriginal burn, the flames low along the trunks of eucalyptus trees, whose leaves are still intact.
As we move west, across country that has been emptied of native people, thick smoke plumes rise from the savanna below us. Soon the ground becomes invisible, hidden beneath the haze from dozens of out-of-control late-season fires that rule a landscape no longer protected in the way of the Bininj.
