ALAN McFETRIDGE

I want to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which these pictures are made, where I stood and the pathways of the journey. These are Gadigal, Ngambri, Ngunnawal, Palawa and Larrakia Country. My gratitude goes to the Traditional Custodians for their continued connection to their lands and for caring for Country for thousands of generations. The Country visited includes Grassland, Mixed-Tree, Storm Burn, Gum-Tree, No Fire, and Desert all of which were observed because of their relationship to Fire Country. Across all of this beautiful Country there are many Sacred sites, the ones that were shown to me opened my imagination to the profound possibilities when place is allowed to dominates time. There were many other Sacred sites that I do not know their names or meaning, however, this is something I hope to understand and respect truthfully.

As the project grows a knowledge space has opened because of the sharing and openness of the First Nations people at the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre and Northern Land Council to whom I pay my greatest respect.

Being a visitor, the warmth and understanding that has been shown to me has been overwhelmingly welcoming and gracious of my limited understanding of the customs and traditions that developed in accord with an Ecological Philosophy responsible for the oldest continuous culture on the planet. Each step is made knowing that the First Nations sovereignty was never ceded. This continent always was and always will be Aboriginal land.

Thanks to Common Ground who have shared learning resources that have helped guide our work around acknowledging and naming First Nations people across Australia.

After undertaking a penetrative case study for the perspectives and institutions responsible for the Climate Crisis with On The Line & Songs of The Dead - many more questions remained about landscape fire. The next step was to seek knowledge from people with a much more familiar relationship to fire. This fieldwork era began in 2018 and paused in 2020 in Australia, during this time I was presented with a sequence of extraordinary friendships, spiritual and physical experiences that could not have been predicted or imagined.

The leap into this field happened when a simultaneous coincidental link between Mike Flannigan, David Bowman, Bill Gammage, Julia Lum and Gabby Moser occurred.  Rather than attempt to explain this, the following excerpt from Bill Gammage’s book Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia offers a possible reason why there is a common interest to re-examine art history and earlier settlers’ records to support First Nation people here and across the globe.

The following excerpt is by a bewildered Edward John Eyre during an expedition into the interior of South Australia in 1839. Eyre, like many Europeans, wrote into their diaries scenes that they could not recognise nor see as anything other than a natural landscape. However, the Aboriginal Australia they were experiencing was indeed highly modified and unnatural - where Fire was their chief ally to mould, shape and organise plant growth and therefore predict animals’ location.

‘In some parts of the large plains we had crossed in the morning, I had observed traces of the remains of timber, of a larger growth than any now found in the same vicinity, and even in places where none at present exists. Can these plains of such very extent, and now so open and exposed, have been once clothed with timber? and if so, by what cause, or process, have they been so completely denuded, as not to leave a single tree within a range of many miles? In my various wanderings in Australia, I have frequently met with very similar appearances; and somewhat analogous to these, are the singular little grassy openings, or plains, which are constantly met within the midst of the densest Eucalyptus scrub … Forcing his way through dense, and apparently interminable scrub … the traveller suddenly emerges into an open plain, sprinkled over with a fine silky grass, varying from a few acres to many thousands in extent, but surrounded on all sides by the dreary scrub he has left. In these plains I have constantly traced the remains of decayed scrub - generally of a larger growth than that surrounding them - and occasionally appearing to have grown very densely together … The plains found interspersed among the dense scrubs may probably have been occasioned by fires, purposely or accidentally lighted by the natives in their wanderings, but I do not think the same explanation would apply to those richer plains where the timber has been of a large growth and the trees in all probability at some distance apart - here fires might burn down a few trees, but would not totally annihilate them over a whole district, extending for many miles in every direction.’

- Eyre vol 1, 35-6. Eyre’s examples: vol 1, 34, 149-50, 198, 208-9, 307, vol 2, 4, 7. Also S Hunter 91; Rolls 1999; Stuart 1865, 39; Gammage, B. 2011.

The Centre for Ecological Philosophy

You can read more about the centre and what we are doing to question how the climate will change, fires will intensify and adaptation necessary and what we can do about it in a blog post here.