Continent Aflame

Responses to an Australian Catastrophe

Pat Anderson, Paul James, Paul Komesaroff

• Publisher: Palaver
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780648855118
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Warming & Climate Change
• Index: Biological Sciences

"Continent Aflame: Responses to an Australian Catastrophe" assembles multiple responses to the Australian bushfires crisis of 2019-20. The moral imperative generated by the damaged continent, the unprecedented scale of the disaster, compels this response.

Contributors demonstrate that the continent is aflame, both literally and figuratively. Indigenous and non-Indigenous scientists, artists, doctors, ecologists, writers and many others are "aflame", in despair, anger and hope.

The book aims to help generate a resolve that comes out of these multiple reactions and which can lead to intense new possibilities.

Contributors include Bruce Pascoe, Susan Norrie, Bill Gammage, Alexis Wright, Ross Gittins, Freya Mathews, Philipa Rothfield, Arnold Zable, Thomas Keneally, Ian Kerridge, Kate Judith, Raimond Gaita, John Funder, Helen Szoke, Stephen Duckett, George Browning, Helen Caldicott, Paul Valent, Mark Beeson, Maithri Goonetilleke, Ross Garnaut, Will Steffen, Lorraine Shannon, Paul Carter, Lionel Bopage, Guy Rundle, Jessica Weir, Catherine Larkins, Philip Freier, James Collett, Tom Griffiths, Vanessa Cavanagh, Stephen Muecke, Miranda Nation, Jane Fisher, Kieran Donaghue, Rimona Kedem, Hugo Muecke, Anne Elvey, and the editors.

Traumas

14.02.20

The burnt leaves on the trees. The crisp ground cracking under my feet, the walk around a burnt shed. The corrugated iron all twisted and bent.

Aboriginal People Find Strength Despite Perpetual Grief

Bhiamie Williamson, Jessica Weir, Vanessa Cavanagh¹

How do you support people forever attached to a landscape after an inferno tears through their homelands? The latest fires decimated native food sources, burned through ancient scarred trees, and destroyed ancestral and totemic plants and animals. The fact is, the experience of Aboriginal peoples in the fire crisis engulfing much of Australia is vastly different to that of non-Indigenous peoples.

Colonial legacies of eradication, dispossession, assimilation and racism continue to impact the lived realities of Aboriginal peoples. Added to this is the widespread exclusion of our peoples from accessing and managing traditional homelands. These factors compound the trauma of these unprecedented fires. As Australia picks up the pieces from these fires, it’s more important than ever to understand the unique grief Aboriginal peoples experience.² Only through this understanding can effective strategies be put in place to support our communities to recover.

Aboriginal peoples live with a sense of perpetual grief. It stems from the as-yet-unresolved matter of the invasion and subsequent colonisation of our homelands.³ While there are many instances of colonial trauma inflicted upon Aboriginal peoples — including the removal of children and the suppression of culture, ceremony and language — dispossession of Country remains paramount. Dispossessing people of their lands is a hallmark of colonisation.⁴ Australian laws have changed to partially return Aboriginal peoples’ lands and waters, and Aboriginal people have long worked to advocate for more effective management of Country.⁵ But, despite this, the majority of our peoples have been consigned to the margins in managing our homelands. Aboriginal people have watched on and been ignored as homelands have been mismanaged and neglected.⁶ Oliver Costello is chief executive of Firesticks, an Indigenous-led network that is re-invigorating cultural burning. As he puts it: ‘Since colonisation, many Indigenous people have been removed from their land, and their cultural fire management practices have been constrained by authorities, informed by Western views of fire and land management’.⁷

In this way, settler-colonialism is not historical, but a lived experience. And the growing effects of climate change compound this trauma.⁸ It’s also important to recognise that our people grieve not only for our communities, but for our non-human relations. Aboriginal peoples’ cultural identity comes from the land. As such, Aboriginal cultural lives and livelihoods continue to be tied to the land, including landscape features such as waterholes, valleys and mountains, as well as native animals and plants. The decimation caused by the fires deeply impacts the existence of Aboriginal peoples and, in the most severely hit areas, threatens Aboriginal groups as distinct cultural beings attached to the land. As The Guardian’s Indigenous affairs editor Lorena Allam recently writes:

Like you, I’ve watched in anguish and horror as fire lays waste to precious Yuin land, taking everything with it — lives, homes, animals, trees — but for First Nations people it is also burning up our memories, our sacred places, all the things which make us who we are.⁹

For Aboriginal people then, who live with the trauma of dispossession and neglect and now the trauma of catastrophic fire, our grief is immeasurably different to that of non-Indigenous people.

Bushfire Recovery Must Consider Culture

As we come to terms with the devastation of this summer of bushfires, Australia must turn its gaze to recovery. The field of community recovery offers valuable insights into how groups of people can come together and move forward after disasters. But an examination of research and commentary in this area reveals how poorly non-Indigenous Australia, and the international field of community recovery, understands the needs of Aboriginal people. Often ‘community’ is understood to be a single socio-cultural group of people, where people’s individual needs broadly reflect each other’s.¹⁰

Research in Australia and overseas has demonstrated that for Aboriginal people, healing from historical and contemporary trauma is a cultural and spiritual process and inherently tied to land.¹¹ The failure to include the influence of culture in community recovery, means that these differences are not acknowledged. Without considering the historical, political and cultural contexts that continue to define the lives of Aboriginal peoples, responses to the crisis are likely to be inadequate and inappropriate.¹²

The long-term effects of colonisation have meant Aboriginal communities are accustomed to living with catastrophic changes to their societies and lands, adjusting and adapting to keep functioning.¹³ Experts consider these resilience traits as integral for communities to survive and recover from natural disasters. In this way, the resilience of Aboriginal communities fashioned through centuries of colonisation, coupled with adequate support, means Aboriginal communities in fire-affected areas are well placed not only to recover, but to do so quickly. This is a salient lesson for agencies and other non-government organisations entrusted to lead the disaster recovery process. The community characteristics that enable effective and timely community recovery, such as close social links and shared histories, already exist in the Aboriginal communities affected.¹⁴

Moving Forward

The agency in charge of leading the recovery in bushfire-affected areas must begin respectfully and appropriately, and so too the different enquiry and review processes. To do so, they must be equipped with the basic knowledge of our peoples’ different circumstances. It’s important to note this isn’t ‘special treatment’. Instead, it recognises that policy and practice must be fit-for-purpose and, at the very least, not do further harm. As Aboriginal woman, scholar and co-author Vanessa Cavanagh wrote during the fires: ‘I hope that Indigenous knowledge and expertise takes precedence in the forward management of natural environments. This requires Indigenous people and systems leading the process, not being tacked on, or our knowledges excerpted and cropped into failing models’.¹⁵

If agencies and non-government organisations responsible for leading the recovery from these fires aren’t well-prepared, they risk inflicting new trauma on Aboriginal communities.¹⁶ At the same time, we need to support Aboriginal peoples’ own organisations and leadership. For example, two Aboriginal-led responses have emerged to provide direct support to south coast Aboriginal families in New South Wales. These are the joint Illawarra Aboriginal Medical Service and Dr Marlene Longbottom appeal,¹⁷ and the Indigenous Crisis Response and Recovery appeal.¹⁸ Central to both of these fundraising initiatives is the importance of culturally appropriate support.

The National Disability Insurance Agency offers an example of how the public sector is learning to engage with Aboriginal people in culturally sensitive ways. Whilst imperfect, their Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Strategy includes thinking about Country, culture and community, and working with each community’s values and customs to establish respectful, trusting relationships. This demonstrates that a large national agency responsible for administering a complex and long-term policy can set out to embed different ways of working within its structures and recognise the uniqueness of Indigenous peoples.

The new bushfire recovery agency must use a similar strategy. This would acknowledge both the historical experiences of Aboriginal peoples and our inherent strengths as communities that have not only survived, but remain connected to our homelands. Similarly, the enquiry and review processes must learn and adapt.¹⁹ In this way, perhaps the bushfire crisis might have some positive longer-term outcomes, opening new doors to collaboration with Aboriginal people, drawing on our strengths and values and prioritising our unique interests.

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1. Where we have used ‘our’ in this text, Bhiamie and Vanessa are speaking from their standpoint as Aboriginal people.

2. A.C. Willox, S.L. Harper, V.L. Edge, K. Landman, K., Houle, J.D. Ford, and The Rigolet Inuit Community Government, ‘The Land Enriches the Soul: On Climatic and Environmental Change, Affect, and Emotional Health and Well-being in Rigolet, Nunatsiavut, Canada’, Emotion, Space and Society, vol. 6, no. 1, 2013, pp. 14–24.

3. B. Pascoe, Dark Emu: Black seeds Agriculture or Accident? Magabala Books, Broome, 2014; T. Alfred, and J. Corntassel, ‘Being Indigenous: Resurgences Against Contemporary Colonialism’, Government and Opposition, vol. 40, no. 4, 2005, pp. 597–614.

4. A. Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2015.

5. S. Hemming, D. Rigney, S. Bignall, S. Berg, and G. Rigney, ‘Indigenous Nation Building for Environmental Futures: Murrundi Flows through Ngarrindjeri Country’, Australasian Journal of Environmental Management, vol. 26, no. 3, 2019, pp. 216–35.

6. M. Faa, ‘Indigenous Leaders Say Australia’s Bushfire Crisis Shows Approach to Land Management Failing’, ABC News, 14 November 2019, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-14/traditional-owners-predicted-bushfire-disaster/11700320?pfmredir=sm. Last accessed 14 March 2020.

7. Firesticks Alliance, ‘Reinvigorate Australia’s cultural fire knowledge’, Media Release, 9 January 2020.

8. N.J. Turner and H. Clifton, ‘“It’s so Different Today”: Climate Change and Indigenous Lifeways in British Columbia, Canada’, Global Environmental Change, vol. 19, no. 2, 2009, pp. 180–90.

9. Lorena Allam, ‘For First Nations People the Bushfires Bring a Particular Grief, Burning What Makes Us Who We Are’, Guardian, 6 January 2020.

10. For example, M. Moreton, ‘“We Needed Help, But We Weren’t Helpless”: The Community Experience of Community Recovery after Natural Disaster in Australia’, Australian Journal of Emergency Management, vol. 33, no. 1, 2018, pp. 19–22.

11. E. Fast, and D. Collin-Vézina, ‘Historical Trauma, Race-based Trauma and Resilience of Indigenous Peoples: A Literature Review’, First Peoples Child & Family Review, vol. 5 no. 1, 2010, pp. 126–136; M. Feeney, ‘Reclaiming the Spirit of Well Being: Promising healing practices for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’, Discus...