Fire with fire
Meet Victor Steffensen, a 48 year old Indigenous fire practitioner, filmmaker, and activist in Australia who is advocating for a return to cultural burning practices to heal our planet and prevent catastrophic bushfires.
Growing up in the rainforest town of Kuranda in north Queensland as a mixed race kid, Victor struggled to connect to his Aboriginality and always felt like something was missing. His mother's Tagalaka people were from the Gulf of Carpentaria, but their language and culture were lost to him because his nan and her people were sent to missions in the 1920s and disconnected from country.
After failing almost every subject in high school, Victor was 18 years old when he set off for a fishing trip with mates on the Cape York Peninsula and met Tommy George and George Musgrave, two Indigenous elders who would shape his life. The old men were the last of their tribe to hold traditional knowledge, thousands of years of information which they feared would be lost because the younger generations lacked interest. Victor however was a willing recipient. After his mates returned home, he stayed in the small town and George and Tommy’s campfire became his university.
The two men taught Victor how to use fire. Unlike western backburning, Indigenous techniques use a ‘cool burn’ designed to stay below the forest canopy, giving wildlife sufficient time to move out. Determining the ‘right fire and right time’ requires an intimate knowledge of the environment, and careful observation. When Victor first met Tommy and George in the 1990s, Aboriginal people had no role at all in official land management, so the men practiced traditional burning, without permits, to heal damaged land. Despite strong opposition from local landowners and rangers, within two years the scale of regeneration and reduction in bushfires began to spark interest.
For the past 20 years Victor has helped Indigenous communities around Australia and throughout the world recover their traditional fire practices, sharing the wisdom that Tommy and George passed down to him. At their request, Victor recorded their conversations with a camera, documenting their knowledge and practices for generations to come. Today the project is known as ‘Mulong,’ and has been mirrored in other Indigenous communities around the world to preserve the traditional wisdom that may just hold our solutions for a better future.
Climate change means the land is telling us something. Indigenous cultures have been practicing sustainability for thousands of years. There is an intelligence there – all the information we need to create the new wave of a human environmental evolution.
