Flying over remote Australia, a photographer snapped a black and white image of something incredible in the outback. Taken around 80 years ago, it shows a complex mosaic burned into the ground by the Indigenous people who called the desert home.
Today, the land is no longer managed at this scale using burns, and experts believe this is why the region is frequently ravaged by wildfires. In 2023, around 43 million hectares of the Northern Territory burned, and fires in 2011 scorched over 55 million hectares, an area roughly the size of France. Comparatively, the Black Summer bushfires, which shocked the world in 2019 and 2020, burned no more than 10 million hectares in southern and eastern Australia.
Charles Darwin University’s Dr Rohan Fisher specialises in using satellite information to understand complex ecological problems. He knows that climate change threatens to make fires more severe, and the spread of hot-burning invasive buffel grass is a problem in some areas, but he sees the biggest problem as being the rapid disappearance of people from the desert last century.
“The root cause is the dispossession of Indigenous people of their land, and the change in management across those landscapes,” he told Yahoo News Australia.
“What people are trying to do now is reintroduce good fire into this landscape.”
The Black Summer mega-blazes destroyed lush forest and drove high-profile species, including greater gliders and koalas, closer to extinction, but the larger desert fires are also causing devastation – there’s just fewer people out there to witness them.
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A satellite image from 2023 shows fires burning across northern Australia. Source: Copernicus
Desert plants and animals vanishing after fire
Chantelle Murray from the Indigenous Desert Alliance, a group that advocates for the health of central Australia and the people who live there, told Yahoo the huge blazes are a “huge threat” to the country.
“Our Traditional Owners, our old people, have identified there are certain shrubs that are missing that were probably threatened by big fires. We don’t see them anymore,” she said.
“We’ve also got threatened species out on country that have been wiped out. There are animals we don’t see anymore.”
Murray spent 12 years as a Ngurrara Ranger, coordinating women as they worked on the land, and is familiar with “right way fire”. This practice involves using satellite technology to analyse where burns are needed, helicopters to access remote sites, and culturally informed burn practices to reduce fuel loads during the cooler months. By burning in a mosaic pattern, unburned areas provide safe havens for animals and plants.
“We always say that country heals when you look after it,” Murray said.
More rangers needed to save Australia’s desert
Dr Fisher’s satellite analysis has shown that the right way fires created by Indigenous rangers are beginning to have an impact on reducing the scope of large blazes. While the 2023 wildfires were massive, burning 84 million hectares of desert and savannah in northern Australia, he believes their impact was reduced because of the limited burning that occurred.
“Even though they were trying to manage an area twice the area of NSW with only a few individuals and limited resources, they still had an effect,” he said.
And now he wants to see efforts scaled up to have more rangers conducting burns across Australia’s deserts.
“This is an effort to save the health of the nation, for everybody that lives on this continent,” Rohan said.
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