Healthy Country: Fire, Country, and the Unmaking of Australian Wilderness

Professor Fletcher will challenge assumptions about concepts such as Terra Nullius, 'pristine nature' and 'wilderness' which overlook and undermine Aboriginal influence on landscapes as negligible or destructive. Instead, Michael seeks to 'not only reintroduce cultural fire, but transform the intellectual foundations of environmental science itself.

Australia is frequently framed as a continent of “wilderness,” a land shaped primarily by climate, soils and natural fires. This framing reflects a deeper epistemological divide between “nature” and “culture,” in which human activity is positioned as external to ecological systems. Fire, within this logic, is understood as a natural and inevitable force. This narrative remains embedded in conservation science, policy, and restoration targets. Yet ethnobotanical evidence, deep-time palaeoecology, and Indigenous knowledge systems together tell a different story. In this talk, I argue that Australia’s catastrophic fires, biodiversity decline, and ecological instability are not simply climate problems. They are the outcome of a rupture in long-standing relationships between people and Country. 

For more than 65,000 years, Aboriginal peoples have actively constructed and maintained plant communities through fine-scale fire regimes, seasonal movement, hydrological manipulation, and reciprocal care. Country is not passive backdrop, but a relational system maintained through ongoing practice. Drawing on sedimentary charcoal, pollen reconstructions, fire-return interval modelling, and counterfactual forecasting from southeastern Australia and Tasmania, I demonstrate that the removal of cultural burning following British invasion triggered measurable shifts in vegetation structure, including woodland thickening, altered eucalypt dominance, and increased fuel continuity. These changes reflect a transition from frequent, low-intensity, spatially heterogeneous burning to infrequent, high-intensity fire regimes associated with suppression and control-based management. The result is increased fire intensity and extent, with trajectories toward the megafire regimes observed today. These transformations precede many twentieth-century climatic trends and reflect the breakdown of Country–people relationships rather than purely atmospheric forcing. The concept of “wilderness” obscures this history. It erases millennia of Indigenous plant management and recasts actively curated biocultural landscapes as natural baselines. Restoration targets derived from these assumptions are therefore misaligned. In contrast, Indigenous-controlled lands frequently demonstrate stronger biodiversity outcomes, suggesting that sovereignty and culture are inseparable from ecological resilience and environmental health. Rewriting the book on Australia requires confronting the epistemological foundations of environmental management. The separation of “nature” and “culture” produces a model in which landscapes are acted upon, stabilised, and controlled. 

The evidence presented here indicates that Australian ecosystems were instead maintained through ongoing, relational practices in which fire functioned as a cultural technology embedded within care. The shift from relational systems to detached management is not incidental, it is the mechanism that underlies the ecological changes observed. The pathway to “Healthy Country” therefore lies not only in changing practices, but in reconfiguring the relationship between people and the environments they inhabit. 

Michael-Shawn Fletcher is a Wiradjuri scholar and geographer whose research examines long-term relationships between people, plants and fire on the Australian continent. His work integrates Indigenous knowledge systems, ethnobotany and deep-time palaeoecology to understand how cultural practice has shaped vegetation patterns for tens of thousands of years. Michael-Shawn’s research challenges the framing of Australia as “wilderness,” demonstrating that many landscapes commonly regarded as natural were actively structured through cultural burning, seasonal movement and reciprocal plant management. Using sedimentary records, fire history reconstruction and collaborative research with Indigenous Nations, he shows how the disruption of plant–people relationships following colonisation has altered vegetation structure, fuel dynamics and biodiversity outcomes. His work sits at the intersection of ethnobiology, geography and Indigenous sovereignty, advancing approaches that reconnect ecological health with Indigenous governance and care for Country.