When Old
Meets New

They said they wanted to see more cultural learning opportunity made available for other Indigenous people.   

In 2016, Adrian Webster worked as a cultural mentor in Sydney and said he did not feel supported, often treated as a firebug.   

Adrian decided to change paths and began Rural Fire Service training, where he met Tagalaka Indigenous fire practitioner Victor Steffensen.  

Victor, or Uncle Vic, told him to forget everything he’d learnt about firefighting.     

“In every aspect of fire, from the way we use it through to the way we look at it, the way we value it and see it, it’s completely different to that Western concept.”  

Victor Steffenson is a leading voice of cultural burning today and the author of Fire Country: How Indigenous Fire Management Could Save Australia, published in 2020.   

This year, an ABC article referred to him as “a keeper of memories. Custodian of a knowledge that has been handed down for thousands of years: the ability to see when the land is sick and know how to heal it”.  

Around 2017, Adrian started working with the Firesticks Alliance Indigenous Corporation, an indigenous-led network aiming to re-invigorate cultural burning.  

Cultural burning involves applying fire in the bush using a controlled and methodical approach; the cool fire acts like water and moves slowly in a trickling pattern, burning in a circular area from where it was ignited.  

To him, cultural burning was about more than wildfire prevention, and he said it was a meaningful practice for Aboriginal people.    

“We all believe as Aboriginal children, like our mother is the Earth. Just like it is our responsibility with our physical mum, our biological mums to look after them, it’s the same with our spiritual mum,” said Adrian.   

He started his career as a cadet ranger with the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife in the early 2000s, shortly before getting a parks and recreation heritage degree at Charles Sturt University.  

While working as a ranger, he went through firefighting training, putting out wildfires and conducting hazard reduction burns.  

“As a remote firefighter, we were the ones dropping out of helicopters on long dangly lines in the middle of national parks,” he said.  

But, while working as an Aboriginal Management Officer in the World Heritage area in the Blue Mountains he met Uncle Vic, and his thinking surrounding fire management changed forever.   

“I had a very difficult time trying to explain to others what I experienced in terms of cultural burning and how good I felt,” he said.   

Den had started a community fire group before, so with the experience and the knowledge he drew from his time in Cape York, he started cultural burning project Koori Country Firesticks in 2016.    

He said Traditional Owners saw fire as a tool, rather than a threat, encouraging natural ecological systems to work closely with the fire as a means of rejuvenation.  

Despite concerns, formal culturally aligned education has started to make its way into the tertiary sector, with efforts made to place cultural education back into the hands of First Nation’s people.   

In Victoria, La Trobe University offers a nationally accredited Certificate IV in Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Management, a year-long formal training course for Aboriginal Australians.  

Aboriginal Victoria Senior Heritage Training and Education Officer Dr Christina Pavlides said the workshop introduced themes of Aboriginal cultural heritage management to students, modelled around the Aboriginal Heritage Act of 2006.    

The Act distinguished Aboriginal people as the Traditional Owners of the land, water and other resources, and recognised traditional laws and customs.   

“All cultural heritage is important, it holds the evidence of past people’s economies, traditions, customs, and knowledge,” she said.   

Dr Pavlides said they found prospective students through Aboriginal Victoria Past and Present workshops and senior members of their community were required to put forth one student for each intake.   

“When we have multiple people applying from one Registered Aboriginal Party group for example, we ask the board of that organisation to make the decision as to who they want to prioritise in any given year,” she said.   

Since its beginning in 2010, over 500 Aboriginal people have taken part in the workshops.  

“That tells you a lot about how important the program is in the Aboriginal community in Victoria and the level of their interest in managing cultural heritage.”