In 1830, the Palawa people were in the midst of their guerilla war against the British colonists taking their land in what is now Tasmania. After flaring in the mid-1820s, intensifying violence had claimed hundreds of First Nations and settler lives. In response, the Governor of Van Diemen's Land, Sir George Arthur , commissioned the preacher George Augustus Robinson to seek conciliation.
Authors
- David Bowman
Professor of Pyrogeography and Fire Science, University of Tasmania
- Greg Lehman
Professorial Fellow, Indigenous Research, University of Tasmania
Guided by Nuenonne woman Truganini and her cleverman husband Woureddy, Robinson travelled southwest across Tasmania to persuade the largely isolated Toogee nation to be relocated to a Christian mission. They were assured they would eventually be allowed to return. The promise was broken. Almost 200 members of the Toogee and other Lutruwita nations were exiled to Flinders Island, where most died .
The consequences of Robinson's empty promise have lingered ever since, from the erosion of Palawa culture to the abrupt end to millennia of cultural burning.
In our time, Tasmania's west is thought of as wilderness - wild and lightly populated. Dry lightning storms triggered massive fires in 2013, 2016, 2019 and 2025, burning areas unused to fire .
To find out whether these fires were been made worse by the end of Indigenous cultural burning, we turned to Robinson's detailed journals. In our new research , we show Robinson made very rapid progress across treeless areas. Many of these are now dense scrub. This is the first time this scrubby thickening has been shown to have occurred at regional scale in Tasmania.
With dry lightning storms projected to increase as the world heats up, our findings suggest a return to cultural burning in treeless areas could be one way to reduce the risk of these uncontrolled bushfires.
Rapid travel through open country
The forced removal of many Palawa by British authorities, and a poor ethnographic record, has made it hard for scientists and land managers to understand how and where Country was managed in Tasmania. Understanding early use of fire is of particular importance in western Tasmania, where national parks preserve many forests and grasslands.
This is why we turned to Robinson's journals . While Robinson's role as "conciliator" had catastrophic consequences for Palawa, his journals are one of the few detailed written records of Tasmanian's ancient cultural landscapes. We analysed the accounts of his 1830 trip from Bathurst Harbour in the far south to Macquarie Harbour and up to Cape Grim, as well as his subsequent 1833 journey to the southwest - around 464 kilometres in total.
The way Robinson describes the vegetation of almost two centuries ago is broadly consistent with maps of current vegetation. Most of his routes (72%) went across treeless areas such as buttongrass plains or sedge and shrub-covered moorlands, or followed what Robinson called "native roads" - pathways through forests created through intentional burning.
Tasmania's treeless areas are highly fire-prone. Despite this, about a third of these treeless areas haven't burned in the last half-century.
Over time, these long-unburned treeless areas become denser and denser. Tasmanian bushwalkers describe walking here as "scrub-bashing", as it involves fighting through thickets of vines, shrubs and dense undergrowth.
A striking feature of Robinson's journeys was how quickly he moved across landscapes now notoriously difficult for modern day bushwalkers. Retracing Robinson's west coast routes is a challenge even for well-equipped bushwalking groups. The distance Robinson travelled in one day would now take two or three days.
The phenomenon where moorlands turn into impassable scrub is well known in Tasmania. Cape Pillar in the southeastern Tasman National Park is now covered in thick scrub. Early colonial observers saw instead an open landscape .
While some ecological theories suggest increased shrub density will rapidly transform treeless areas to forests, this isn't the case in this region.
Robinson's journals and other historical sources leave no doubt the frequent low-intensity fires set by First Nations kept treeless landscapes open and passable in Tasmania.
Palawa burning of treeless areas required skilful coordination with seasonal weather and intimate knowledge of terrain to avoid destroying organic soils and fire sensitive alpine and rainforest vegetation. After cultural burning ended, large and more damaging bushfires increased. These have had a catastrophic impact on fire-sensitive plants such as King Billy pine.
Wild, remote - and more prone to fire?
Visitors are often struck with how western Tasmania's wild, remote landscapes mix large treeless areas with forests and alpine plants. This diversity of vegetation brings with it a complex fire ecology. Ancient trees such as southern beech (Nothofagus) and pencil pines (Athrotaxis) dating back to the Gondwanan era are often surrounded by flammable eucalypt forests and sedgelands.
These areas are often wet. Rainfall is high and many soils are saturated. Plant communities here grow on peaty soils with organic surface layers. When these organic layers dry out, the soil itself can burn , triggering a cascade of degradation through soil loss, erosion and slower plant growth.
Lightning is a major cause of bushfires, as treeless regions are particularly prone to igniting after a strike. Massive dry lightning storms across Tasmania are becoming more common .
Bringing back fire?
The fires started by dry lightning storms can grow very fast, as lightning can strike in several places in quick succession, far from human settlements. It's practically impossible for land managers to detect these fires and put them out while small. This year, a huge 100,000 hectare fire began when over 1,200 lightning strikes started dozens of individual fires.
Fuel reduction burns on treeless areas can reduce the risk of lightning starting a fire and make any ignitions easier to fight.
As the area is World Heritage listed , authorities will have to consider the interests of contemporary Palawa people, who already manage significant places such as Kutikina and Wargata Mina caves and want a self-determined approach to cultural burning.
There's still much to rediscover about Palawa use of fire . Authorities will have to learn how to burn grasslands, moorlands and sedgelands while avoiding burning the peat beneath, how to manage tracts of long unburned scrub, and how to create landscape mosaics to maximise habitat for different species.
Doing this will require a partnership between fire authorities and First Nations practitioners. As climate change intensifies, this task is only getting harder and more urgent.
David Bowman is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and also receives funding from the New South Wales Bushfire and Natural Hazards Research Centre, and Natural Hazards Research Australia.
Greg Lehman receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. He is a member of the Board of the Tasmanian Land Conservancy.
