Reimagining wilderness and the wild in Australia in the wake of bushfires

Abstract

This chapter explores the potential for reimagining wilderness and the wild in Australia in the wake of the 2019-2020 bushfire seasons that consumed nearly 13 million hectares, including large areas of preserved wilderness across the continent. Renewed interest in traditional Indigenous land management practices and philosophies have focused on cultural burning and fuel load reduction, and called into question assumptions about the appropriate role of humans in managing landscapes for certain ends. There is now growing recognition that the exclusion of Indigenous peoples, based on human/(non-human) nature binaries and via so-called 'fortress conservation' approaches, is deficient not only on equity grounds but may also be sabotaging environmental aims. Wilderness is not country remote from humans, or devoid of people, rather it is uncared-for-country. Wild country is country that needs to be cared for more properly. According to this framing, what Europeans might call wilderness is more accurately "quiet" country, and is quiet as a result of proper care being taken (Rose 1988, 386). Such a radical reframing may well be one means by which further extinctions and bushfire events of this scale may be avoided in future. This will require active responsibilities also being taken by non-Indigenous Australians.