Ecological and Technological Knowledge of Fire: Aborigines Versus Park Rangers in Northern Australia

The attitudes held by Euro‐Australians about “bush fires” are markedly different from those of Aborigines. These contrasting perspectives confront each other in different practices of prescribed burning employed by Aborigines and Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service (ANPWS) rangers at Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory. A large part of the problem that ANPWS personnel have in understanding Aboriginal knowledge and practice involves the perceptions that Euro‐Australians have about “simple technologies,” “aboriginality,” and what is or is not “traditional.”