Landscapes socialised by fire: post‐contact changes in Aboriginal fire use in northern Australia, and implications for prehistory

Fire is integral to two distinct yet related types of hunter‐gatherer social landscape — those perceived and those physically transformed by human action. The relationships between the two are explored here, first in the ethnographic fire record for northern Australia. Results of a case study of Aboriginal fire on pastoral land are compared with previous research into fire use on Aboriginal lands. In situations of flux, the most resilient aspect of fire use is argued to be the ethic of ‘cleaning up the country’, an expression of the human signature on the landscape. Relationships between this ethic and physical landscape transformations are complex; the former has a range of expressions on the ground, and varying impacts on vegetation. Applying these findings to the prehistoric period, I argue that the ‘conservative’ Aboriginal burning observed ethnographically in northern Australia, embedded as it is in present patterns of seasonality, is a feature of the late Holocene. The concept of ‘cleaning up the country’ is at least this old, and may be considerably older. If the latter, the impact on the vegetation is likely to have been quite different in earlier times, given the changes in boundary conditions.