GROUNDED Live - 2026: Jack Pascoe - Fire: The Friend You Know

Welcome to a new season of GROUNDED Live. This season features presentations recorded at GROUNDED Festival 2026, held over two memorable days on Yan Yan Gurt West Farm in Victoria, Australia. Each episode captures the ideas, stories and practical knowledge shared by the farmers, researchers, chefs, practitioners and thinkers who came together to explore healthier landscapes, healthier food systems and healthier communities.

In this presentation, fire ecologist Jack Pascoe shares the importance of cultural burning through both a scientific and Indigenous lens. Exploring the ecological, cultural and social value of cool burns, Jack invites us to rethink our relationship with fire and consider what can be learned from practices that have cared for Country over thousands of years.

See Jack's PowerPoint presentation here.

GROUNDED Festival is a cross between a farming conference and a food festival, held on a different farm each year. Every festival is unique, celebrating the people, landscapes and food of its host region through an inspiring line-up of speakers, local producers and hands-on learning.

With multiple stages running concurrently, GROUNDED brings together science and technology, ancient wisdom and fresh thinking. It provides a respectful place for lively discussion, an audience as interesting as the speakers, and an excellent menu of local food, drinks and music, all on a beautiful, regeneratively managed farm.

Each year, we record many of the presentations and make them freely available as the GROUNDED Live podcast. We hope you enjoy the conversations.

Thanks for listening, and if you enjoy this episode, we'd love to welcome you to a future GROUNDED Festival.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

G'day there, I'm Matthew Evans, and I'm the founder and curator of the Grounded Festival. And what follows is the Grounded Podcast. Now this is the audio that we captured for the speakers in the tent, live on the day, unedited. And I hope you enjoy. One of our most popular speakers from Grounded 2024 and first 2010 has got my name Jack Pasker. He's a former ecologist, but he's also an Indigenous man who knows the value of cultural cool burns, not only from an ecological perspective, but from a broader perspective.

SPEAKER_09 0:43

Welcome back everyone! Welcome to the afternoon sessions. We're going to get started. Take your seat if you're coming in. For those who might have just walked up to this tent for the first time, my name's Anthony James, host of the Regeneration podcast and confluence river journeys and a few other things. And I'm here now with our next special guest, Jack Pasco, a UN man living here on Gutavanet Country. Among many roles, Jack's a director of Bush Heritage Australia and Saltwater people. He's an honorary strategic advisor to the Conservation Ecology Centre, leading their adaptive management and applied ecological research program across the Otway region. Jack also sits on scientific reference groups for Zoos Victoria and the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action. And he was a member of the expert panel which recently reviewed the Victorian Wildlife Act of 1975. On fire as friend, would you please give a massive hand to Jack Pasco?

SPEAKER_08 1:48

No, yeah. Um thank you. So just to clarify a few things, I'm no longer work at the Conservation Ecology Center. There are staff members here that do that now. Um clearly need to update the bio. Um look, I'm I'll I'll speak about fire today, but I'll speak about a whole range of other stuff as well because I can't keep a narrow focus, it's just not the way I am. Um firstly, I want to acknowledge that we're on Gulagin country today. I live on Gadabunut country, which is directly to the south. Those two language groups are the most closely related of the uh greater Gundich Mara Nation, which is made up of five language groups. The reason that they're closely related is most likely become because those groups of people have come inland with sea level rise. So they're Basque Coast people. Uh there's a story that comes with uh one of the first um contacts between white and black people on Gulagin Country with an old fella who kept saying to this group of white fellas on horses that Kolaknyat was interpreted by those settlers or colonizers that he was uh giving a name of his clan or himself. What he was actually saying, that old fella was this country's mine. And uh he was saying it not in the way that we would say it today, he was saying it's mine in the way that my mother is mine and my father is mine, my brother and sister are mine. I'm part of this country. Driving through Goulogen country today, seeing I guess the way that the landscape has been changed irrevocably, um largely for agriculture. I wonder if that old fellow, if he'd had his time again, would have been less polite about his introduction. I need to be closer. Oh no, I'd either do it with this, AJ, help me out. So I when I was three, I moved to Cape Hotway. So this is on the southernmost tip of uh Gadabinhood country, and we lived in that caravan. And I don't think you'd particularly care, um, but it's an interesting photo because it shows you what the landscape used to look like. It was kept open by the old people uh through frequent use of fire, and it was maintained that way by uh pastoralists um through both the grazing of cattle and the cutting of summer hay. It looked like this was I was on old uh when I was a young fella, and the aunties from Geelong and Waterung Country would come down uh for the Lamandra longafolia, so the sword grass, because dad and I would burn it pretty regularly, and that was the most supple grasses you can get for weaving. So they'd come down a lot. And I've been manipulating it for a long time. This was my first job as the uh sole member of the organization Flash Flashes. We managed about 20 properties across Cape Otway. We eventually got a ride on MOA, which I miss immensely, but um was inoperable by the end. I went away and studied. I studied at Beacon University and then went to the University of Western Sydney. I'm now at the University of Melbourne, I should acknowledge that because they pay me. Um and uh I don't know about their OHS things with bare feet, but anyway. Is anyone here from University of Melbourne? Good. We're good then. Um by the time I came back about a decade later, the country had gone from a very open woodland to one that was dominated by dead trees, senest stags, and a very, very dense understory of plants that had come in from the coast. So in this instance, it was largely coast wattle, but basically dominated by a plant called uh leukopogan parviflorus or coast coastal beard heath. And that would come in every year with the Currawongs as they moved inland, they'd bring a whole lot of seed, and they were always uh always dragging the seed into the open woodlands. But those processes that I talked about before would keep the country open, the fire and the animals. And I remember coming back and just seeing this dense wall of vegetation under these dead trees and thinking, geez, it's changed. And and my mum would talk about this plant that she remembers from when we were living there, about this big, and she couldn't know identify it. And what they were when we worked it out were German and leukopogan. They were always in the system, they just hadn't been allowed to dominate. Why had the trees died? Um koalas largely had become out of balance with the ecosystem and defoliated uh several hundred hectares of of manigum woodland. I'll diverge uh for a second. So when Matthew asked me to talk, he always says, We don't really like slides. You know, we think better stories come when you don't use slides. So I've got 70 of them because I don't like being told what to do. And then he he said, I want, you know, if you do use slides, if you have to do it, then talk to each one. Well, I'm not gonna do that either, Matthew. I'll do what I like. But I won't have any slides of graphs. I'm not gonna go into this because it's really boring chemistry, but basically what that shows is why koalas favor manigums over other trees in this area. They have a very high protein content, very low in toxins and terpenes, which uh reduce the digestibility of that protein. Then, when those trees are defoliated and produce epicormic growth, like you'll see after a bushfire, most other trees make that epicormic growth less palatable. Mannigum doesn't do that, creates a positive feedback loop. You defoliate the canopy. Um and we were left with a woodland that was completely and utterly upside down, like the roots are in the sky and all of the leaves are on the ground. I thought maybe we could reintroduce fire. Maybe that's something that we could do to reinvigorate the seed bank and have germination of the next generation of trees. So I joined the Country Fire Authority. When I tell this story, I always say it was because of this, but in fact, my wife joined before me, and I felt both emasculated and the need to keep her alive. Um, she then left, and I'm still in it. Um, I seem to be able to pick up organizations as I go along. It's really hard to divest yourself of organizations. Anyone else feel that? Anyway, so I was in it to restore the next generation of manigums and messmates into this bit of country that I love so much. But the CFA, they're in it for this other reason. They're really interested in reducing fuel. Um, the cocky that taught me fire fighting through the Country Fire Authority calls it the nipples, knees and nuts theory. Basically, the different levels of structured vegetation that create the conditions for bushfire. So it drags the fire from low-level fire up through the layers, up the nipples, knees, and nuts, not in that order, into the canopy, and you get self-perpetuating bushfires. So that's what they were interested in. I was in it for the restoration of trees and plants, and we failed. There wasn't enough eucalyptus seeds still in the seed bank to carry a generation of trees. So we planted them all. Um and we did all right. My back's knackered, but we did okay. But what the fire did was create perfect preconditions for those seedlings to survive. And it also, um, all of the seeds that we wanted in the mid-story and the understory of the country were still there, just waiting for the opportunity to uh effectively be able to compete with the wall of shrubs. In the process, we let off some ungodly bushfires, effectively, that we contained but just. Um and this wasn't the fire that I'd grown up with the old man, although he and I did have some escapes from time to time and burned some fences, it never got beyond the fences. Um and so I went to elders of mine, who I had been for a long time, to talk about what other fire we could use. And I apologize to the locals in the room who'd probably heard me bang on about this for a long time, this story. But these two old fellas, you and elders, Uncle Max and Uncle Noel. Uncle Max has left his suitcase, that's how he described his body um a few years ago through COVID, unfortunately, but Uncle Noel's still with us, and they're both extremely affected by the 2019-2020 fires that ripped through South Coast New South Wales, Ewan Country. Um, and they taught me a lot about fire, as did a whole lot of other people from around the country, and they have, you know, for a long time. And so through that and our own experimentation on country and Cape Otway, we started to introduce a different sort of fire in the woodlands of Cape Otway. And there's something very peaceful about that photo, so I always share it with people. And what we were able to do was manipulate the vegetation, manipulate the nipples, knees, and nuts by removing the leukopogan with very small fires. We were able to create diversity throughout the landscape. And that's my family not being very scared of the fire. That old dog, he waits for the fires. He's been to a lot of fires, the lad, he waits for the fires to get just big enough that he can fit in the ash and then he rolls around in it and goes to sleep. He's about 14 now, he does a lot of the sleeping bit. So I want to talk about fire, but I I want to talk a little bit about the work that we do with Eastern Ma. Aboriginal corporation. I understand that um Uncle Joe did a smoking that went really well here. A lot of smoke, eh? Settled in place. You might must bring a lot of bad energy with you if the smoke's doing that. It's one of those funny days where the inversion layer keeps all the smoke in the in the valleys and the low places. Now it John Clark tells this story very well, and it's a good example because it's on Gulagian country. So that picture is um is actually taken looking south from uh Alvy, a place called Red Rock. It's um its language name means he who bears his red teeth. It's because the Gulagian people who named it were there when they were seeing it erupt 10,000 years ago, and they've maintained that connection with that land, and that language still exists. And John and Ebony, who's a local Gulagian woman, will talk about the different entities that make up that landscape. And so looking out to the south from Red Rock, what you're looking at is the curve of the bandicoot's tail, or the or the snake, Kerang Krang, place of many snakes, and that bit of country was managed for the betterment of those species. If you look from there to the northwest, to place called Deranalum or Cheranalum, as it was called, that's sea turn country on the banks of the lake kerangamite. And then looking to the northeast, you look uh past another volcanic called Warin, which means bandicoot. And that lava flow of warin is associated with ancestral bandicoot beings, and that country was managed for their betterment. And that story talks to, and I'm not going to go into the details, the way that the movement through the landscape in this country has been changed by volcanic eruptions over millennia. We did a project with a colleague of mine, Michael Sean Fletcher, who's a rajry man and a paleoecologist. I think that's what he is. He sticks a thing that looks like a pottipooty into the mud, draws out a uh a column of uh of mud or sediment, cuts them into fine sections, and analyzes the pollen in those sections, and he can is able to backcast effectively vegetation change over hundreds of years. It's too tedious for me. I would not survive doing that. There's a lot of lab work. But what we were able to show from that sediment core is how the vegetation in a place called Triote Nature Conservation Reserve, which sits on the bandicoot or the Warine lava flow, has changed over years, and it showed obviously an increase in exotic weeds to be expected in pastoral country, but also it showed an increase in the number of native shrubs and a decrease in the amount of poases or grasses, which and also a reduction in the fine uh accumulation of carbon in the soil. So there was an association with a reduced amount of fire over the last 200 years and a shrubbification of country, which is what we were talking about on Cape Otway as well. I'm doing this awful academic thing showing my papers because it sounded like I remember to talk about it, but we wrote a paper with Eastern Ma knowledge holders to explain to scientists how to engage with Eastern Ma on some of these questions and how they wanted to work with. We'll get to the fire bit. I'm not going to speak to this picture much, but this is a song line of ours, which actually is written in the stones in Tasmania. So this old fellow, when he was a boy, Uncle Max, I got to try not to get emotional when I talk about this because it is a bit, but this old fellow was taken out of school when he was nine years old by five grandmasters, and they took him to a place called Cathcart, which is maybe 80 kilometers west of the ocean, and they drew him a story in the sand, and they said, Young fellow, you've got to find this place in your lifetime. Have you got that? You know where it is? And he goes, Yeah. They crossed it out, and he found that place when he was 80 in Tasmania. It tells this story. He he tracked it down. We've just come back from there actually, and and working with some of the arties there that hold that bit of country, and trying to understand the story and how it connects all the mobs of the east coast of Australia and the West Coast to a degree as well. But the story tells a similar story about sea level rise, how Guru, through a negotiation with the elders, agreed to hold law in the ocean if from time to time he'd come back and regurgitate that law for the people through beaching himself. And that was the agreement. And then during the chaos, which is the first panel of that painting, which is written in the stone, Guru came back to the people, and through leading the people with the creation of bubbles, the people were able to find uh a way through to higher country. The reason I'm talking about that is because I want to talk about culturally significant entities. And that's really the basis for how Eastern Ma have arranged their biocultural country plan, is showing the culturally significant entities in the landscape and explaining to people who want to work there that that is the reason for the management of that country. The whale is simply another expression of that, one that's familiar to me. As an ecologist, we were working in a place called the Carlisle Heathland, which you've probably seen in the news recently because so much of it has burnt recently, or a portion of it has burnt. It's Xantherea-dominated country, grass trees, on a really sandy spur along the west side of the Otway Range, which tends to burn fairly frequently because it's so dry comparative to the wet forest of the range. And John Clark was talking to us and said, Where have the eastern ground parrots gone? When I was a park ranger, we were burning it, we're replicating what the cow cookies had done, and they were representing what the old uh replicating what the old people had done before. Since we've stopped that program of burning, we've lost them over two two decades. They're no longer in the old ways. The last record was actually in the Anglesey Heath in 2015. So where have they gone? Work it out. So we try, we try to work it out, and this is where fire comes into part of this story. It's extraordinarily flammable. This was a picture taken of a fuel hazard reduction burn. She's fairly going. Um and it's the sort of country that'll crown at 3 a.m. You know, it's um really highly flammable. It's like having giant tussocks that, you know, stand taller than me when I stand up. This is sort of the landscape that we work in. That picture means nothing to any of you. I'm sorry. What I wanted to show you was this map. And if you can ignore the bit of red blob in the top left-hand bit, what you can see in the center is actually a fire scar that started when the rest of the Eastern Seaboard was on fire in 2020, January of. And it took a northeasterly run at the township of Jallybrand. They evacuated everything. And what that did was draw a real focus on that landscape for its flammability and potential to harm communities. So we've got this directive from Uncle John, or he doesn't like to be called that, um, to look wherever the ground parrot's gone. And we've got these mob and grown overalls that want to burn the shit out of the place because they want to reduce the fuel hazard. So, how do we come together and what are we going to do about it? And it was interesting. Um, because fuel hazard reduction burning in this landscape does work. Because in 2000, what year is it? 2026. In 2024, in November, when the Otways should not be burning, a fire took a run in a northerly direction towards Yulong, which is near Labour's Hill, also probably places that mean nothing to anyone but me and a few others. Um, you can see that strange shape. If the black diagonal stripe is the shape of the fire, and the green bits on the side hemming it in, they are burns from that would conduct it in winter and the the winter before and the winter before that, and it completely hemmed in and changed the shape of the fire. So it does work, and you can understand why they're thinking about it. This is what it looks like. We were actually already in the landscape studying small mammals. We call them critical weight range mammals because it's a terrible description, but they're football sized, that's how I think of them. And they have a larger propensity to go extinct than other mammals. And we were trying to find places where we could do experiments on, not, you know, like laboratory field mice, but understand the populations of these species and how they react to fire. And we were able to find extraordinary numbers living in these grass tree skirts of long-nosed potteroos, southern brown bandicoots, and uh swamp eye kindness. So we were already working here. And we'd found some disturbing things. Um, fire obviously changes the landscape drastically. It moves through this country ubiquitously because it goes from grass tree skirt to grass tree skirt to grass tree skirt. And what we were able to demonstrate with these little potteroos by putting little uh GPS collar devices on them was that they would all survive the fire. We never had a fire uh kill a potteroo directly, but within a fortnight of a planned fuel hazard reduction burn, they were all dead. And we repeated this consistently, and we had about an 80% mortality rate over numerous fires. Um, and then see I told you there wouldn't be any graphs. But there was a considerable mortality. I'm not going to go into it, the culprits were obvious. Um we did a another study where we looked at um cats, and my PhD student Mark Laplace had tracking collars on feral cats and foxes at the same time. This is, and he names them after Disney characters, it's embarrassing. But these green dots here are the um uh Gaston's uh home range prior to a burn, and then there's the burn in the orange, but I'll do that again. So watch his home range move into the into the planned burn. So for those of you who can't see it, and I know you can't see it at the back, basically what Gaston has done is he's moved straight into a planned burn within days of coming across it, and he hasn't just targeted the bits that have burnt, he has targeted the bits that have remained unburnt where all the animals would have gone as refugia. And that um Yeah, that's another graph that we don't need to talk about. But basically, what that association with these burn areas then degrades over time. So they become less and less interested in those uh in those landscapes, in all likelihood, because all of the food's gone. We're able to find some other trends. Um foxes and cats were less likely to be successful and attracted into these landscapes if the there was vegetation, dense vegetation between them and a fire. So these animals are largely restricted to using uh uh tracks, so fire access tracks, etc., through the landscape because it's so dense. And that's what was keeping the small mammals intact in the first place. And if the fuel hazard reduction burning was going right to the edge of the road, they were using that as a way in to find all those mammals. So we did a whole lot of stuff like this and working out the patchiness of the fire. If we could reduce the, I guess, the ubiquitousness of the fire across its extent, um, we could also reduce the mortality rates. And so we did a whole lot of planning, and that's just a slide I show to convince you that I do actually get out of the office. What we're able to do is come up with a methodology of using an aerial drip torch, which is basically a flamethrower on the arse end of a helicopter that can be extraordinarily accurate with where it puts fire, and we're able to manipulate where that fire went in association with the weather conditions, but also the fuel moisture in the country, and we're able to reduce the patchiness of a fire to the scale, the extent of a fire in patches to the extent that it never really exceeded much more than 40% of a Potteroo's home range. And that worked. We were able to really reduce the mortality rates. I'm not really into numbers. I hope no one else is here. I just sort of tell Yarns. Which is interesting enough in and of itself, that's a success. We've just come back from a really bad bushfire season, so around the townships of Carlisle River, Jallybrand, uh, and Kawarin. And this is right on the edge, around the the boundaries of this uh dry heath land on the corners of Goolidge and Gadabod and Kiro Run country. And we had this extraordinary thing happen where we had an old experiment looking at Potteroo densities and it burnt half our sites. And if you're a scientist like me, that's an experiment waiting to happen, so we'll do that. But it was kind of uncanny. But that's got nothing to do with ground parrots, really, has it? So that's all about the dry country. And I said I was going to talk about fire and ground parrots. Can't trust me. They don't really rely on this grass tree country, they rely on low sedgy stuff, grasses, seeds that are within range of a ground parrot, you know, they're about that big, so you can imagine what they need. Sedge is within that sort of range. They need it very dense for not only food uh uh but also to keep the predators to have somewhere to escape to. Now, what we've seen is a very interesting pattern as fire has been removed that the cockies were replicating that we talked about, as this intense shrubification. So along the drainages, there is always meloleucasclerosa or scented paper bark, which, with the absence of fire, or I should say, intermittent high intensity fire associated with bushfires and no other intervention, those plants have just spread out from the drainages and now dominate most of what I would call impeded heath or wet heath country to the point where there is simply no food or structure for the ground parrots to rely on. Again, the work of my colleague Michael Sean shows this in uh Tasmania, where based on geology and climate, they really should have ubiquitous rainforests and wet forests. But actually, they have these immense button grass plains, which is one of the species, ironically, that ground parrots rely on as well. And those button grass plains are an artifact of frequent and deliberate fire use in those bits of country. So we have a very similar trend. What are we going to do about it? A PhD student of mine designed a series of uh mechanical and fire interventions to see if we could reverse the trend in shrubification of these wet heats. They're really drastic if you're not used to looking at them. Um we have a really clear intent. So we had mulch-headed bobcats do some intervention in some places. We had uh the same bobcat roll some of the country, wait for that country to brown off because it had uh killed the shrubs and then burned through that country, and then in others we tried to put low-intensity winter fire through some of this country. Um the winter fire in particular is very difficult to get to take um in a consistent way. It relied on on wind because the moisture in the soil at that time is very, very high, and the the fuels are very green for the most part, green shrubs. But we did get some take to make you feel better within a few months that looked very, very green again because all of the re-sprouting plants um had pushed through the mulch. We saw a whole lot of plants, we did a lot of measurement. There's pretty flowers in there, that's cool, isn't it? And we did a similar thing in Cape Otway. We we didn't do the rolling, but we did the mulching versus fire versus a control, and we had it all sorted, we'd done all the pre-surveys, and then we had a fire in 2024. I don't know, there's a few too many, that ran straight through the study area. And I was actually one of the first incident controllers for that fire, and by coincidence, a bulldozer put a fire break right through the experiment in just the right way to get the right number of treatments, so we kept our experiment uncanny. The coroners interested. What we're able to show, and I won't go into it because it's boring and no one likes graphs except for the scientists amongst us, but what it has shown is all of the treatments compared to experimental controls are increasing uh species richness across the board. The treatments that involve fire, so the the burnt, the wind of fire and the rolling and burning, um, were even more likely to increase uh the species richness. And we'll know over the decades that with repeated intervention, whether we can reverse the shrubification of these landscapes and maybe someday have uh a bit of country that can support ground parrots again. Um how am I going, AJ? That's half an hour. I won't read it out, but this is basically a statement that Eastern Ma have made about ground parrot country. It's founded in some of the work we've done, as in it's informed by, but it also sets a landscape biocultural objective for that landscape, talking to having ground parrot country ready again for ground parrots in 2045. And it talks about how all of the people working on ground parrot country, black, white, and brindle, relate to each other and the place. It's really quite powerful. I'm not going to read it, it's too powerful. It'd kill you all. But that's that that bit of uh bit of firework that we're doing. I'll speak really quickly to another project at the northern ramps, which is just behind us, actually, and they'll probably start firing it up over the week. It'll be interesting. I think the soil is probably a little bit drier than it would be normally at this year. But um, over about the last seven or eight years, forest fire management have been working on these north-facing ridges here to see if they can uh bring in a fire regime that's regular enough to reduce the elevation of the of the plants to potentially uh mitigate the pot uh the potential. I'm saying that a lot, aren't I? But to mitigate the potential for self-perpetuating crown fire, which relies on those shrubby species in really dense ubiquitous stands to drive up into the canopy. And so a bit late to the story, we've come to try and understand that from a scientific perspective. And we've designed an experiment that's looking at um north-facing ridges that haven't been burnt versus those that have been burnt twice in five years versus those that have been burnt in ten years. So trying to understand how the fire regime over a period of time will influence plants, both structurally and and from species richness point of view. We're also trying to build a model that will incorporate the cultural values of those landscapes. So the food species, the artifacts can be gathered from certain sort of plants, um, for simply having people on ceremony back on country again. So we'll build that into the work we're doing. Um this slide has survived from a different presentation. So is this one, James? Basically showing you uh the structural changes within the different vegetation types. It's quite obvious once you're there, the the regular fire does open the country up. It is grassier and and potentially uh more biodiverse. Um that's telling that story, and I haven't got results beyond that yet. But basically, species richness is very similar across the board if you simply count the number of plant species with any of those um experimental types. Um, they just happen to be different species, which suggests to me you need all sorts of different fire treatments across a landscape, which um has been the story of ever for fire management in this country. Um it's an interesting process, and I think in Saturday they intend to start putting uh fire in this country. Um, and they do it largely through um again, aerial ignition, so on uh with uh aerial drip torches. And it it's interesting in that as opposed to what we used to do, and I don't mean we royally, I mean agencies tend to burn from track to track. And in national parks, those tracks tend to be on the top of ridge lines. And if they want to target 80% of the vegetation, which is often their you know their fire hazard uh objective, is to target 80% of the vegetation, and if they have to burn from track to track, it has to carry, logically, through the wettest part of that country. Does that make sense? So, in order for it to carry through the wettest part of country, it has to burn the driest bit of country, far hotter than it needs to to carry. That's shit house. But what this work is demonstrating is that in clever use of aerial drip torches and knowledge of the country and the variance in the fuel moisture across the different X area areas of country, they're not burning from fire break to fire break, they're burning to fuel moisture differentials, which is how the old people used to do it. Um, so it's exciting. It might get very smoky here, and no doubt in patches they'll still burn too hot. But um prepared to learn from country, which is the most important bit. I'm done, AJ.

SPEAKER_09 33:31

Thanks, Jack. Questions? Straight to the floor. I've got one to get us going. I think raise hands and we've got a mic runner there. Jack, I'm curious. We hear in other quarters of this sort of a festival about uh holistic grazing methods and then weaving that into uh fire practices for beneficial outcomes. Is that something you've come across too?

SPEAKER_08 33:58

Uh it's not something I work on particularly age. I mean, I I do think a lot about fire in terms of uh I guess restoring native pastures. Um my old man owns a farm on the Wallagra and Far East Gippsland, and so it was really interesting watching the country recover or come back from the 2000, well, they were impacted on New Year's Eve 2019-20. The old man's farm burnt in sections about three times, three different bifronts. And the the years since the the native grasses uh did far better and than than the you know the tricule and all the other crap. I think it's crap, um, that had sort of dominated that farm um for a long time. But it was interesting to the dense forests, and so I mean these are you know largely silver top ash forests that are recovering from you know many decades of of clear fell logging, very dense with young trees. I mean, and they've been designed that way to grow shitloads of tall, straight trees, and now they're national parks. But that created a very, very dense canopy, and the fire actually opened that canopy to the point where enough light penetrated. This is our theory, it's probably a shit one, but it's it's what we're sticking with, that it allowed those uh native grasses that we hadn't seen really since you'd own the farm germinate and set seed. And so it was all in the seed bank, it just needed that opportunity. And I've avoided your question about pasture because I don't think about it very much.

SPEAKER_09 35:40

What comes to mind is is uh is uh some station managers out west, actually from West Australia, who who find ways to work in with fire that that reduces the fire need from the grazing angle. So they'll graze more, but in a way that's uh tending soil and so forth as well, not not overgrazing it, um, that diminishes the need for fire and achieve similar objectives from my reading. Uh so it's it's been fascinating to observe how the two could potentially be uh dead fellows, knowing the two, right? There's a there's often divisions between cultural burning, prescribed burning, and and farmers.

SPEAKER_08 36:26

Yep. Yeah, and I agree. I mean, look, I think the landscape has changed so drastically for the betterment of beef and sheep, really, grass and maybe half a dozen species of pasture grass. And so my default is to say we could possibly do with less of that. But I do think that if we can work out like in systems like yours a way that actually doesn't denude the soil, um, which is so important, having a cover. I mean, the the old people used to burn in ways that would allow the charcoal to settle on the soil so it had a blanket over winter. You know, it was that sort of nuanced. Those are the sorts of understandings of country that I think we haven't been particularly good as agriculture has become larger and larger as opposed to you know smaller family holdings with an actual association with that place and knowledge of it. Right.

SPEAKER_09 37:27

Anyone? There's a couple. Thanks.

SPEAKER_00 37:35

Jack Jeff from Warner Bull Kosovo Lancare Network. Um in the past we're familiar with uh some very one-dimensional uh concepts like um DECA had a plan to where they um sought to have burns equivalent to 5% of the land area every year. Um there's the other system, the name escapes me, but it's a system where they say that there should only be one fire every hundred years in the outway forest and more frequently in uh in different areas. Does your work provide the opportunity to not be to not take such a one-dimensional approach with fire management, but to be um quite variable depending on the circumstances and uh the m multiple layers that you've presented today, whether it's the fauna, uh, the landscape, etc.

SPEAKER_08 38:36

Yeah. How are you, Jeff? It's been a while. Um yeah, I hope so. I wouldn't do it otherwise. I'd probably just I don't know, do something else. I I think you're spot on. I mean, the 5% target was destructive. We now have the thing called the residual risk. Is that what you're referring to? Which basically views landscapes um from how much risk that they're retaining within them, which um extraordinary way to view a landscape, isn't it? Really? How how scared of it are we? So, yeah, I hope so. I I don't think there's any there seems to be this push and pull where you have to have one outcome or another, right? So we have to have environmental outcomes, or we have to have uh, you know, biodiversity outcomes. I I think that's I think that's a false economy, because I think different types of applications of fire can coexist, as can the exclusion of fire. The old people knew that. There was country that wasn't burnt, or there was country that was burnt very infrequently, like I think you're referring to the Mountain Ash, which relies on a bushfire at least once every 300 years. I hope to dodge that in my lifetime. I suspect I won't. You know, we we know those of us that live in the Otways, that um as opposed to very infrequent fires, we now seem to be fighting the most years, and we'll lose one into the the big country eventually, and that that'll be devastating. But we know that they're fire adapted systems, and so we'll move on. Um but yes, I I think, and I guess the way I'd explain it is that we need to be explicit about the values that we are considering when we're looking at for the reason to manage land. I know that seems like an obscure thing to say, but we tend to be talking about landscape from a risk perspective or an ecological perspective. It's nonsense, it's it's all one bit of country, and we can do it alongside each other if we're explicit about what we're doing and why.

SPEAKER_05 40:48

Hi Joe. Um, I've got a question about uh Luka Pogan Parvi Floria in the Cape Wat Way landscape and your results with burning with that because it is um when it gets uh large, it's a modern creeper that was never there, it is hot. It burns so hot and so hard to get rid of. And um so how could you have a cool burn on that? And has you know, what has your burning uh regimen and results been on that? Or has it been that Shane's been mulching it or you know, to sort of get rid of it to get all the good stuff back? Thanks.

SPEAKER_08 41:29

Yeah, look, I think all of the above, Roz, uh we burn it, we burn it too hot, you know, and we share those sandy soils, right? It's not real good to burn those those soils so hot. Um it it degrades the seed bank, it degrades the organic matter that's in there. Um so I think once it's gone to a certain point, you know, and and and shrubs, including Luka Pogan, do this thing where if they're left to their own advice over many decades, they will snare some decline. But that species that we're talking about seems to generate underneath itself, and it that doesn't seem to happen in that system. So I think the mulching is good. One of the real advantages you get on those sandy soils that we share versus some of the other Otway soils is they grow so slowly. So you have that window of time to interrupt that shrub cycle. So I think things like mulching and burning the mulch seasons down the track or allowing plants to come through it has worked. We we've we've demonstrated that it has worked in in some places, um, is a good option. I think we should consider all those things.

SPEAKER_05 42:40

Um so just to clarify, so you've mulched it and it's gotten to a sort of a small height, and then you've put a cool burn on it, which would and and you've had quite good results with that.

SPEAKER_08 42:50

We have, yeah. In terms of species diversity, absolutely. Um the key to all of this is grass cover. As soon as you have grass cover, you have all the options in the world for burning. Um I'm I'm talking about, in particular, native grasses because they do tend to go through that annual cycle where they uh don't die off, but they maintain some of their moisture uh and have more of that dry material at certain times of year to carry a low-intensity fire. So grass cover, especially, especially natives in those systems, is key. And the systems we're talking about, Roz had some shrubs in them that are largely maritime grasslands. And if you look across the eastern seaboard, we're losing our native maritime grasslands um rapidly.

SPEAKER_10 43:35

Hi, um, my name's Peter. I'm just really interested to know um is traditional burning allowed in Victoria's national parks? And if not, why not? Hope I haven't opened up a slide.

SPEAKER_08 43:51

No, no, no. Look, there's been a lot written about it. There's a lot of mobs trying to do it. Um there are there are Certainly, traditional or indigenous led burns in national parks right across the state, they tend to be within a uh a government agency framework that they can exist, which leaves leads to some of the spontaneity of reading country in a difficult place. Because instead of going, all right, today is the day, you know, yeah, everything won't be ready. You know, the OHNS won't be in the joint fuel management plan, won't have been done 18 months in advance. But largely it's one of the few opportunities to practice those things because so little of the Victorian landscape is in Indigenous hands. So it's an important place for cultural practice to be undertaken, regardless of the fact that it's over-regulated. Um so yes, it's allowed. There are both legislative and policy impediments to doing it well and easily, which stops it being done wide used in a widespread manner. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 45:05

Isn't that on farms?

SPEAKER_08 45:08

Yeah, it is. Um absolutely that there's no impediment to anyone burning on private property in Victoria outside of the fire danger period. And so that's um that's been a window that's been explored by by mob across the state as well, an important one. Yeah.

unknown 45:22

Cool.

SPEAKER_09 45:23

It might be worth bringing in too, like with regard to the native grasses. I wonder if you've had exposure to this over this side too. So farmers in the West, who happen to just have cracked through after 30 years of pioneering work, uh became West Australians of the Year last year. I'm talking about the Haggerty family. Perhaps even Matt, their son is in this audience, he's present presenting at some stage. But I I've marvelled at how they have the native grasses coming through and they and they harvest crop over the top. So they found a way that it can coexist and and indeed to mutual benefit.

SPEAKER_08 45:59

Harvesting wheat or other grains, barley and well, I've got nothing to say about that, AJ, other than we've done the reverse where we've harvested native grasses in far east Gippsland over the top of all the other crap. So you can do it whichever way you want to skin the cat, I guess.

SPEAKER_06 46:23

Richard Gilbert, uh East Otway Landcare Group, I was one of those volunteers that helped you with that re-vegetation down on Cape Gotway years ago. Something getting away from fire management for the moment, uh, something that's always puzzled me as to what initiated that koala-led decimation of the manigums. Uh, what was the, or do you have a theory on what the ecological background was to that uh event?

SPEAKER_08 46:52

Yeah, I've got a theory. No Victorian environment minister has enjoyed it. Um so koalas in Victoria were largely extirpated by the 20s on the mainland, and they were reintroduced in several places. One of them was on Cape Watway from uh uh a population of French island, I think. And so, but I think some also came in a second wave from Tower Hill. Um, but it was like 71 animals released in 85, or it's 85 animals. No, no, it's in 85, and uh they had a very limited genetic pool, so some people have said that there was something weird going about on about their genetics. I don't I'm not into that so much, but they're in a a really uh high density stand of their absolute favorite food, and we've reduced all of the things that used to manage their numbers. People no longer have harvest koala, there are no dingoes left in the Otways, fire was excluded from that system for a very long time. So that's my theory. There's no top-down pressure on a population that's in its absolute best habitat.

SPEAKER_04 48:13

Hi Jack, um just following on from that, I'm just wondering about the feral population of cats and foxes. What's going on with that through the Otways?

SPEAKER_08 48:25

They're very well, thank you. Yeah, look, there's a um there's a program which I helped design um called the Otway Ark, which is a landscape-scale fox baiting program across the Otways. Um still a lot of foxes around, and we can kind of prove that, which is a concern, isn't it? Cats are very difficult to manage. We did a study on them like, I don't know, seven or eight years ago, which showed like a scat a scat, a cat per square kilometer or something, like really high, high densities of cats. Um, so we can throw a lot of energy into controlling these feral animals, which are filling an ecological niche, or which the thing that I think is better bang for buck, we can think about the way we manage landscapes to provide habitat and cover for the animals that are hanging on in those landscapes. So, for instance, the the very dense xanteria or grass tree habitat, which creates really good uh cover for those species, we think really carefully about how we manage them. Um until we have an efficient way of managing both of so there are some really uh successful fox control programs across Australia, but they tend not to be in these temperate forests with high rainfall. Um, and because there's no food limitation for those species, they're not drawn so much to um uptake of bait and things like that. There's some indication of control, but um complicated and difficult, yeah. And a lot of non-target bait uptake, so it makes me squirm a little bit.

SPEAKER_09 50:02

You mentioned dingoes before, Jack. No prospect of reintroduction around here.

SPEAKER_08 50:11

Uh no, I mean that would get me into trouble, wouldn't it?

unknown 50:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_08 50:17

And if it happens, it had nothing to do with me. All systems need a top water predator, I would argue.

SPEAKER_09 50:26

I'll I'll cite I'll cite a station of 400,000 acres in the west that is sort of playing a role in advocating for the reintroduction in broader parts, and and um yeah, they haven't seen a fox or a cat in a while.

SPEAKER_11 50:43

Um Jack Jeff from WA. Um looking trying to introduce cool burns onto our small farming system. Any recommendations from your experiences and advice to landholders?

SPEAKER_08 50:54

Yeah, you're straying into this pasture management thing, which I haven't done a lot of. Um ecosystem management. Yeah, well, look, all use of fire really relies on a fundamentally good understanding of your plants. So if you're trying to encourage something, understand when are the sensitive times of year. I mean, we use it when we're thinking about shrubs and when they're putting the majority of their energy into above ground growth, it's a really good time to be putting fire into them because it will send them backwards because they're, you know, they're investing. Um things like when uh you know, when we're looking at trying to can outcompete exotic improved pasture grasses um for the betterment of native grasses, then we're looking at when maturity occurs, when fire will carry. And so instead of looking at, and one of the reasons why I think the 2009 and 20 fires were so good at encouraging native grasses over exotic pasture was because it was a hot summer fire when um pasture grasses are quite uh vulnerable, but native grasses, most of their energy is in the is in the roots, um, and so they're able to recover really well. So that would be my advice. Just I mean, if you're a farmer, which I assume you are, you're thinking about plant life cycles and and habits all the time, but it's no different to to fire. Um, just don't let one go.

SPEAKER_07 52:24

G'day, I'm Sebastian Enmark from um New South Wales, Beer Pie Country, about four hours north of uh Sydney. Um, firstly, just want to, as someone who's spent a lot of time as a volunteer firefighter, as a paid firefighter, I also just want to really uh express my appreciation for the immense amount of indigenous indigenous literature and work that Indigenous people have done to bring out information like yourself. Um, bring out information um for the rest of society to be able to read about fire and fire management. That's just quite a phenomenal thing of the last few decades. Um maybe following on from the previous question, um I've got a bit more of a statement that I'd like to see if you think is is fair. Um so as I said, I have a government fire agency understanding of fire behavior, and it's obviously pretty narrow-minded. Um, and I've educated myself as much as I can in regards to um this amazing literature that's available. So, what I do is what I call appropriate burning, I'd like to think, because I'm not Aboriginal, so I can't say cultural. And yes, cool burning isn't always possible. I cool burning obviously one could be the ideal, but that's not always the case. But basically, my parameters that I kind of work within, um, I want the soil to have a good bit of moisture before I born. Like you've got to stick your finger in the ground to see if it's wet. I've been on countless hazard hazard reduction burns. I've never seen anyone stick their finger in the soil to see if the soil's moist. And yeah, so anyway, when I burn, I want to see a good soil moisture content. Um, I want to see minimum smoke. I want to not burn the canopy, and I want it to basically be traveling at the speed that an insect can be walking out of the way. And this is a phenomenon I love seeing as you've got a fire going along and there's insects walking along, walking up the trees, getting out of the way. Do you think that those um uh reasonable parameters to operate within? And I acknowledge that the one thing that I do miss there is the individual plant knowledge. And obviously, individual plants, I'm I'm a passionate plant enthusiast, but I don't have the specific understanding of when to burn specific plants at specific times. Um, so basically, with that base level, um, do you think that's a reasonable set of parameters?

SPEAKER_08 54:50

Yeah. So I'd I'd say that with the smoke thing, you probably every bit of country is different. There's probably the first parameter I'd start with, and every bit of country wants to be burnt differently. But the smoke thing, you know, good smoke's white. There might not be a lot of it, but good smoke's white. There's not a lot of carbon going up in the atmosphere. That that's a good sign. The canopy thing is interesting because it depends on what the country is. Now, if you're trying to reduce canopy scorching in 10-meter tall peppermints in five-meter tall Xanthurria country, uh, you're gonna struggle. It doesn't matter what time of year you do it to have no, but then if you have a look back through that country's history, you might find those peppermints were never there and they've crept in over time. So you just got to know your country, then that's all I'd say. I mean, and and you're right to point out that indigenous lead burning is a different thing to burning with some sensitivity. And if you are testing the cake by sticking your finger in, you want it to come back dirty, right? Like that's the idea. Right.

SPEAKER_09 55:54

Anyone else?

SPEAKER_02 56:00

Might be might be the last one. Okay, Jack, Paul Simmons um jelly brand. So yeah, we dodged it this year and that big one that we know is coming. As white fellas, how do we get ready for that emotionally? How do we uh own the country that we're on in that respect that it's coming and that we that's the natural you know, we're we always you know, the so on is divided into four sections. We we we think about the different types of uh um landscape in this fairly small geographical region. So we're we're a community here, but we come off different sorts of country. So how do we yeah, how do we get ready? Can we get ready?

SPEAKER_08 56:50

Yeah, yeah. We could say we dodged it this year, but there was a lot of country that burnt far too hot, too. You know, like you know, that that dry foothills stuff burnt hard. I'd like to think we could be more organized in the way we respond to it. Not not so much the fire potty. I mean, there's a parliamentary inquiry going on at the moment about how we responded to it. And there look, you know, there'll always be good and bad in that mix because it's it's an emergency, right? There's stuff happening very quickly. The way we do recovery, I think we could be more prepared for. The way we move together as communities in response to these things helps if you're organized and have thought about it beforehand. I know Malikuda did a really good job in responding post-2020. Still caused what will probably be, you know, lifetimes of trauma for the people who went through it. I think it's going to be hard to dodge that trauma. I've always known as an ecologist that the Otways burns, you know, it has to have. We've got records from settlers of extraordinarily large fires, you know, burning sails and stuff on ships. What I'm worried and I'm not prepared for is if we have that landscape scale fire, with the way country is going and the way the climate is going, will we see it come back in the same way again? Had a real moment last year or the year before, whatever it is, um, where we had a fire on Bins Road, another lightning strike. And the fire was going against the wind down the slope under tree ferns, you know, in the middle of the night, whatever, wake us up at 3 a.m. or something. I thought, fucking hell. If it can burn like this in really mild conditions, something has fundamentally changed in the way that this country can burn. Um, and the the way that we're seeing this, you know, we were talking about it before, Paul, and the the regularity of the lightning strikes, the dry lightning strikes that are causing fires, you know, we're seeing these lightning shows, and then probably people go to bed. I'm not going to bed now because I'm just waiting, because one of those has caused a fire somewhere, and we'll be going to it. Um, but it's that regularity combined with the fact that it's burning in fundamentally different ways in locations we've not seen in my lifetime. Will we see that country recover in the same way? Now, places in the East Coast New South Wales, uh, South Coast New South Wales into Gippsland, some of them, those temperate rainforests, warm temperate rainforests, as opposed to the cool temperate rainforests we have here, some of them are recovering. Some of them are changed fundamentally. And that's the bit that we need to think about. And so I think the way to deal with it so that we don't get gloomy is to be organized. So, what are the wins that we can have from having a really large bushfire? Well, we should think about what the interruption of the domination of some of the shrubby species, ubiquitously across country. Can we interrupt that by maybe putting low, low cool fire in really rapidly? Can we be resilient enough to, as a community, not to be up in arms when that's suggested? Because that would be a win. When the canopy opens in the Otways, is that an opportunity to once and for all start dealing with feral deer? Because that's what stops us doing it effectively, is a fucking huge canopy of Mountain Ash. Can't do anything from the ground. We're just proverbially in the wind, anyway, bro. But you know what I mean? Like I think we have to feel like what because what we have done is lay a shitload of toxic baits. Let's do something that could profoundly improve the country, and I think that will make us feel better. I hope it does.

SPEAKER_09 1:00:27

Underline. Yeah. All right, one last one. Jeffrey.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:33

Thank you. Um, I'm a firefighter from Canada, so we're dealing with like a bit of a different situation. But in BC, uh one thing the scientific community's been discussing a lot lately is that our really wet tree species, like the western red cedar, are starting to disappear from the landscape as our climate has changed. I think from logging, that's like my personal preference in the thought, is that's why our rain patterns have changed, because we've cut down 90% of our forests. Um, but they're being replaced by Gary Oak forests. And the entire landscape of our province is rapidly changing from what it's been in since time immemorial to something that's unrecognizable to like our traditional people and also to settlers. And I wonder as we're looking, like you're saying, these opportunities and these changes that are coming, and how do we prepare for it? Um, how can we mix that adaptability, that like craving to hang on to what we have now and to maintain these systems as we know them and love them, and as our um all the animals and other creatures that we share this world with need them, but while also looking at the adaptations that nature is naturally going through and unnaturally going through, and where can we strike that balance and how can we, you know, work with these changes that we're all being forced into?

SPEAKER_08 1:01:48

Personally, you probably answered it anyway. This country's never been static. You know, the climate has been changing. I appreciate it's happening rapidly, and things are happening in human lifetime, which is unusual. But the country has been changing. Um I think the old people were just simply responding to the way the country was changing. I think that's what we have to do. You know, it's the same here. So that the cool temperate rainforests of the old ways have just go through these cycles in between fires, they creep out of the gullies and then a fire comes through and they shrink back into the gullies. That will happen to a degree, but maybe they won't come out as far. And I think you're right, we will see changes to the tree species that dominate. I think we probably already are without without noticing. We can do a whole lot of things to manage our forests in ways that um can make them more resilient. And in my opinion, we can start to recognize the association of people on country forever, and I don't just mean in an Aboriginal sense, I mean in the fact that we have agency within these landscapes. We have tender in national parks in particular to close the gates and walk away to a degree, and that that's caused some chaos in the recovery of the forests. We can do things like manipulate tree density and fire regimes to make trees more resilient, to reduce understory mass so that we're not creating canopy fires. I think these are the opportunities that um changing conditions at least make us think about consciously.

SPEAKER_09 1:03:28

Thank you very much, Jack. Would you please give Jack Pasco a hand?