A Nature study led by University of Melbourne researchers ties Australia's mega-fires to the end of Aboriginal cultural burning after colonization, saying fuel-heavy forests now hand fire control to climate.
Lead author Professor Michael-Shawn Fletcher argues the dense, flammable forests Australians now “protect” are a product of colonization, and that legacy puts those same forests at risk. The Daily Mail reported the findings drawn from a Nature paper on sediment evidence from Victoria.
The work points past the usual climate-only storyline. Fletcher’s team says the shift toward hotter fire began well before recent climate change, after Aboriginal care of the land stopped in the 1800s.
Australia’s 2019, 2020 Black Summer fires killed 33 people, destroyed 3,000 homes, and killed or displaced more than three billion animals. Flames burned about 93,000 square miles, 24 million hectares, and scorched 90 percent of Croajingolong National Park in Victoria, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve the study treats as a key case.
Recovery time between major blazes has collapsed. The reporting cites roughly 40 years between major fires in the 1800s, versus about five years in the last decade. Scientists also flag a growing Super El Niño and the risk of another severe season.
That human cost is why land-management claims matter more than academic branding exercises aimed at Captain James Cook, the British Royal Navy officer whose arrival more than 250 years ago anchors the colonization timeline in the coverage.
Fletcher’s group pulled sediment from Lake Purghagoolah inside Croajingolong National Park. The cores hold about 1,000 years of pollen, charcoal, and infrared signals for fire temperature.
Before the 1800s, the record shows frequent low-temperature burning tied to GunaiKurnai maintenance of open woodland. After white colonists arrived and Aboriginal people were removed from the land, shrub cover thickened, eucalyptus rose to four times pre-colonial levels, and hot fires took over. Charcoal from wildfires jumped sharply.
Fletcher put the core claim in plain terms.
"The forest we protect there is in fact a product of colonisation, and it's that legacy that now imperils its very survival."
He added that the move toward forest and hotter fire “began well before recent climate change.”
The professor described how the old system worked.
"Aboriginal people used frequent, small-scale cultural burning to care for Country. These cool fires suppressed seedling recruitment, maintained open woodland and created a diverse landscape of differently aged vegetation."
“Country” here means the land under active Aboriginal stewardship. Cool, regular fire limited thick regrowth. When that practice ended, the landscape loaded up with fuel.
Fletcher’s sharpest line cuts against climate fatalism:
"When Country is cared for, climate does not dictate wildfire."
And the follow-through:
"When colonisation ended that care, the forest expanded and thickened across the region, loading the landscape with fuel. It is that transformation that has handed control of fire to climate."
GunaiKurnai elder Uncle Russell Mullett, of the GunaiKurnai Land and Waters Corporation, backed the land-care push. He said studies like this give “firm scientific evidence to support towera land management initiatives for Country”, towera referring to fire in that tradition.
Many scientists still treat climate change as the obvious driver of rising fire risk. Fletcher’s team does not deny climate can worsen conditions now. Their point is narrower and earlier: the vegetation change and fuel buildup started with the end of cultural burning in the 1800s, long before today’s climate debate. The two explanations sit in tension inside the same reporting, and the study does not settle every share of blame with neat percentages.
What it does press is a practical conclusion. Parks and “wilderness” left to thicken after the collapse of routine low-intensity fire become tinder. Preservation without fuel management is not neutral. It is a choice with body counts attached, as Black Summer showed.
Cook is a convenient historical name for headlines. The operational failure is newer and ongoing: treating flammable, post-clearance forest as a museum piece while recovery intervals shrink from decades to a handful of years.
The sediment does not invent a morality play. It shows open woodland under frequent cool burns, then denser eucalyptus and hotter fire after that system stopped. Australians living next to those forests need officials who cut fuel and restore disciplined burning, cultural or modern, not another round of guilt theater aimed at an 18th-century navigator.
If caring for the land keeps climate from dictating wildfire, the duty is stewardship in the present. Blaming Captain Cook will not thin a single acre of undergrowth.
