Fire-stick farming

Fire-stick farming was the practice of Indigenous Australians who regularly used fire to burn vegetation to facilitate hunting and to change the composition of plant and animal species in an area. Fire-stick farming had the long-term effect of turning dry forest into savanna, increasing the population of nonspecific grass-eating species like the kangaroo. One theory of the extinction of Australian megafauna implicates the ecological disturbance caused by fire-stick farming.

In the resultant sclerophyll forests, fire-stick farming maintained an open canopy and allowed germination of understory plants necessary for increasing the carrying capacity of the local environment for browsing and grazing marsupials.

Aboriginal people may have been able to aim the burning of the scrub to avoid growing areas. There may have been a ritual taboo against burning certain areas of jungle.

This type of farming directly increased the food supply for Aboriginal people by promoting the growth of bush potatoes and other edible ground-level plants.

The term fire-stick farming was coined by Australian archaeologist Rhys Jones in 1969.

A 2011 research paper has questioned whether Indigenous Australians carried out widespread burning of the Australian landscape. A study of charcoal records from more than 220 sites in Australasia dating back 70,000 years has found that the arrival of the first inhabitants about 50,000 years ago did not result in significantly greater fire activity across the continent. The arrival of European colonists after 1788, however, resulted in a substantial increase in fire activity.

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