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Women gather from around the world to bring cultural knowledge to firefighting.
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First Nations firefighters changing culture on the Queensland fire line
When Arlene Clubb and her relatives joined their local volunteer fire brigade in rural Queensland a decade ago, they were not entirely welcomed with open arms. "People didn't want us there because we were Indigenous people," the Kuku-Thaypan, Kuku Yalanji and Kuku-Possum woman said. "[Some members] in a photo, they turned their backs on us, they didn't want to be in the same photo as us and it just sort of made us feel no good. "But we didn't let that faze us. If you let people like that affect you, you're not going to go anywhere." The reception some gave the Clubb family at the Tinaroo Rural Fire Brigade in the state's far north belied the efforts of first officer and founding member Les Green, who went out of his way to encourage the Wadjanbarra Yidinji traditional owners to join in the first place. It started with a conversation about the need to manage a piece of the Atherton Tablelands of great importance to traditional owners. Arlene's sister-in-law Kylee Clubb, who also signed up, is now the Tinaroo brigade's second officer, working to drive cultural change in fire management more broadly. "[We] thought about what we wanted to do as a family and what we wanted to do as First Nations people, especially on the lands we've been on up there on the Tablelands," she said. Kylee said the growing number of First Nations firefighters was leading to a greater appreciation within agencies of the importance of cultural burning. The practice involves using small fires to benefit the ecology and encourage plant growth, rather than a simple focus on reducing fuel loads. But the best time for a cultural burn on the Atherton Tablelands — an ancient landscape shaped by volcanic activity millions of years ago — might clash with statewide fire bans or burning schedules decided elsewhere in the state. Kylee said the "conversation is being started" about moving away from strict burn schedules, to better include Indigenous knowledge of landscapes. "At the moment, we've seen heaps of lantana, heaps of different weeds, sicklepods just overtake the forest," she said. "[It's about] paying attention to what's flowering and what's seasonal. "The seeds we have out here need activation from fire." Fire management agencies have shown an interest in investing in the leadership skills and expertise of their First Nations personnel too. When the Queensland Fire Department was looking for female firefighters to attend an Indigenous-focused intensive training exchange program in the United States three years ago, Kylee was one of those asked to go. She and fellow Far North Queenslanders Chloe Sweeney and Alex Lacy found the experience so rewarding, they decided to organise their own version of Women-in-Fire Training Exchange, or WTREX, on home soil. It ran over 12 days near Cairns last month, bringing together 40 fire practitioners from across Australia and overseas, most of whom were Indigenous women. One of those was Arlene, who said the growing presence of Indigenous women among the ranks of volunteer firefighters was about showing "we're not just mothers, not just caregivers, not just stay-at-home wives anymore". "[Dispossession] did stop a lot of our cultural burning but it never got lost — the mentality has always been there and all the knowledge we had from our elders is still there," she said. Lenya Quinn-Davidson, an expert on human connection to fire at the University of California, was one of the founders of WTREX in 2016. She took part in the recent Queensland program, and said it was important to offer Indigenous women a safe place to develop their skills and share knowledge so they could thrive in a traditionally "male-dominated, very militaristic" field. "The fire issues we have globally are so wicked, they're wicked problems, and we need diverse perspectives to solve them," she said. Megan Currell, an Australian-born member of the British Columbia Wildfire Service said a decade ago, "it felt like Canada was way ahead of Australia" when it came to relationships with Indigenous peoples. "When I come back and visit home, honestly, I see a massive improvement in the relationship and that cultural aspect, starting to get into cultural burns and being a support system for that and forming real partnerships," she said. "I'd say now they're starting to become neck-and-neck a bit or maybe even Australia is starting to take over."
