Burning before bed

We’re out on the spinifex sandplains, my favourite country – grasslands with scattered small trees and shrubs. There’s that comforting feeling of being able to see the horizon in every direction. I’m going on an overnight school camp with a dozen or so women, mostly grandmas and great-grandmas, and a couple of dozen school kids, a few teachers.

The women decide to stop and camp in a little patch of mulga. The first thing they do is set fire to the spinifex. They want to clear some space under the small trees. Spinifex is very prickly, a fire hazard in a camp, and might hide snakes. (The long, thin leaves of spinifex grass roll into sharp spears to protect themselves from the sun.)

Soon flames are leaping from clumps of spinifex around the trees and lines of fire trickle off across the plain. The women seem to mostly ignore the grass burning around them. They set to threading bunches of spinifex, and branches they’ve ripped from shrubs, through the mulga trees to make them shadier – it’s a hot day. The children run around the flames, or sit down near them, waiting for the camp to be set up. Soon everyone is sitting in little enhanced mulga tree shelters, often only metres from roaring flames. Occasionally, the women rake up some nearby spinifex and shove it into a fire.

Within an hour, the ground under the trees is mostly clear of grass, the sooty ashes raked up. One fire is still heading in a 20 to 50-metre strip out across the plain and doesn’t burn out til the evening. We watch falcons and buzzards hawking for lizards and mice running from the flames.

The ‘old’ spinifex that hasn’t been burnt for a few years is pale yellow and as thick as wheat. Burning is the only way of recycling its nutrients into the ground. Burning also brings up green pick for roos, bush food ‘fireweeds’ like desert raisins (a Solanum species); and makes firebreaks so that hot summer fires from lightning strikes don’t burn out huge swathes of country. (This happens where there’s not much burning, in places where there are few tracks and people don’t travel through that country anymore. Thousands of square kilometres can burn.)

On the way to our camp, we’ve travelled past kilometres of recently burnt country, with black stubble on terracotta sand, and strips of bright green where the spinifex is starting to grow back.

Patches which people burnt 6 months ago, at the beginning of winter, are dotted with lime green spiky spinifex and other fireweeds (annuals that grow quickly after fire) and red termite mounds.

Back at our camp, everyone sits around during the heat of the early afternoon. Then the women head off hunting for goanna – it’s easy to see tracks on burnt ground. The children come back with bunches of ‘bush beans’, long thin pods of a type of wattle with large seeds. People eat the seeds green, straight from the pods, or roast them a little. Some women found a few bush tomatoes (another Solanum species). There are lots of yams in this country too, but they’re mainly around in winter.

In the late afternoon, a ute-load of blokes come past and drop off a bullock leg, they got a ‘killer’ on the neighbouring pastoral property. One of the teachers cuts up the leg and the pieces of meat sit in a bloody pile in a metal tray covered with a tea-towel, til they are taken and cooked the next morning – we have roo tails (frozen, from the community store) and plenty of stew for dinner. And one family has two goannas.

As the sky darkens, the flames from a fire lit by someone a kilometre to our north make a spectacular show along the horizon. After dinner, the children climb into lines and clusters of swags. The women sit on the ground softly singing the dreaming songs for this area, the stories of the ancestor animals and people who made this country.

Soon everyone is in their swags, but the kids are restless, keep on getting up and running around. So one of the teachers stands up and sings them some bedtime songs, Aussie rock classics by old bands like Midnight Oil, who used to tour Aboriginal communities a lot. The kids sing along:

'The time has come
To say fair's fair
To pay the rent
To pay our share

The time has come
A fact's a fact
It belongs to them
Let's give it back

How can we dance when our earth is turning
How do we sleep while our beds are burning
Four wheels scare the cockatoos
From Kintore East to Yuendemu
The western desert lives and breathes
In forty five degrees'

The teacher sings and dances for 20 minutes. The kids settle down after that.