Fire
One of the outcomes has been handing the responsibility for a lot of land management back to the indigenous community. This includes a return to regularly burning the countryside during the dry season.
Burning the undergrowth at Kakadu
For tens of thousands of years, prior to the Europeans arriving, Aboriginal people used fire to clear the undergrowth for ease of travel; to herd and or kill animals for food; and to create areas of new growth to attract game. This reduced the number and type of trees that grew to maturity and produced parkland more suitable for hunting and gathering. It has resulted in some species predominating that actually require the smoke from fires to germinate.
The effect can clearly be seen in early pictures of Sydney that show relatively bare foreshores that are today forested with large trees.
Regular burning certainly reduces the the combustible load so that the fires are small and contained; as opposed to the highly destructive bush fires that now periodically devastate parts of Australia.
So now in the bush around Darwin all the trees have fire-blackened trunks and small undergrowth fires dot the countryside; with whips, or palls, of smoke rising at regular intervals.
Its not evident that people are any longer eating the game thus killed; but the birds of prey love it; as the burnt bodies of numerous small animals are simply left for the picking. We were told by our driver to Kakadu National Park that some of these birds have even learnt to carry burning branches to start their own fire. Urban myth?
The Warradjan Cultural Centre also proclaims the benefits of regular burning.
A Park Ranger on the Alligator River was the only person we heard cast doubt on the universal benefits of the return to frequent burning.