Aboriginal Elders Lead Prescribed Burn–And Rare Orchids Appear By Thousands

Aboriginal Elders Lead Prescribed Burn–And Rare Orchids Appear By Thousands

Recapturing ancestral responsibility and restoring endangered orchids are the themes coming out of Australia’s scorched grasslands.

Burned by the cataclysmic bushfires of 2019, a national park called the Barrington Tops exploded in rare veined doubletail orchids, and now the traditional owners of the lands perform prescribed burns to aid these flowers in flourishing under duress from invasive species.

“During the… wildfires, fire jumped up here on the plateau,” Luke Foster, from the country’s Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW), told ABC News AU. “And in the burn footprint the following season, we had 4,000 [orchids] pop up right where the fire went through.”

Prior to 2023, it had been more than 50 years since the plain experienced a cultural burning, when slower, cooler fires are allowed to spread across the landscape according to elders’ deep knowledge of the terrain.

Birrbay, Warrimay, Wanarruwa, Gaewegal, and Guringay peoples all consider the Barrington Tops, called the Biyan Biyan Plain in their language, to be their traditional lands, and elders of these groups speak of a time when it was used as a place for gathering.

Warrimay elder Michelle Perry has been collaborating at the request of the DCCEEW to help lead the burning in aid of the veined doubletail orchid. According to Perry, Aboriginal groups have been conducting these burnings for millennia to prevent larger, more destructive wildfires from breaking out.

“There was a sense that they [our ancestors] were giving approval… it was just a sense of, ‘Yeah, they’re caring, watching.’ It has been one of the best things that’s happened for me and my family,” she told ABC.

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So far the collaboration between the DCCEEW and some 150 different traditional owners has lit controlled fire to the Barrington Tops three times, and research is ongoing to study its effects on the orchids.

Ms. Perry relishes each chance to forge a greater connection to the land, and focuses on sharing and instilling that sense of connection into the younger generations of Warrimay and others.