KEYNOTE PRESENTATION - Healthy Country: Ethnobotany, Fire, and the Unmaking of Australian Wilderness
| Wednesday, July 29, 2026 |
| 9:00 AM - 9:45 AM |
Overview
Professor Michael-Shawn Fletcher
Speaker
Professor Michael-Shawn Fletcher
The University of Melbourne
KEYNOTE PRESENTATION - Healthy Country: Ethnobotany, Fire, and the Unmaking of Australian Wilderness
ISE Congress 2026 Abstract
Australia is frequently framed as a continent of “wilderness,” a land shaped primarily by climate and lightning, where fire is a natural and inevitable force. This narrative remains embedded in conservation science, policy, and restoration targets. Yet ethnobotanical evidence, deep-time palaeoecology, and Indigenous knowledge systems together tell a different story.
In this talk, I argue that Australia’s catastrophic fires, biodiversity decline, and ecological instability are not simply climate problems. They are cultural problems. For more than 65,000 years, Aboriginal peoples actively constructed and maintained plant communities through fine-scale fire regimes, seasonal movement, hydrological manipulation, and reciprocal care. Plants were not passive background vegetation. They were kin, indicators, food, fibre, ceremony, and governance. Ethnobotanical relationships structured landscape pattern.
Drawing on sedimentary charcoal, pollen reconstructions, fire-return interval modelling, and counterfactual forecasting from southeastern Australia and Tasmania, I demonstrate that the removal of cultural burning following British invasion triggered measurable shifts in vegetation structure: woodland thickening, altered eucalypt dominance, increased fuel continuity, erosion, and ultimately catastrophic megafires. These transformations precede many twentieth-century climatic trends and reflect the collapse of plant–people relationships rather than purely atmospheric forcing.
The concept of “wilderness” obscures this history. It erases millennia of Indigenous plant management and recasts actively curated biocultural landscapes as natural baselines. Restoration targets derived from these assumptions are therefore misaligned. In contrast, Indigenous-controlled lands consistently demonstrate stronger biodiversity outcomes, suggesting that sovereignty and ethnobotanical practice are inseparable from ecological resilience.
Rewriting the book on Australia requires reframing fire not as an external disturbance but as a cultural technology embedded within plant knowledge systems. Ethnobotany, when extended into deep time and coupled with Indigenous governance, provides both the analytical tools and the ethical foundation for this reframing. The pathway to “Healthy Country” lies not in refining suppression or intensifying prescription, but in restoring Indigenous authority and plant–people reciprocity.
In this talk, I argue that Australia’s catastrophic fires, biodiversity decline, and ecological instability are not simply climate problems. They are cultural problems. For more than 65,000 years, Aboriginal peoples actively constructed and maintained plant communities through fine-scale fire regimes, seasonal movement, hydrological manipulation, and reciprocal care. Plants were not passive background vegetation. They were kin, indicators, food, fibre, ceremony, and governance. Ethnobotanical relationships structured landscape pattern.
Drawing on sedimentary charcoal, pollen reconstructions, fire-return interval modelling, and counterfactual forecasting from southeastern Australia and Tasmania, I demonstrate that the removal of cultural burning following British invasion triggered measurable shifts in vegetation structure: woodland thickening, altered eucalypt dominance, increased fuel continuity, erosion, and ultimately catastrophic megafires. These transformations precede many twentieth-century climatic trends and reflect the collapse of plant–people relationships rather than purely atmospheric forcing.
The concept of “wilderness” obscures this history. It erases millennia of Indigenous plant management and recasts actively curated biocultural landscapes as natural baselines. Restoration targets derived from these assumptions are therefore misaligned. In contrast, Indigenous-controlled lands consistently demonstrate stronger biodiversity outcomes, suggesting that sovereignty and ethnobotanical practice are inseparable from ecological resilience.
Rewriting the book on Australia requires reframing fire not as an external disturbance but as a cultural technology embedded within plant knowledge systems. Ethnobotany, when extended into deep time and coupled with Indigenous governance, provides both the analytical tools and the ethical foundation for this reframing. The pathway to “Healthy Country” lies not in refining suppression or intensifying prescription, but in restoring Indigenous authority and plant–people reciprocity.
Biography
Michael-Shawn Fletcher is a Wiradjuri scholar and geographer whose research examines long-term relationships between people, plants and fire on the Australian continent. His work integrates Indigenous knowledge systems, ethnobotany and deep-time palaeoecology to understand how cultural practice has shaped vegetation patterns for tens of thousands of years.
Michael-Shawn’s research challenges the framing of Australia as “wilderness,” demonstrating that many landscapes commonly regarded as natural were actively structured through cultural burning, seasonal movement and reciprocal plant management. Using sedimentary records, fire history reconstruction and collaborative research with Indigenous Nations, he shows how the disruption of plant–people relationships following colonisation has altered vegetation structure, fuel dynamics and biodiversity outcomes.
His work sits at the intersection of ethnobiology, geography and Indigenous sovereignty, advancing approaches that reconnect ecological health with Indigenous governance and care for Country.
