Born in the 1920s, TG and George Musgrave (Poppy) narrowly escaped becoming stolen children. The pastoralist Fred Shepard employed their parents on his Cape York station, and hid the boys in mailbags whenever the police came seeking Aboriginal kids to remove. In a matter-of-fact way, Steffensen writes about the boys seeing men and women in chains with whip marks on their bodies, walking for miles, sometimes unable to continue. Thanks to Shepard, the boys stayed on Country and learned its stories and how to manage with fire. They became stockmen and eventually acquired native title over their land.

Fire became a fascination for Steffensen in childhood when, by setting fire to some old banana fronds, he nearly burned down his father’s chicken coop. Earning the friendship of TG and Poppy, the last speakers of Awu-Laya language, he learned about fire on their hunting and fishing trips and from later work filming them. Fire Country details his long and passionate quest to understand fire and, in the face of many obstacles, to teach fire management to national park rangers and Indigenous groups across eastern Australia.

Aboriginal elder George Milpurrurr shows his children how to make a controlled fire to burn off dangerous dry grass Arnhemland (photograph by Penny Tweedie/Alamy Stock Photo)

His cool burns reduce the fuel available for wildfires, but his writing about fire goes well beyond logistics. ‘Most of the vegetation has developed in a perfect way to encourage the right fire for the soil and country it lives on,’ he says. ‘It is amazing how Mother Nature has created the balance of no-fire and fire-dependent systems to provide tolerance and courtesy between them through fire … The country loves us when we fit into the divine beauty of being a part of it. The old people would sing to the country all the time, through songlines and dances. Old TG would talk to the country and let everything know that we are about to apply the fire.’

One view held today is that national parks can’t be considered natural because Aboriginal burning shaped the vegetation. In his famous book The Biggest Estate on Earth (2011). Bill Gammage goes so far as to say that ‘Australia in 1788 was made, not natural’. The nature–culture dualism is a Western construction, so we shouldn’t be surprised at Steffensen for depicting ecosystems (he uses this word) as systems that are natural but need input from people. They are also animated. The trees change the qualities of the soils and ‘become the Elders of the landscape, maintaining their gift of providing life and prosperity’. The water is a living thing, not a dead substance. Some places deceive. Poppy warned him about devil-devil country in which the land is ‘trying to trick you’ by putting trees that signify early burning on hard ground that should be burnt late.

Environmental philosopher Val Plumwood has talked of the multiple forces shaping nature that we deny if we label it a human artefact or estate. Steffensen repeatedly downplays human agency, explaining, for instance, that nature is ‘arranged in such a way that it can be kept healthy by burning habitats in a sequence signalled by their readiness to burn’.

Gammage and Bruce Pascoe in Dark Emu (2014) have both lifted Australian awareness of Indigenous management, but both relied for information on white experts and observers. Pascoe, in his chapter on fire, calls for a shift to real knowledge coming from Aboriginal Australians. What Steffensen delivers is authentic enough, but it doesn’t fit Pascoe’s larger narrative about Indigenous farming. No mention is made of the Awu-Laya tilling or sowing seeds. The cool burns to protect yams and other bush foods fit the narrower notion of ‘fire-stick farming’ invoked by archaeologist Rhys Jones in 1969 to stress that the hunter-gathering lifestyle involved management.

Steffensen doesn’t mention Pascoe, Gammage, or other writers. His focus is fixed on his vision of Australia under Indigenous fire management with Indigenous people gainfully employed as fire managers. ‘We need to see three-year training courses of learning out on the country to graduate our Indigenous fire practitioners,’ he says. He tells of bringing confidence to Indigenous communities in south-eastern Australia, helping them at times to direct flames against weeds such as African lovegrass and lantana. Western science tells us that fire regimes in tropical and temperate Australia are very different, but if Steffensen had any issues bringing his expertise south, we do not hear of them.

Early in the book, TG grumbles about some careless burning: ‘Those bloody national park rangers, they should be learning from us.’ Steffensen conveys the impression that even today, no worthwhile burning happens in national parks, which is not true. Some is practised for endangered species such as orange-bellied parrots and northern bettongs. Most of this tries to match Indigenous burning, but the measure of success is different. Steffensen rejects this approach: ‘Managing the country wholistically for all the animals is how we must look after those animals that seem to be the most endangered of all. If we make the land healthy, then we look after all of them.’

That assurance might sound convincing, but it is not supported by examples, and that will leave managers uneasy. Lore that has worked for thousands of years might need adjusting for a world in which, for example, cats now prowl after fires.

Steffensen is a good storyteller with a passion for his vision. Australia should be doing more to integrate Indigenous and Western fire skills, and he is well placed to help with that.