 Hi, I'm Jamie Espister, Australia's Ambassador to the Environment. I'm here at Tibbin Bell and Nature Reserve to mark NAIDOC Week. This year's NAIDOC theme is Heal Country and it's calling for all of us to seek greater protections through our lands, our waters, our sacred sites and our cultural heritage from exploitation. Each year, NAIDOC celebrations are held across Australia in July to celebrate the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Indigenous Australians have been the custodians of our land for over 65,000 years. One practice Aboriginal people have used to care for country is cultural burning. Cultural burns have been critical in managing the environment, protecting nature and vegetation, protecting our biodiversity and the risk of loss and reduction of the impacts of bushfires, particularly during summer. I had a chance to talk to Dean Freeman, our Indigenous range at ACT Parks and Conservation about cultural burning practices. We basically say that if you heal country then you unknowingly heal yourself. We go out and do these type of cultural burns or any type of traditional land management with our community and you go out at the end of the day with a feeling of satisfaction and you've actually contributed and it's something we've been doing for like 60,000 years. So we want to continue what our ancestors have been doing. A lot of us basically say it's on our watch now, so we're trying not to lose any more and now we're actually picking up some more, we're actually gaining more and finding more information about how to manage the land properly. The best feeling to be in amongst that with your family and your community and healing the place. Cultural burning is significant for the biodiversity and the ecosystems of our country. It's a practice that has operated right across Australia for all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. With an area like this you can see we've done a bit of a cultural burn, a small burn here or a cool burn. We did do that in selected areas, so here in the ACT prior to European arrival most of the grassland areas were burnt to encourage the native grasses to come back and once you've got fresh foods and fresh shoots and that sort of stuff then you'll start getting the animals coming back in. So it was also used as a form of hunting, so to burn one area we generally burned areas like that for the environment itself. Traditional Indigenous knowledge is being applied today here at Tidbin Villa but also across many other parts of Australia and particularly in Northern Australia. This Indigenous knowledge is also being shared internationally. DFAT through an international savanna fire management project is partnering with Botswana to share some of this Indigenous practices, particularly how we're using cultural fire burns to maintain Indigenous cultural practice, protect native wildlife and fauna and reduce the risks of devastating bushfires, particularly as we adapt to the impacts of climate change.