 My name's Bruce Pascoe, we're in the Gypsy Point shed of the Malakuta Brigade and we built this about 10 years ago and it's been really serviceable for us because we're closer to the highway than Malakuta so we end up at incidents 20 minutes earlier if they're out our way. That critical period of time for car accidents in particular. So it's been quite effective for us and we've got the slip on here as well so we can get out to the accident scene pretty quickly. I'm a writer, I've worked with Aboriginal communities, I've been working on language recovery, bit of archaeology within community organisations, secretary of the local mob here and I've got a Boonarong Tasmanian and Ewan Heritage, we're on Ewan land here. The burning in Aboriginal communities was done as a cultural and spiritual activity. It was all to do with looking after the ground but also looking after next year's crops. It was done to promote the growth of food plants and so it was used strategically and wasn't haphazard in any way. It also involved other language groups, other communities who were, they might be 500 kilometres away but everyone had to work together so you would communicate with the people around you using message sticks and things like that so the people knew when you were going to burn and they would know if you needed help and they would know if you were going to burn and tell them when they were going to burn. So there was a hell of a lot of communication about it and it was done as a community and it was done with the purpose of looking after the earth so there was a spiritual element as well as a very practical element because you were caring for the earth. Aboriginal people were burning to promote moonong, yam daisy, bulbon, literally stuff like that but also the grasses. We know that kangaroo grass and panicum really respond to burning so you get a better yield from those grasses. A lot of farmers know this already. The farmers who are looking after their properties well, they know that they can burn those grasses at the right time and get a real spontaneous growth out of those plants because they're used to it. That's what they're designed to do. A lot of Australian plants are fire ready. They know how to respond. They're used to it. Aboriginal people told early settlers when they started noticing how the scrub was growing they said, no, you've got to burn in autumn and you do it this way that you wait for three consecutive dews and you wait for the wind to turn away from the north and around to the west and you light your fire at two o'clock in the afternoon because that's the safest way to do it. And it was very specific prescription. And when we light fires now, we do a similar thing. We're waiting for the heat of the year to have gone. We go into the bush and we do our tests on the litter. All of those things, that's Aboriginal procedure. So even if we're doing it unconsciously because it's common sense then we are following Aboriginal practice. It's very, very important that we respect the value of cool fire, a fire that trickles along the undergrowth. And Aboriginal people not only use fire, but they would weed out wattle. If they didn't want wattle in a section of the bush where they were planning to have yam or grass production, they'd just literally weed them as they walked past. They'd be weeding out wattles. So this was creating a very open fire-free bushland. River red gums were so massive in those days that they couldn't catch a light because they were too big and the understory was absent. Aboriginal people that burnt the understory were using it for the production of their own vegetables, their own tubers. So it was more or less an environment that couldn't burn, except as a cool burn because all you were burning was ground litter. You were not getting ladder fuels, you weren't burning the canopy. And when you look at the big trees here, you can actually see that. You can go back to 200 years ago, 150 years ago, and you can see the absence of fire in the environment. Not the total absence of fire, but the absence of wildfire. When Aboriginal people first saw wildfire, they were stunned because they'd known the odd lightning strike and things like that, but they'd never caused wildfire. And that manicured country that Aboriginal people had created, and that's what the explorers saw, that is a fire-free environment. And if we are going to go back to that, if we decide as a country that that's what we want, we're going to have to work toward it for 100 years. A lot of our species have adapted to fire in Australia. So if you don't provide fire or if you eliminate fire, those species begin to degrade. So we need to be careful of making sure there's fire in the environment, but that it's well controlled. When you don't control it well, but you have had a fire, you'll get massive coppicing of junior eucalyptus trees, wattle and scrub. That's what you get. It's understory, which in some places you can't walk through and certainly creates a bomb-like incendiary device that is just ready to explode in the middle of January, early February. We've seen those circumstances. We can do something about it, and that's what we have to control our fire in that way. And we can learn from Aboriginal experience. But the CFA, because it has such a high public profile and is so well perceived by the rest of the community, that if they engage themselves in this area, then they could bring the rest of the community with them. And we'd all be better off for it. There's nothing to be lost. No one's going to lose their backyard or their barbecue or their clothes line or their pet dog. There's everything to be gained, nothing to be lost. Just by saying, yeah, we come from this country. Aboriginal people were the first occupants of it and Aboriginal people had a history of achievement in this country. Let's learn from them and let's embrace them as part of the community rather than looking upon black fellas as a problem.