After more than 160 Clarence Valley homes were tragically lost during the devastating Black Summer bushfires, Area Manager for Environmental Services at Envite Environmental Services Mick Webb is encouraging locals to be prepared for other natural disasters.

“There’s definitely still concerns around the possibility of more fires,” he said.

“It’s still in the back of people’s minds.

“Even though we’ve had flooding and increased rainfall in recent months, those concerns are still there.”

According to Mr Webb, people in the community want to improve on their ability to protect their properties from bushfires.

To do that, they have been turning towards First Nations knowledge and practices, including the traditional land management technique of cool burning.

Cool burning, also called mosaic burning, involves burning a very small area at a low intensity.

“It’s done in patches to allow areas for animals to escape,” he explained, adding the heat of the fire is kept at a manageable level, and the flames are close to the ground.

This year, a number of Clarence Valley residents learned how to perform cool burning during a series of workshops in recent months, led by First Nations fire practitioner Charlie Little, and facilitated by Envite Environmental Services.

Participants learned how to plan a cool burn in the first workshop, including identifying the best time and place to perform the burn.

In the second workshop, they had the opportunity to perform a burn, and returned to learn how to evaluate the outcome of the burn in the third and final workshop.

The workshops were supported by a $20000 grant from the Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal (FRRR) as part of the bushfire recovery stream.

FRRR’s grants program manager April Merrick was impressed by the level of public support for the program. 

“They trialled this in 2021, and it went really well,” she said.

“They identified that there was a lot of interest in the community.”

Ms Merrick revealed community members living on smaller parcels of land identified this type of land management as an easier way to protect their properties from bushfires.

“While it makes sense that people with properties would want to learn how to protect their land, the interest in the workshops was broader than that,” Mr Webb said.

“People who don’t own land were and are interested in knowing why cool burning was used for thousands of years as a land management practice.”

The Clarence Valley Independent will publish updates of upcoming cool burning workshops once new dates have been confirmed.

This article appeared in the Clarence Valley Independent, 2 August 2023.