Australian Bushfires and Aboriginal Culture

By: Lauren Vergos

The Aboriginal Australians are Australia’s native people. They have lived on the continent for over 50,000 years. Nearly 200 years ago, they were massacred and separated from each other by European colonizers. Today, about 3% of Australia’s population has Aboriginal heritage. More than half of them live in towns, which are usually impoverished and on the edges of modern civilization. The rest work on farms or ranches and some still live off of the land in a hunting and gathering lifestyle. Aboriginal Australians are constantly struggling to preserve their culture and fight for the recognition that they deserve from the Australian government. Since the recent news of the Australian bushfires has spread around the world, a common question has struck the minds of many people – what will become of the Aboriginal Australians?

The Australian bushfires have been burning for months. However, around Christmastime, the flames reached the community of East Gippsland in Victoria, home to around 45,000 Aboriginal Australians. Not only have the fires been destructive to Australia’s iconic wildlife and landscape, but they are especially traumatizing for the Aboriginal groups. Alice Pepper, an indigenous community organizer in East Gippsland states that “Fire, an element indigenous groups across the continent once liven in harmony with, is now putting their cultural and sacred sites at risk.”

Aboriginal Australians are the group of people that has been the most impacted by the fires. Through around mid-January more than 25 million acres of land have burned from bushfires in Australia. New South Wales is where the majority of the fires are concentrated, which is also the state that has the highest number of indigenous people in the country. For the people, the fires do not only mean the loss of land, lives, and property. The fires also mean the loss of thousands of years of their culture, which they have already had trouble retaining in modern civilization. Sacred sites for the Aboriginal Australians are getting destroyed by the flames, taking the culture that they represent with them.

For years, the Aboriginal Australians have suffered enough with colonizers, retaining their culture, and struggling to get sufficient recognition from the Australian government. Now that the bushfires are destroying their last of their land and culture, it is time for the rest of the world to step up and help.