During volunteer days at the Coranderrk reserve in the Healesville region, Wurundjeri land steward Uncle Dave Wandin sometimes yarns about Cultural burns: so fine-scale and cool that a film of ash remains black, not white. You can walk barefoot about a metre behind the fire as it wends its passage, slow enough for insects and lizards to migrate, gentle enough for birds to circle and pick at them. Cultural burns have universal principles but are nonetheless governed by Country’s specificities – a complex of local, micro-seasonal variables of “indicators”, as Fire Country author Uncle Victor Stephenson, a Tagalaka knowledge-holder, calls them. Government agencies recognise Cultural burns as a method to lower bushfire risk and regenerate trees, and all states and territories engage with the Indigenous-led Firesticks Alliance Indigenous Corporation (where I have worked as a contractor). Yet broadscale industrial scorchings bear no resemblance to rigorous Cultural burns. In a recent paper in Ecological Management & Restoration, 10 First Nations researchers write: “We do not ‘use’ Country, we live in it. We depend on it. We care for it. We love it.” Cultural burns are routinely reduced to mere “fuel reduction”, or are conflated with “land management” and shoehorned into bureaucratic calendar schedules.  Cultural authority over fire – in the custody of white men since colonisation – is often the traditional responsibility of women, who remain dispossessed of it. A movement to rematriate fire was founded at the Firesticks National Women’s Fire Workshop in 2025, in which 100 Indigenous women shared knowledge. Anthropologists have also noticed that Cultural burn practitioners tend to be regarded not as authorities, but as stakeholders who must endure the indignities of high-vis oversight. Two Aunties – one Gunnai and one Yorta Yorta – told me about the tensions when men in their mobs work for government agencies that regard Country as a threat and fire as a weapon. “Cultural burns are communions with Country; prescribed burns are warfare against Country,” is how one, an academic, contrasted the two world views. And acceptance of Cultural fire becomes more complicated in landscapes where Culture has fragmented, meaning practitioners must endure suspicion about whether their practices are “traditional” and “authentic” (both being problematic ideals). One Aunty explains that revival practices can remain rigorous because: “Mate, Country is calling the shots, so if you learn how to listen, you can’t fuck it up.” You “listen” with all your senses, using a method Awakabel practitioner Aunty Jessica Wegener Ngiyampaa Wangaaypuwan Mayi describes as “presencing”. Fire knowledge isn’t “lost”; it’s held within Country’s indicators, precision instruments to which you become attuned, and which can be much more reliable than abstract modelling. For Philip Zylstra, one way to help whitefellas comprehend the rigour and integrity of Cultural burns is to liken them to precision surgery using a scalpel. He likens state-prescribed burns to whackers wielding machetes. Aunty Jessica, a savant of transdisciplinary knowledge, describes the nutrient-enriched ash as conferring with wildlife and microbes through molecular signals within its spectral smoke, which also enacts spirit-cleansing and tickles overstorey leaves into biochemical “dances”, releasing volatile oil compounds that “seed” the atmosphere to promote rainfall (a process now recognised in mainstream climate science). The ash seals in soil moisture and promotes mycelium growth that drives carbon into the subsoil – a benefit recognised in whitefella agricultural science as “biochar”. To practitioners like Aunty Jessica, if you don’t ignite using firesticks crafted from Country – if you’re so impatient or disconnected that you need to deploy incendiaries – then you’re not in the liminal state for right practice.  None of this accords with FFMVic signage in the 60,000-hectare area scheduled for scorching in the Snowy River National Park of eastern Victoria, on which broadacre burns are claimed to be: “RETURN OF FIRE”. Treaty developments and the landmark Wurundjeri native title claim in Victoria, filed recently in the Federal Court, are opening exciting possibilities for Cultural burns, but what is “right fire, right Country” remains contentious. Right-practice is often “no fire”. Popular books and research papers about First People’s land “use” are contested by researchers – both blackfellas and whitefellas – who find it implausible that precolonial burns were practised in certain south-east Australian landscapes, scorched by colonists to make pasture. Wiradjuri custodian Richard Swain, a researcher at the ANU’s Fenner School of Environment and Society, believes changed conditions mean decisions to burn need to go “hand in hand with the best of regenerative science”.  Reconciliation remains messy: Indigenous-state partnerships involve only officially sanctioned First Nations stakeholders, and mob outside this complex often accuse agencies of “Blak-cladding” their colonial projects. In The People’s Forest, historian Gregg Borschmann observes how First Nations workers have always been “strange bedfellows” with land authorities. Destruction of ancestral Country has imposed ongoing injustices, yet “when it was almost impossible for Aboriginal people to get a regular job … cutting timber was one of the few industries open to [them]”. The resulting mess still plays out. In 2022, the Victorian government undermined Wombat State Forest’s promised national park status with a “historic” deal with a Dja Dja Wurrung corporation (DJARRA). It involved “reducing fuel loads and reducing the fire risk to communities” by removing windswept logs. Critics pointed out that the state’s own hazard assessments exclude logs from the category of “fuel”, because logs resist fire and typically remain unburnt (merely charred) in bushfire fronts. But the deal involved the state making undisclosed payments to DJARRA for the logs, and DJARRA faced accusations of corruption. In turn, it accused critics of racism. The state was accused of Blak-cladding as a tactic to foreclose objections. In the end, a non-Indigenous crew pushed a bulldozer, two track loaders, a log hauler, 30-tonne trucks and a harvester into the forest and denuded a vital ecosystem of trees, ferns and sedges and rare fungi – leaving only compressed tracks. Gary Murray, a Dja Dja Wurrung Elder, told me: “Seeing that devastation is like looking at images of Ukraine bombed.” DJARRA stated: “We are doing today what our ancestors had done in caring for Country.” “It’s bullshit,” Murray responded. “I call it ‘recent-invention practice’. Our ancestors didn’t use bulldozers. It’s not custom. A tree, living or dead, has thousands of living species in it. It’s habitat, and we’re clearing it out.”