Fires in GunaiKurnai Country - Landscape Fires and their Impacts on Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Places and Artefacts in Southeaste

Anthropogenic climate change has become a reality, and in Australia this means longer wildfire seasons with more intense fires across a wider area. The GunaiKurnai people of southeastern Victoria saw a large proportion of their Country decimated by the Gippsland Fires of -Black Summer- (2019-2020), prompting questions about the management of Country and its heritage places and artefacts, and of the role that traditional (-cultural-) burning could play. This volume, written at the request of the GunaiKurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation (GKLaWAC), seeks to investigate these twin issues. Bringing together a multi-disciplinary team of Aboriginal Elders, archaeologists, environmental scientists, ecologists, historians and art historians, it considers the histories of GunaiKurnai and European settler burning-based landscape management practices, the impacts of fire on specific classes of cultural materials, and the broader impact of changing wildfire patterns on cultural sites in t