Outback Cinema - Old Ways, New Directions – Transcript
This is the transcript from the Old Ways, New Directions, film that features in
the Outback Cinema section (from the ABC’s Catalyst Program).
Introduction (Catalyst Reporter, Mark Horstman): It’s the dry season in the
tropical savannas. By year’s end, an area bigger than Victoria will be vaporised by
wildfires. Across the north, this annual firestorm emits more carbon dioxide than all
our coal-fired power stations combined.
On top of the fires, over the next fifteen years industrial emissions are set to double
in the Northern Territory alone.
Mark Horstman: Down there is a pipeline carrying millions of tonnes of natural gas.
It stretches 500 kilometres, from the Timor Sea to end up here, at the LNG plant in
Darwin Harbour.
Narration: Despite its efficient design, eventually one out of every hundred tonnes of
greenhouse gases made in Australia will come from this single refinery.
The Northern Territory government saw a unique opportunity.
Marion Scrymgour: We thought why wait for the rest of Australia, we need to do
something. This is all part of it, it comes from our own greenhouse strategy.
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Narration: Long before greenhouse strategies came along, community rangers in
Arnhem land were working to re-establish traditional fire management.
Victor Garlngarr: It’s important to us to come back and do our burning in our
country.
Narration: Their age-old skills are the foundation for the first carbon trade of its kind
in the world and it all starts here.
Mark Horstman: Why are you burning now?
Nigel Gellar: We’re trying to make a firebreak, cos we don’t want any wildfire coming
through. In the afternoon, you make a fire and it travels very slowly.
Mark Horstman: A beautiful day to burn?
Nigel Gellar: Yep.
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Narration: It’s late May, and Arnhem Land is still drying out after the big wet.
Aboriginal people start burning Arnhem Land soon after the rains, as they’ve done for
millennia, to regenerate useful plants and animals.
But over the last fifty years this early burning was interrupted as people started to
move into townships.
As a result, around half of the landscape is incinerated by uncontrolled wildfires late
in the dry season.
Now carbon trading offers an elegant win-win solution: for a company needing
greenhouse credits; and for Aboriginal people wanting to restore traditional burning
on a grand scale.
They’re led by this man – eighty-year-old artist Lofty Bardayal Nadjamerrek.
Bardayal Nadjamerrek AO: I wanted a place where both Aboriginal and nonAboriginal people are together, a combination of our laws and cultures.
Narration: With the other senior men, he established a remote outstation called
Kabulwarnamyo, nearly 400 kilometres east of Darwin.
After a cold night, it looks like a sleepy camp – but this is the regional fire station for
all of western Arnhem land.
Lofty Bardayal Nadjamerrek AO: Leave the grass for one year, burn it the second
year.
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Peter Cooke: Waddyareckon if we burn it late afternoon?
Narration: Community rangers from a vast area gather here to plan operations for
the coming season.
Dean Yibarbuk: The cyclone has doubled our fuel load because all the leaf litter on
the ground makes extra big fires.
Peter Cooke: We found a lot of fuel down here north of Kamalkamadjan.
Narration: This fire brigade doesn’t put fires out they’re here to light them.
Jimmy Kalarriya: We often see on the TV how homes in the southern cities are
destroyed by fire. That’s why it’s important to burn early like we do, and not to let the
fuel build up year after year.
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Narration: As flames trickle around their feet, the rangers light cool fires in places
that vehicles can’t get to. But to build firebreaks on a regional scale, you need a
helicopter and exploding ping pong balls.
Dean Yibarbuk: That we have a good line put through here, not burning big or
whatever, the flames are real nice and low.
Peter Cooke: With a bit of luck we’ll come back tomorrow and we’ll see that we’ve
got a burnt break.
Narration: Controlled burning creates barriers that stop the intense wildfires later in
the year. In theory, that should mean reduced carbon emissions – but first you have
to prove it.
Jeremy Russell-Smith: Every five metres or so we’re going to measure these
quadrants for grass and litter fuels.
Narration: Over the last decade, ecologist Jeremy Russell-Smith and his team have
been mapping the flammability of northern Australia.
Jeremy Russell-Smith: This is just two years of litter after the last fire.
Andrew Edwards: That’s 150 grams Nigel and the leaf litter, that’s 250 grams.
Narration: They burn the plots at different times of the year, and take samples from
each habitat back to the lab.
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Andrew Edwards: This is site 27, the litter sample.
Narration: Andrew Edwards wants to know the relationship between fuel load, fire
frequency, and fire intensity.
Andrew Edwards: We have these ash samples and other burnt materials that are
there. But some of the material doesn’t burn. We weigh all of that.
Narration: These calculations are the key to trading carbon – knowing just how
much goes up in smoke.
Andrew Edwards: The amount that was there before the fire, minus the amount
we’ve collected after the fire, is the amount that’s gone up into the sky as a
greenhouse gas.
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Narration: What their research revealed is astonishing.
A hectare burnt in May releases half the greenhouse emissions of a hectare burnt in
a hot November wildfire.
Dr Jeremy Russell-Smith: It’s much better doing it early in the year when there is
still a lot of moisture in the ground and moisture in the biomass, that’s what you are
trying to achieve
Mark Horstman: Because less stuff burns up.
Dr Jeremy Russell-Smith: Indeed, you’re managing fires under conditions where
you’re still going to retain a lot of the carbon in the system.
Mark Horstman: And if there’s more in the ground, there’s less in the air.
Dr Jeremy Russell-Smith: Absolutely.
Narration: In fact, in one year, if Aboriginal people can reduce the area burned in
wildfires by only 7 percent, they create at least 100,000 tonnes worth of greenhouse
gas savings.
Suddenly they realised they had a valuable commodity that could fund their entire
plan well into the future.
Dr Jeremy Russell-Smith: The Australian Greenhouse Office gave us a technical
assessment, and said yes, this is feasible.
We knew we had a significant and serious product to sell.
Narration: And they were right. Remember that giant gas refinery? Its parent
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company Conoco-Phillips and the NT Government signed up for carbon trading in
September.
Each year for the next seventeen years, Conoco-Phillips will pay a million dollars to
employ Arnhem land people and support their fire management.
It’s a carbon trade that will buy the company millions of tonnes of greenhouse
savings – and even though that’s only a few percent of their total emissions, it could
be a trailblazer.
Marion Scrymgour:Hopefully if we can get that controlled burning process
happening, then certainly down south and on the eastern seaboard, there could be
some lessons for those areas to learn about how to do that trading.
Narration: For their part, the rangers get long-term employment doing what they
know best, on their own terms. Lofty looks forward to thanking the company boss
personally.
Bardayal Nadjamerrek AO: I’d say it’s a good thing that we’re shaking hands today.
You have given Aboriginal people jobs.
Peter Biless Nabalambarl: When we three old men and the whitefellas here who
helped to start this have all gone, it will sustain our young people into the future as
they inherit this land and make a living from it.
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