Fire-stick farming is a term coined by Australian archaeologist Rhys Jones in 1969 to describe the practice of Indigenous Australians where fire was used regularly to burn vegetation to facilitate hunting and to change the composition of plant and animal species in an area.
Fire-stick farming had the long-term effect of turning scrub into grassland, increasing the population of nonspecific grass eating species like the kangaroo. The ecological disturbance caused by fire-stick farming is one theory behind the extinction of Australian megafauna.[1]
In wet and dry sclerophyll forests, firestick farming opened the canopy and allowed germination of understory plants necessary for increasing the carrying capacity of the local environment for browsing marsupials.
This type of farming also directly increased the food supply for the aborigines, by promoting the growth of bush potatoes and other edible ground level plants.[2]
A recent research paper has questioned whether Indigenous Australians carried out widespread burning of the Australian landscape.[3] A study of charcoal records from more than 220 sites in Australasia dating back 70,000 years has found that the arrival of the first inhabitants about 50,000 years ago did not result in significantly greater fire activity across the continent. The arrival of European colonists after 1788, however, resulted in a substantial increase in fire activity.
The study shows that bushfire activity was high from about 70,000 to 28,000 years ago. It decreased until about 18,000 years ago, around the time of the last glacial maximum, and then increased again, a pattern consistent with shifts between warm and cool climatic conditions. This suggests that fire in Australasia predominantly reflects climate, with colder periods characterized by less and warmer intervals by more biomass burning.