When will Australians learn what old timer Harold Riley has known all his life: if you look after country, country looks after you?
Harold Riley has just left a meeting with National Parks. Using one hand, he raises the back of his high-crowned Akubra to scratch his head because, rather than today’s management speak, he’d sooner be using two words that people understand than one long one. In fact, he’d sooner be looking after country he sees is crying out to be looked after.
While another government division weighs up the scientific evidence around Aboriginal land care using firestick burning, Harold knows for a fact that up until the 1970s, when Tasmania’s high country was “locked up”, the evidence was 40,000 to 50,000 years of burning. This year, at the time I spoke to him, he knew it was too late: the burning season, and with it the opportunity for traditional land care, had already gone.
Eighty-three-year old Harold grew up burning country. His knowledge will die with him unless it’s passed on more widely than the handful of Tasmanian farmers who have invited him on to their land to do cultural burning – and Capstone College, Poatina, which has incorporated his skills into its teaching program.
Film maker Roger Scholes, whom Riley has known since working together on Scholes’ film The Tale of Ruby Rose nearly four decades ago, has been researching and making a documentary on cultural burning for five years. Scholes sees Riley as “a mythic character”.
“When I look at him in the bush, he’s in his element, carrying shovel and firebrand.”
Scholes hopes his 52 hours of video for Burning Tasmania won’t go to waste. “It doesn’t matter if there’s no money,” he says. “I just want people to see it.” Now in his 70s, Roger Scholes is a highly awarded international filmmaker and deserves far better. As does Harold Riley.
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Harold Riley lives on about 30 hectares of farmland in Sheffield with his brother, Alwyn, 78, where they run a bit of stock to pay the rates and cover costs. The family property was bought in 1862 by Harold’s ancestors Thomas Johnson and Dolly Dalrymple (a granddaughter of north-east clan chief Mannalargenna).
Following ill treatment from a teacher, Harold missed a year of school to work on the family farm. In those days the Sheffield Area School taught blacksmithing, leatherwork, carpentry and tin smithing as standard curriculum, and he learned agricultural skills “living with it” at home. Great uncles Bill and Lou Johnson taught young Harold most things about life. “Bill would have made me who I am,” Harold says, recalling the days when, aged five or six, he’d go to the mountains with his great uncles, “looking for the gold”.
Later, his parents went to the mountains in the ute. “It had a bit of a frame on it. They’d go back round the Cradle and camp. Dad was 12 when he first walked back there with his father. He loved the country and knew it very well. When he got too old to drive, they camped out in the yard instead. People used to ask, ‘Your parents got visitors?’ But it was them, camping in the back yard.”
Young Harold grew up seeing his dad and great uncles burning the high country for cattle grazing and for their 10-weeks of snaring for the fur trade. They used practises passed down to them by highlanders who were themselves taught by Tasmanian Aboriginal people.
“They’d just light a bit of bark, burn a bit here and a bit there,” says Harold. “It wouldn’t escape them because it was still in the same state as before European settlement and the snarers kept it fairly close to how it was for their trade. The fire didn’t go anywhere – you’d burn a bit and it would stop.”
At the time, Harold had no idea this was Aboriginal culture he was learning, and only found out about his Aboriginality, aged 21, when Bill Mollison visited his parents for a book he was co-writing on the genealogies of Tasmanian Aboriginals and their descendants. “Mum and him started talking, my ears started flapping like a clothes line with all this black fella stuff.”
In the 1950s, Harold worked on a stud in Cressy where they started a Tasmanian Murray Grey stud. He drove a bulldozer for years. Ran a mob of cattle on the road for 20 months in NSW. Worked in the Territory, the Kimberley and Queensland. In the 1970s he started Black Stumps Pioneer Settlement in Gowrie Park near Sheffield, where he taught kids about the old days with bullocks and horses, about blacksmithing and snaring, splitting palings and how to cook a few scones on a camp oven. “I had 40 to 50,000 kids through there in the time I was there, some from as far away as Adelaide and Toowoomba.” From age 50, Harold worked at 18 rodeos in Tasmania as a professional rodeo clown, protecting riders from the bulls. He also spent nearly a hundred days riding his horse from Long Reach to Melbourne, raising funds for leukemia.
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It’s 32 years since Harold started his campaign to use Aboriginal burning practises in Tasmania’s high country. “I would have taken a pack horse up there and burnt in the spring, before it gets too late, then go back year after year. One person could have camped up there for a month and done that. I could have done it on my own. Burning is the easiest thing to do. The big problem is people. It’s terribly frustrating. Terribly frustrating. Sometimes I just want to go and do my own thing … I’ve been burning on private country this year since August.”
He uses a phrase his old Uncle Bill once used, “It’s that easy you could do it with one hand kneeling.
“I’ve been burning for years. People see smoke and think it’s a wildfire and go crook about a bit of smoke. It’s got to be brought to the people that there is another way of doing it, and how important it is to do it.”
He needs the word to get out sooner and wants to see a round-table conference where the ministers of all departments and representatives of every community in Tasmania get together to agree a plan. That way, he won’t spend any more time being passed from one department to the next, and country will get what it needs.
“Every year’s delay is a year the culture’s not done,” Harold seems to say every year. “We can’t leave the country as it is. Wild country was made by the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. They created the ecosystems we inherited in the 19th and 20th centuries that we now enjoy.”
Harold Riley strains to understand people in the meetings he attends, and all the while he sees land crying out to be looked after: Traveller’s Rest near Hadspen, Kelcey Tiers behind Spreyton, Knocklofty Reserve in Hobart and the hills behind Taroona. Riley knows that without cultural burning in such places, bushfire has an open invitation.
Hilary Burden is a British/Australian author, journalist and photographer. She lives and writes from a shack on an acre in the low hills of Swansea. Her memoir, A Story of Seven Summers - Life in The Nuns’ House, was published in 2012 by Allen & Unwin. More of her photography can be seen on Instagram, @hilaryburden.
Roger Scholes is a Tasmanian film maker. The photographs in this article were taken during the making of his documentary, Burning Tasmania, and are used with his kind permission. The documentary was still in production at the time of publication of this issue.