A Turning Point for Fire Country: NSW's Landmark Cultural Fire Strategy, June 2026

Australia has always been a fire country.

Long before emergency warnings, aerial waterbombers and government-funded hazard reduction programs, Aboriginal people (Indigenous people of Australia also referred to as First Nations) understood how fire moved through the landscape. They knew when to burn, where to burn, how intensely to burn, and crucially, when to leave Country alone. Fire was not a disaster waiting to happen. It was something to understand, respect and use with precision and care.

We have written before about the case for cultural burning and the barriers that have long prevented it from being properly supported. In June 2026, something changed. That ancient knowledge has now been placed at the centre of a formal government commitment and the implications for how Australia manages fire could be significant.

A Landmark Strategy, Long Overdue

The release of the New South Wales Cultural Fire Strategy in June 2026 marks a significant turning point in how Australia approaches the management of fire on Country. Developed through an Aboriginal working group and a cross-government working group following recommendations from the 2020 NSW Bushfire Inquiry, the strategy is the first of its kind in the state. It formally recognises cultural fire as a distinct and legitimate practice, one that is explicitly not the same as a standard hazard reduction burn and commits the NSW Government to supporting Aboriginal communities to lead it.

The strategy is built around five pillars: Activation, Stronger Networks, Partnerships, Research and Data, and Cultural Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting. Together, they represent a framework not just for burning Country, but for rebuilding the relationship between government institutions and the Traditional Owners who have cared for this landscape for thousands of years.

As the NSW Government's own statement makes clear, cultural fire "is not hazard reduction. It's a tradition that has been practised by Aboriginal people for millennia. Cultural fire practices have spiritual, environmental and social outcomes at their core."

What Cultural Burning Actually Is

To understand why this strategy matters, it helps to understand what cultural burning actually involves and how it differs from the prescribed burns most Australians are familiar with.

Cultural burns are cool, slow and controlled. They move gently through the landscape, giving native animals time to move away from the fire front. They are carefully timed, guided by deep seasonal knowledge rather than calendar schedules, and applied in a targeted, patch-style manner across specific parts of Country. The purpose is holistic: to support the health of vegetation, protect culturally significant sites, improve habitat, encourage the regrowth of food and medicinal plants, and reduce the build-up of fine fuels that can drive more intense bushfires later.

Research by the Australian National University and NSW Local Land Services from pilot projects in the Riverina and South East found a strong response from native plants following cultural burns, with many native species, including native peas, germinating after the burn, with stronger results than in unburned areas. These burns were conducted in critically endangered box-gum grassy woodlands, highlighting the ecological as well as cultural significance of the practice.

This is fundamentally different from a conventional hazard reduction burn, which typically prioritises fuel reduction across broad areas and is shaped by regulatory frameworks rather than local cultural knowledge. One ANU forest fire management specialist described the current tension as "a structural mismatch"—"like a clash of two cultures at the moment. The concept of lighting a fire to maintain the health of a forest didn't enter into the legislation."

Evidence from the Landscape

One of the most compelling cases for cultural burning comes from the aftermath of the 2018 Tathra bushfire on the NSW South Coast. The Bega Local Aboriginal Land Council had carried out a cultural burn over a section of the affected area roughly six months before the fire swept through. The results were striking. Where the cultural burn had taken place, canopies remained alive, the ground was not scorched to bare soil, and the NSW Rural Fire Service was able to use the treated area to slow the fire's advance toward the town.

"Where we burned, didn't get scorched," said one practitioner involved in the work. The RFS confirmed that reduced fuel loads in the culturally burned area helped stop the fire progressing further into the township. By contrast, a nearby area that had received a conventional 2009 hazard reduction burn had since grown back with dense regrowth, actually increasing fuel loads ahead of the disaster.

This is not an isolated example. On the NSW South Coast more broadly, Aboriginal-led cultural burning has supported healthier ecosystems and strengthened the intergenerational transfer of cultural knowledge between Elders and younger community members. The Batemans Bay Local Aboriginal Land Council and the Walbunja Ranger Team have been using cultural fire across a range of land in the Batemans Bay area, with some of that work generating employment and training opportunities through fee-for-service arrangements. Near Tumut, the Buugang Wambal project, led by Walgalu and Wiradjuri people, uses cultural fire to protect critically endangered species. In the Northern Tablelands, the Banbai Rangers use fire to care for heritage sites, including Aboriginal rock art, artefacts, stories and cultural knowledge.

The Barriers That Held It Back

Despite this evidence, cultural burning has faced serious obstacles for years. In New South Wales, fire use sits across multiple pieces of legislation, none of which establishes a clear right to light a fire for cultural purposes. Minimum intervals between burns set under current rules can conflict with Indigenous knowledge that supports more frequent, low-intensity, patch-style fires. Aboriginal organisations have also faced practical barriers around approvals, funding, regulatory compliance, and, critically, insurance.

The insurance issue has been one of the most persistent structural problems. For many years, Aboriginal land councils and cultural fire practitioners struggled to obtain adequate public liability cover for burning activities, leaving them exposed to significant financial risk and effectively preventing burns from proceeding. The NSW Cultural Fire Strategy directly addresses this, committing to documenting and resolving insurance barriers as a key government action.

Recent developments on this front are encouraging. Insurance group IAG, through a partnership with the Aboriginal Carbon Foundation that began in 2022, has extended its support for cultural land management work, framing it as part of a broader climate and sustainability strategy. IAG has cited research indicating that appropriately applied cultural burning can lower the likelihood of high-intensity bushfires, emit less greenhouse gas than some other hazard reduction methods, and help maintain soil health and biodiversity. The insurer has described the approach as "a preventative tool in mitigating bushfire risk", a significant shift in how the insurance sector is beginning to view traditional fire practice.

What the Strategy Commits To

The NSW Cultural Fire Strategy is not just symbolic recognition. It comes with specific commitments from the NSW Government, including:

• Resolving insurance barriers for cultural fire practitioners

• Updating land management agency policies and procedures to accommodate cultural fire

• Creating a dedicated environmental assessment pathway for cultural fire activities

• Building cultural capability within government agencies to act as effective interfaces with Aboriginal communities

• Identifying research priorities that recognise the value and expertise of cultural fire practitioners

• Developing cultural monitoring, evaluation and adaptive management frameworks

Importantly, the strategy also supports Aboriginal self-determination, placing communities in the lead role. As the strategy states, "Aboriginal communities will lead when and how Country is managed with cultural fire. The NSW Government will support Aboriginal communities to undertake cultural fire." This is a meaningful distinction from earlier approaches that involved government agencies supervising or co-opting Indigenous knowledge within bureaucratic frameworks.

Part of a Larger Picture

The NSW strategy does not exist in isolation. Across the country, there is growing momentum around Indigenous-led land management. A recent expansion of a cultural burning research program, backed by an Australian Research Council Linkage grant and involving ANU, CSIRO ecologists, the NSW Rural Fire Service and local Aboriginal Land Councils, is extending pilot work into new landscapes across NSW and the ACT. The NSW Crown Lands Cultural Burn Program has also been facilitating burns on Crown land in partnership with Traditional Owners.

None of this means cultural burning is a complete answer to Australia's bushfire risk. The climate is changing. Communities continue to expand into fire-prone landscapes. Modern emergency services, planning frameworks, building standards, early warning systems and community preparedness remain essential. Cultural burning works best as a complement to these systems, not a replacement.

But what it offers is something genuinely different: a different relationship with fire itself.

Instead of treating every fire as a disaster to be extinguished, cultural burning asks us to think about Country before the emergency happens. It asks us to maintain landscapes rather than simply react to them. And it asks us to listen to the people who have been doing exactly that for tens of thousands of years.

The Deeper Point

There is something worth sitting with in the fact that it has taken Australia this long to formally recognise what Traditional Owners have always known. The 2019-20 Black Summer fires burned more than 18 million hectares and destroyed thousands of homes. The subsequent bushfire inquiry recommended greater use of Aboriginal land management practices. And yet it took years more of advocacy, research, practical demonstrations and negotiations with insurers before a formal strategy was put in place.

For many Aboriginal communities, this is not a new conversation. It is a very old one, finally being heard.

As one Southern Yuin cultural fire practitioner put it, standing amid a gentle burn on the NSW far south coast: "After the bushfires that we've been getting, you need a little fire like this to protect the biodiversity of the landscape."

That is the essence of what cultural burning offers. Not a technology, not a policy instrument, but a relationship with Country. A way of caring for the land that has kept it in balance for thousands of generations, interrupted by two centuries of colonial land management, and now slowly, imperfectly, but genuinely beginning to be restored.

Australia cannot eliminate bushfire risk. But it can become better at living with fire. And some of the most important knowledge about how to do that has been here all along.