Exploration Research
Healing Country: Indigenous-Led Fire, Water, and Wildlife Restoration Across Victoria
Healing Country is not simply an environmental goal — it is a cultural, scientific, and spiritual imperative. Across Victoria, Traditional Owners and Indigenous ranger groups are restoring the balance disrupted by colonisation: reintroducing cultural fire, reviving wetlands, returning species, and reawakening languages and stories of place.
For tens of thousands of years, Indigenous peoples such as the Wadawurrung, Gunditjmara, Dja Dja Wurrung, Taungurung, and Bunurong managed their lands with precision — shaping ecosystems through ceremony, observation, and stewardship. Their systems of care, suppressed during colonisation, are now central to a growing movement that unites traditional knowledge and contemporary science to restore Victoria’s Country and biodiversity (Gammage 2011; Pascoe 2014).
The Meaning of Healing Country
In Indigenous philosophy, Country is not a passive landscape — it is alive, sentient, and relational. Healing Country means restoring right relationships between people, land, water, and spirit.
This process involves:
Reviving fire knowledge to maintain biodiversity and reduce destructive wildfires.
Restoring waterways and wetlands to sustain fish, eels, and aquatic plants.
Reintroducing and protecting endangered wildlife as kin, not resources.
Reconnecting communities to ancestral responsibilities and totems through land-based work.
Healing Country is thus both ecological science and cultural renewal — a merging of observation, ceremony, and adaptive management.
Fire: Restoring Balance to the Land
Cultural Fire in Wadawurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung Country
Before colonisation, cultural burning maintained open grasslands and woodlands across much of Victoria. Small, low-intensity fires cleared undergrowth, encouraged new growth for kangaroos and wallabies, and protected seed banks.
In Wadawurrung Country, mosaic burns once shaped the volcanic plains, allowing animals like bettongs, bandicoots, and plains wanderers to thrive. After colonisation, these practices were banned, replaced by European fire suppression — leading to dense regrowth, invasive weeds, and catastrophic bushfires (Gammage 2011).
Now, Wadawurrung Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation and Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation are restoring traditional burning with support from state agencies. These burns:
Protect native grasses and orchids.
Create habitat for small mammals.
Reduce wildfire fuel loads while restoring cultural connection.
Analogy – Arnhem Land, Northern Territory
Across northern Australia, Yolŋu and Warddeken fire programs have reduced carbon emissions and revived biodiversity — showing how traditional fire practice offers climate solutions. Victoria’s projects mirror this success on a southern scale.
Water: Restoring Rivers, Wetlands, and Aquaculture
Budj Bim and the Eel Traps
In Gunditjmara Country, the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape — a 6,600-year-old aquaculture system — is a living example of sustainable water management. Using volcanic rock channels and weirs, Gunditjmara ancestors managed eel harvests in balance with seasonal flows.
Colonisation disrupted these systems through drainage, pollution, and land seizure. But restoration since the 2000s, guided by Gunditjmara Elders, has revitalised both the ecosystem and the culture. The site’s inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List (2019) acknowledges this Indigenous engineering as one of humanity’s oldest sustainable technologies (McNiven 2012).
Barwon River and Wadawurrung Revival
On Wadawurrung Country, projects along the Barwon and Moorabool Rivers are reconnecting communities with water Country. Traditional owners are monitoring river health, replanting native vegetation, and reintroducing eels and platypus populations once devastated by pollution and flow diversion.
Analogy – Murray-Darling Basin
Similar Indigenous water programs are emerging across Australia’s largest river system. Ngarrindjeri, Yorta Yorta, and Barkandji peoples are reviving floodplain wetlands, combining hydrology with ancestral knowledge to manage flows for ecological and cultural benefit.
Wildlife: Returning Kin to Country
Reintroduction and Protection in Victoria
Across Victoria, Indigenous ranger programs and community partnerships are restoring wildlife once thought lost:
Eastern barred bandicoots are being reintroduced to predator-free zones near Geelong and Hamilton (on Wadawurrung and Gunditjmara Country).
Brush-tailed bettongs (woylies) and rufous bettongs are returning to the volcanic plains through collaboration between Traditional Owners and conservation groups.
Brolgas and swans are being protected in wetland restoration projects across Lake Connewarre, where Wadawurrung Elders speak of their return as the “voices of balance” coming back to Country.
Cultural Significance
These animals are not merely species — they are kin, teachers, and symbols of identity. Reintroducing them revives the ecosystems they sustain and the songs, stories, and ceremonies that connect people to place.
Analogy – Kakadu and Cape York
Just as Bininj and Kuku Yalanji peoples reintroduced native species like wallabies and turtles in northern Australia, Victoria’s Indigenous-led projects reconnect ecology and heritage — blending field ecology with ancestral law.
The Science of Restoration: When Culture and Ecology Unite
Modern ecology increasingly validates Indigenous land practices once dismissed by colonists.
Fire ecology: Cultural mosaic burns enhance plant diversity and prevent large wildfires (Holling 1973).
Hydrology: Traditional aquaculture systems maintain water cycles and fish spawning grounds.
Biodiversity: Indigenous stewardship improves ecosystem resilience — the capacity of nature to recover from disturbance (Johnson 2006).
These systems exemplify resilience theory (Holling 1973) and the Gaia principle (Lovelock 1979) — that balance arises through interdependence and feedback, precisely the philosophy embedded in Indigenous law.
Psychological and Cultural Renewal
Healing Country is also healing people.
For Indigenous communities, restoring land reconnects families to ceremony, story, and identity after centuries of displacement.
For broader society, these projects offer a model of ecological empathy — a recognition that human well-being depends on environmental harmony (Cunsolo & Ellis 2018).
Through ranger programs, school partnerships, and collaborative research, younger generations are learning that science and culture are not opposing forces but complementary ways of understanding the world.
Conclusion
Across Victoria, from the Budj Bim wetlands to the Barwon River plains, Indigenous-led restoration is rebalancing ecosystems once fractured by colonisation. Fire, water, and wildlife are returning, carrying with them the stories and spirit of Country.
Healing Country is more than rehabilitation — it is truth-telling through action. It acknowledges that colonisation caused deep ecological and cultural wounds but affirms that renewal is possible through respect, partnership, and knowledge sharing.
In reconnecting people to land and science to story, Victoria’s Indigenous communities are not just restoring environments — they are restoring hope, demonstrating that balance, once lost, can indeed be found again.
References
Broome, R 2005, Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800, Allen & Unwin, Sydney.
Clark, ID 1990, Aboriginal Languages and Clans: An Historical Atlas of Western and Central Victoria, 1800–1900, Monash University, Melbourne.
Cunsolo, A & Ellis, N 2018, ‘Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss’, Nature Climate Change, vol. 8.
Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP) 2021, Aboriginal Partnerships and Ranger Programs in Victoria, Victorian Government, Melbourne.
Gammage, B 2011, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney.
Holling, CS 1973, ‘Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems’, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, vol. 4.
Johnson, CN 2006, Australia’s Mammal Extinctions: A 50,000-Year History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Lovelock, J 1979, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
McNiven, IJ 2012, ‘The Budj Bim Eel Traps: World Heritage Aboriginal Aquaculture’, Antiquity, vol. 86.
Pascoe, B 2014, Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture, Magabala Books, Broome.
Written, Researched and Directed by James Vegter (16 September 2025)
Magic Lands Alliance
Sharing the truth of Indigenous and colonial history through film, education, land, and community.
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Copyright MLA – 2025
Magic Lands Alliance acknowledges the Traditional Owners, Custodians, and First Nations communities across Australia and internationally. We honour their enduring connection to the sky, land, waters, language, and culture. We pay respect to Elders past, present, and emerging, and to all First Peoples’ communities and language groups. This article draws only on publicly available information; many cultural practices remain the intellectual property of their respective communities.