About Professor Michael-Shawn Fletcher
Michael-Shawn Fletcher is a Wiradjuri scholar and Professor of Geography at the University of Melbourne, where he serves as Associate Dean (Indigenous) in the Faculty of Science. He is also Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures. His research investigates the long-term relationships between people, fire, and vegetation, using palaeoecological records such as pollen, charcoal, and geochemical proxies to reconstruct environmental change across Australia and the Indo-Pacific.
His work demonstrates that many Australian landscapes are cultural landscapes shaped by millennia of Aboriginal land management, and that the disruption of Indigenous stewardship following colonisation fundamentally altered vegetation structure, fire regimes, and ecological function. By integrating palaeoecology with Indigenous knowledge and historical evidence, his research challenges dominant wilderness narratives and reframes ecological baselines.
Video Transcript
How would you like to introduce yourself?
My name is Michael Shawn Fletcher. I’m a Wiradjuri man. I’m a physical geographer. I work at the University of Melbourne. My research expertise is an area called paleoecology and paleo is just a Greek word that’s put onto the front of words to mean past so I’m really interested in past ecosystems or how environments change through time. I’m also the Associate Dean Indigenous in the Faculty of Science. So I run the Indigenous Strategy. I’m a deputy director of an ARC Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures, which is a seven-year long, hundred million dollar project funded by the federal government, working with Aboriginal communities across the country and academic institutions across the country and museums and other collection institutions to basically reframe and re-associate Aboriginal knowledges with the Academy so that we can come up with a better future.
What is paleoecology?
So paleoecology, or the study of past ecosystems, uses things like where we are today. These are wetlands, and they’ll be accumulating information through time. So around the air that I’m breathing now, there’s pollen grains, there’s dust blowing in from different places, there’s pollutants coming in. If there was a fire, there’d be some charcoal blowing. And that all, all of that information settles on these lakes’ surface, and then to the bottom of the lake, and builds up through time, essentially like a book, an archive. They’re called natural archives. So we extract that archive, much like a core, say from Antarctica, which is a nice core, and we can look at the bubbles of air that have built up over millions of years. We unpack this archive, or this book, through time, and we can understand how the landscape’s changed. So how plants have changed, how fires changed, how erosion’s changed, how pollution’s changed, all of these sorts of things. And by piecing this together, we can rewind the clock really, and go back millions of years if the conditions are right.
What has been your career pathway to here?
My journey toward academia, like most Aboriginal people, is somewhat non-traditional. I’m the first in family to have gone to university, I believe, definitely to finish university, let alone get a PhD. I entered into a Bachelor of Education. I thought I wanted to be a science teacher, and I was for about four years. And then I had this burning sort of desire to pick up on some of the threads that I’d unpicked through my Bachelor degree, particularly in the geography space. So I went and did an Honours degree back at the University of Melbourne, looking at a question around how the south-west of Tasmania could be called a wilderness when there was a lot of evidence that it had been inhabited for 40,000 years plus. And it didn’t really gel with my understanding of the way that people interact with Country, and that we’re calling this place a wilderness, which means free of people. So I worked on a small project unpicking that a little bit. And then in true fashion, I think I went over and surfed in Margaret River for a year or two, and eventually had the inspiration to come back and do a PhD, where I really picked up that western Tasmanian story and got stuck right into it and did my PhD. And then I ended up in South America and Chile doing a postdoc, looking at environmental change there and the main drivers in the system I was working at were volcanoes, looking at how historical volcanoes and people interacted to create landscapes. And then I ended up back at the ANU, Australian National University in Canberra, doing some more research a little bit back in Tasmania. And then in 2013, I ended up at University of Melbourne. And here I am.
Can you tell us about your PhD investigating the ancient landscapes of Western Tasmania?
Yeah, so the substantive part of pretty much all of my PhD was focused on this really unique part of Australia, Western Tasmania. It receives around three and a half metres of rainfall a year, which is, if you think about here in Naarm, it’s around 700 millimetres a year. So it’s a really high rainfall area. It’s cold. The biogeography of the place is a big mountain range that splits the island in half. So the west is really wet and within 100 kilometres you’re down to 400 millimetres of rainfall on the other side of those mountain ranges. So it creates this really binary landscape. And there have been a lot of papers published puzzling on what was called the anomaly between the vegetation you would expect there, which should be cool temperate rainforest, and the vegetation you actually found, which is a really fire-promoted grass-like vegetation, which dominates around 40% of the landscape is this fire promoted vegetation. And the anomaly was that it’s just so incredibly wet there that lightning strikes are usually accompanied by high rainfall. And the presence of lightning alone couldn’t really account for the landscape. There was also archaeology that dates back just over 40,000 years of people living in this landscape. So I went about taking these sediment cores and trying to understand how long it had been open for and how that related to human activity. And it turns out that these landscapes are completely constructed. They were constructed by Aboriginal people. For the million years before the arrival of people, this landscape had sort of switched between rainforests when it was nice and warm like it is in the period we live in. Then an ice age would come in and grasses would dominate. And then that ice age would end and rainforests would come back in. Right after the arrival of people, that landscape radically changed. And it was basically an open fire promoted landscape completely from when people arrived until the British invasion. So it really reframed this area that’s called a wilderness as actually a cultural landscape that was designed and maintained by people over millennia. And that’s kind of underpinned a lot of the work that I do now. There has been recognition of this, but the area is still called a wilderness area, as are many places in Australia right now, which is a real jarring reality when this is one of the longest inhabited places on earth by a continuing culture. And we’re just about everywhere we look. You can see evidence of human creation of landscapes. Yet the landscapes are still routinely called wilderness.
What can you tell us about this place where we are conducting the interview, Bolin Bolin Billabong?
Yeah, so right now we are at a place called Bolin Bolin Billabong. The word Bolin Bolin gives its name to the suburb around here, Bulleen. This was and remains an incredibly important site for Wurundjeri, the Traditional Owners here. Before the British invasion, there were ceremonies in this landscape around these wetlands that would host hundreds of people for months on end. And these were like supermarkets. Uncle Dave Wandin, who I’m working with on this site, a Wurundjeri elder, calls these supermarkets. You would have had eels, fish, you’ve got the animals that are feeding off the grass, you’ve got birds, you’ve got vegetable resources, this perfect sort of confluence of resources. And it’d be a really important place where ceremony would take place. It was actually the place that Wurundjeri chose to be relocated as Naarm, or modern Melbourne, was expanding and Aboriginal people were being forced out. Unfortunately, they were told no, because it was a prime dairy country. And they were sent off to Narre Narre Warren and later Coranderrk to set up their missions. So we were really interested now, you can see around here, it’s a lot of closely packed trees, all these river red gums, Eucalyptus, Camelgilensis is the Latin name. There’s some really big branching individuals you can see just over the road here. And they’re surrounded, particularly on the other side of the Billabong, by really tightly packed straight individuals. Now, as a person who observe landscapes, you can automatically see that there’s been some kind of change in the way that trees are establishing here. The big branching trees are growing free from light competition. So they’re not forced to grow straight. If you imagine a tree in the middle of a paddock is always spread out, and they’re actually called paddock trees. So you can see these big paddock trees here surrounded by tiny little individuals going straight up. So that meant that the paddock trees when they were growing, which may be three, four, 500 years old, these are incredibly large trees, were growing in an open landscape. And now there’s jam packed, there’s trees all through here. It’s really quite a bit classified as a forest in many parts. So there’s a hint of change there. And we’re interested in unpacking what this place was like prior to the British invasion, so that the Wurundjeri could re-engage with Country and through their range of programs start to return health to these systems. So we took a core not far from here. It was about six metres and it dates to about 400 years ago. So prior to the British invasion and the establishment of modern Melbourne after 1835. And what we found was really quite remarkable, is that this here is a former path of Birrarung, what’s now called the Yarra. It was a flowing river and in the bottom were some gravels, which you see in the bottom of rivers. And we cored all the way through to those gravels. So we managed to start our story when this was a river. It then was left behind because the river changed course through various hydrological processes and turned into a billabong. And around the banks of the billabong at that time were rainforest plants. This thing called Myrtle Beech or Nothofagus cunninghamii and there were tree ferns, Tixonia Antarctica. And these are now found 30, 40 kilometres away. So not actually found in the area around here now. And almost immediately within a decade or so, they were burnt out. And this landscape was virtually treeless, virtually treeless. There would have been about a 5% tree cover around here, which probably reflects these big old river red gums. So the Wurundjeri converted this landscape, wrapped it into their economy, cleared the banks so that they could do things like harvest eels. These billabongs like this are an important eel reservoir where people can harvest eels. And we see this pattern now that is emerging across all these billabongs when they’re created. The fringing sort of rainforest plants are cleared out and you have basically a treeless grassy landscape. So the Wurundjeri are wrapping this into their economy. And then the British invade and what happened after that was a whole lot of weeds come in. You see dairy farms in and around these sorts of areas. And this is really quite telling. There’s this national myth in the formation of modern Australia that white people or the British came and tamed the land and cleared the land and turned it into productive land. Well, we know from the writings of surveyors and things like that, that that’s just categorically not true in many places. And the empirical data here, the scientific evidence shows that basically the British walked into a curated open farming landscape and all they had to do was put a bunch of cows in here. So they actually did nothing to improve this. They just took it. And it’s really telling that within two years of Melbourne being established in 1835, there were 700,000 sheep in and around Melbourne. And so that’s a landscape that’s being filled with sheep that was already open. And we see this repeated story throughout this series of billabongs along the lower Birrarung. So it’s really quite powerful data to show basically landscape architecture by the Wurundjeri, wrapping this into our economy. And then the British essentially capturing this landscape and considering it so bountiful because of that work that was done. And that work now is being employed by the Narrap Rangers who are caring for this now. And we’re sitting right next to where the first cultural burn in 150 or so years was performed earlier this year, based on the work that they’ve done with some other colleagues and the sediment work we’ve done here to reestablish health of these systems.
What methodologies did you use?
Yeah, so in order to unpack that story, we basically treat the layers of sediment. So we’ll take a big long core, slice it into one centimetre or a half centimetre increments. So here it was a six and a half metre core, so we had a 650 slices. And then we each and every one of those, we would, we treat with different chemicals to dissolve everything we don’t want. Yeah, so if I want to look at charcoal, I hit it with some different chemicals to remove everything but the charcoal. If I want to look at the pollen, I’ll treat it with different chemicals to leave the pollen behind. And if we were interested in flood, we’re interested in flood history here. We dissolve everything except the fine grains that come in with floods. So by doing those sequential treatments, we then count and analyse those individual pieces and build a chronology, a story to a time, a timeline of change here. We use things like microscopes. We have basically lasers that tell us the elemental or the composition of polymers and all these sorts of things in the sediment that can reveal about environmental change. We scan it with a particular light that can give us readouts of different elements like titanium, iron, zinc, silica. All these fragments, all these partial bits of the past, combine together to give us a nice constrained story. It’s like a Venn diagram of multiple possibilities. And by having more and more and more sets of data, you narrow the area of overlap and you constrain the potential explanations of that. So you can actually really get a tight picture of what’s happened in the past. So by applying all of those kind of different scientific technologies and methodologies.
What are some of your broader findings derived from this site?
In addition to the localised work we can tell here about returning health to country, and doing things like the restoration targets that are set for these places are based on models or expert elicitation. It’s basically asking a bunch of non-original scientists what they think. Never Aboriginal communities. There’s a national database where you can click on a place and it can tell you what was there prior to the British invasion in 1750. Where there’s no expert elicitation they use models and they just model the plants and animals that are in the area, the climate, the soils, and they run the model and produce what we call a climax or potential natural vegetation, which explicitly does not include people. There is no human element in that whatsoever. Where we’ve empirically tested these they are almost universally wrong. So there’s a big problem there, a really big problem. So these local site-based corrections, if you like, can help us recalibrate that national data set. Another really important thing that’s emerged from our work is work on bushfires. So we’ve focused in with a bunch of different communities from Gunaikurnai up to Bundjalung in northern New South Wales. So Gunaikurnai in eastern Victoria in Gippsland up to Bundjalung in northern New South Wales looking at areas within the 2019-2020 catastrophic bushfires in the forests. And we found right across that area there was between a four and six-fold increase in eucalypt cover, eucalypt amount following the British invasion right across that region. And immediately accompanying that change was more fire. And not only just fire, fire that was fundamentally different. Fire that burnt the ground so hard that soil erosion began where it was absent before. So this is a fundamental new world. And what it shows is that Aboriginal people were very cognisant of the dangers of this amazing tree, the eucalypt, the most flammable tree on earth, which can actually, which actually changes fire regimes. If you get too many of them in there you create a catastrophic fire loop and you’re locked into a flammable system. Aboriginal people were keeping what are now forests as open woodlands. Tree cover went from about 5% to 40% in some of these places or even greater in some areas. So Aboriginal people were keeping these fires safe. And in those areas in the past where there were really strong droughts, equal fire weather to what we experienced in 2019-2020, there were no fires. So the Aboriginal people were keeping safe, productive and climate resilient landscapes when it comes to wildfire. And that was ended by the British invasion, massacres, removing people from missions, removing the care that Country needs and eucalypts have been let out of the box across this forest estate. And so now this climate driven catastrophic fire problem we’re living in is a product of the lack of care. And now climate can really engage these forests and cause big problems. So it really shows a way forward. We have this big focus, which I think we need to do on sequestering carbon, but that’s a decades long solution. And we have fires now and ever-present danger. And we know that by working on the vegetation cover, by returning Aboriginal care through cultural fire, that we can wrestle back control of these systems and disengage them from the climate. So it’s a really important finding.
How would you like to see your findings integrated into Australian landcare practices?
Science and discourse around fire has really rested with non-Aboriginal people. It sits in the hands of fire experts, ecologists and fire scientists who are non-Aboriginal and it still happens today. Like there’s a very powerful group of people who essentially act as gatekeepers around what is good fire, what is bad fire, where Aboriginal fire can and can’t be used with little conversation with Aboriginal people or with really tokenistic or even appropriating use of Aboriginal knowledges. You see this time and time again. They do things like leverage the very fact that in some ecosystems such as Mountain Ash forests or Tingle forests in southwest where fire was almost certainly not used in the same way that it was in places like this, they leverage those small examples which are actually pretty anomalous in the Australian context to argue for a no fire policy more broadly and then they arbitrate on where Aboriginal fire is and isn’t appropriate and that’s built on a very powerful compendium of scientific knowledge. I mean data and science have incredible power in society. Decisions usually are made off data and if you don’t you’ve got to make a very good reason why you’re not making this offer a data-driven decision. There’s a big problem there. I think when it comes to science and the questions that it asks it’s set from a certain perspective and there’s this myth and we’re taught this at schools, we’re taught that science is objective, we’re taught that scientists seek the truth and objective truth and that’s a myth. Humans can’t be objective really. We all come from a cultural standpoint, we all come from a perspective. All of the questions we ask are preset by the knowledges that we have in our head and there’s no way that we can have the knowledges and perspectives of all the different ways of looking at the world. So that sets in train a sequence of processes and methodologies and practices and interpretations and findings that are constrained by the initial framing and this is why it’s incredibly important to include people with different perspectives. Aboriginal people, women, men, get diversity around decision-making because you always bring a slightly different perspective into frame. You’ll ask different questions, you’ll look for different answers, you’ll look at different methodologies and we know this. This has been done, there’s a lot of experiments now where they give the same data to groups of people from different backgrounds and they end up with different results all the time. Even asking the same question, there are these micro decisions we all make daily and in our work, these micro decisions that build up and set us on a path. Now we can’t break that, we can recognise it. The way around that is to bring different perspectives in and try and work together with these different ideas. So especially in the historic sciences that I work in, it’s really, really prevalent because we’re forensic scientists, we’re looking at the past. I’m looking at reflections of the past in the charcoal and pollen. I don’t have the absolute picture and there’s an ambiguity to that power of that data. And the questions you ask are often so powerful in the way you set them up. So for example, let’s prove that this is a human landscape. Science requires absolute irrefutable data to disprove that it was natural and prove that it was human. And we’ve managed to do this here with really a lot of work and to certain circumstances. But equally, if you come in to this and say modern Homo sapiens were living here for 40,000 years, 30,000 years, whatever it is in this particular area, prove to me that this is natural, not human. The burden of proof becomes equally hard. So there’s an unequal burden of proof that isn’t recognised in science. And it’s just an artefact of especially when we’re going back in time to periods where there’s no scientific data collection. We have to go back 250 years ago, 300 years ago, 500 years ago. Without getting into a time machine, we’re dealing with looser and looser sets of data to overturn our initial hypothesis. And so that initial hypothesis carries really incredible importance. And what’s happened in this landscape in Australia is that we were right from the moment that Cook landed at Botany Bay and shot two Dharawal men and walked up the hill and claimed it unoccupied, you know, right through to being called intelligent parasites, right through to Terra Nullius, right through to the modern day framing of this is natural, prove that it was human. That starting point has always been to remove us. The data that restoration is set to, we’re removed from, we’re never in and we are facing this incredible task of having to rewind the clock 200 years and get enough proof and data to overturn this incredibly powerful position through the means of science, which is falsification. And you need absolute proof to overturn hypotheses. And we never acknowledge that’s a choice that hypothesis at the start. It’s a cultural choice. You would never walk up to a personal person. And they would assume that this was a natural landscape prior to the British invasion, they would assume that was someone’s Country. And that’s a different perspective. And you would have to bring that a massive evidence in behind there to overturn that hypothesis, which you couldn’t. No. So it’s really, truly important we recognise these biases coming with this agnostic, a prior, if you like, or predisposition into our work and let the data speak. But too often we’re framing in this, this is natural. Or, for example, in the fire science word, fire is bad. That’s the framing. And you have to prove unequivocally that it’s good. And that’s a qualitative assessment. You actually don’t know. But these initial framings are so, these are these micro decisions are so powerful. And they’re set from a cultural paradigm. It’s not one that has been resident in this place for tens of thousands of years. And knows Country and has a relationship with Country. It’s one that’s come in lately, has a really different perspective that justified this as terra nullius and wilderness and all these sorts of things. And the data is required to turn that over. So there’s a deep problem with the way that we’re doing science now. And places like this hopefully can help reveal that epistemological, that kind of standpoint that is biased by our cultural perspectives.
How could scientific paleoecological work integrate or sit alongside Indigenous Knowledges?
A potential solution here around what I call this epistemic bias is to meaningfully engage with people who have been in the land that you’re working in for millennia and by doing so you end up asking different questions. So we’ve got this big National Centre of Excellence where we’ve partnered with Aboriginal communities across the country. We offer as scientists ourselves as toolkits. We each have our speciality archaeologists, environmental scientists, like myself, historians, museum people, DNA people. Yet we work with community to ask the questions they think are important, set the framing they think are important and by doing that we’re not imposing a paradigm from somewhere else. We’re not imposing naturalness, we’re not imposing and I think that’s really important. In a lot of ways what you would call the methodologies that we do are kind of set in science. You have your chemicals, you have your amounts, you have all this sort of stuff. It’s actually that framing and the way that it’s interpreted in the discourse around it. That’s where the work needs to be done and that’s the initial approach. That’s the initial methodology where you have to ask the right kinds of questions. If you’re asking and you see this a lot, if you’re asking inappropriate questions, your data is too weak to do anything about it, then you’re going to end up with inappropriate answers. For me it’s how do we get the right group of people around thinking about these questions. Not a group of non-Aboriginal people sitting in a room thinking these things, then going out and working with a ranger and saying oh look we’ve indigenised our approach, they were there, they helped us collect it and this is what we found out just so happens we were right. How many academic papers you’ve written that they’ve asked the right hypothesis and then come out with it in the end. There’s very little evidence of actually true agnostic approach. Equal weighting of potential hypotheses and let the data speak. Quite often there’s a real strong bias. And I think that will dissipate if you actually make true engagement with Aboriginal communities, true engagement with Aboriginal knowledges, true engagement with Aboriginal perspectives, then you actually get more sensible and nuanced questions and answers.
Have you seen much change within universities and the wider public’s interest in or support for First Peoples Knowledges – particularly in Science – over the course of your career?
Yeah, so throughout my academic career I’ve actually witnessed substantial change in the way that science is done, not ubiquitously. It’s often concentrated around certain individuals and then permeates out to a more systemic change. But you see now within institutions more meaningful engagement with Aboriginal communities, a requirement by the institution to engage with Aboriginal communities if doing work on Aboriginal Knowledges or Country. I noticed that the Australian Research Council now has a board of Aboriginal people assessing projects so you don’t end up with ridiculous situations like an Aboriginal community being met by non-Aboriginal scientists saying, “Hey, we’ve been funded by the government to do archaeology on your community.” And they’re like, “We’ve never heard of you before.” These things just shouldn’t happen. They’re a true partnership. There’s a big focus on true partnerships. There are still… power’s a difficult thing to relinquish. And we often think of power as the mega-rich, but there are powerful voices in science who have very strident and particular views and ways of doing. And change is hard and it’s really hard to change. So I see this particularly with the young generation. A lot of my work is focusing on the ECRs, even down to primary schools really, but the young academic generations in showing them the right way to do work with community and actually centring Indigenous voices. In the University of Melbourne and I know this happens in other institutions, we now recruit academics that might not have traditional pathways, PhDs, but it’s knowledge holders. There’s a lot of opportunities to actually bring different perspectives into the institution. I’d say over the last five to 10 years, there’s really been an acceleration in that and it’s really pleasing to see. Change never happens quick enough, but we’ve been waiting for a couple hundred years and I’m sure we can keep going for more.
Beyond your own projects, what are some of the most significant developments underway in Australian Indigenous research at this moment?
I think that one of the most important revolutions, revelations, is authentically Indigenous-led research. You know, not people just being put on the paper. This actually being led by ranger groups, this actually being led by communities with academics bringing in support where required. That to me is the most pleasing and really will be the most transformative part of where we’re going. It allows more authenticity of Aboriginal ways of knowing and being. There’s some work to be done around how that’s received in scientific literature, you know, with nomenclature and different kinds of uses of words and phrases and these kinds of things, which a good example is the furor around Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu really centring on semantic gatekeeping around the word farming. And I’m not comfortable with the word farming because I think what Aboriginal people were doing and have the potential to do is a lot more sophisticated and sustainable than farming. Farming should be a perjorative. That’s actually a negative. It’s actually an extractive barbaric process of which you just take, take, take. Whereas what was happening wasn’t farming. It’s got some elements of that of actually domestication of species and increasing of crops and these kinds of things. So I’m glad that it was brought to light because yeah, we don’t want to be lumped as earth destroyers who do these sorts of things with no relationship. So there’s those sorts of issues, but really, I think the most transformative thing is a lot of this stuff is now moved beyond tokenism to actual genuine engagement and Indigenous-led research, which is really going to be really quite powerful, especially when it comes to the stuff that I’m interested in. But medicine and food and all sorts of things and cosmology, all these sorts of things will really benefit from that because if we face it, we’re living in a world faced by incredible challenges. There’s a lot of nihilism out there about climate destruction, fires, all these sorts of things. And all of those have been created by the current worldview that dominates. They weren’t a problem until this worldview dominated the earth and put in inappropriate relationships with the world around it. Extractive things like farming, mining, all these sorts of things. And the solution isn’t, and we know this, we know this from the trillions of dollars that have been spent globally on trying to solve it with the same approaches that are failing. The solution isn’t that. The solution is different perspectives and solutions that are born from Country and the people who are on it.