Protection of biodiversity, human assets, and cultural heritage pose significant challenges to contemporary planning of bushfire mitigation activities. Current mitigation approaches are not always appropriate, and mismanagement is a source of distress for Indigenous peoples. Increased understanding of Indigenous fire knowledge and increased Indigenous participation may provide insight into more appropriate and inclusive land management for fire mitigation. We analysed contemporary Noongar and Western fire practitioner approaches within an Indigenous fire knowledge (IFK) framework to explore knowledge and aspirations for small reserves in the Southwest Australian Floristic Region (SWAFR) global biodiversity hotspot. We recorded an extensive knowledge base, characterised by a highly nuanced approach to burning, held by the Noongar coauthors. We explore potential approaches to applying this knowledge to build collaborative fire mitigation strategies with mutually beneficial outcomes for biodiversity, cultural heritage, and human assets.

This article considers the dynamic relationship between Aboriginal Australia identity, western history and the recuperation of lost ancestral memories. In recent decades many Australian cultural institutions have supported Aboriginal community groups in the revival of Aboriginal languages, songs and stories. The reclamation of heritage from archival collections has helped strengthen Aboriginal claim and control of ancestor histories – especially when significant materials are returned to people of a descendant community and given meaningful social context. Often set in place from these interactions are cultural protocols and ethics formulating future material access, return and usage. Looking more closely at intercultural practices of repatriation, this article relates Aboriginal pathways of ancestral memory restoration (and invention of memory) to living story. In particular, it examines the cultural decision-making of two Australian Aboriginal family groups – Wirlomin Minang (Noongar) families from the Great Southern of Western Australia and Gunai Kurnai (Koorie) families from the Gippsland region of Victoria – who characterize kin reactions to the returned colonial historiography of their shared ancestor Bessy Flowers (c. 1849–95), as well as family grief and shame at her absent memory. The difference between the archival material of photographs and letters that represent Bessy and the ways her Wirlomin Minang and Gunai Kurnai families imagine themselves created context for the mixed-media co-production, No Longer a Wandering Spirit. This article explores how intercultural efforts to strengthen family story might widen circles of knowledge about Aboriginal cultural dislocation, historical exclusion and the ever-present action of resistance and recovery.

As a result of removal and custody of Noongar children from their families and lands—forced mobilities and immobilties over decades, and within days and nights—a distinctive and beautiful artistic heritage emerged. Th is material heritage, too, was moved through and from Noongar country. Illustrated by the art of Carrolup, the culture and identity of the Noongar people has been transcendent and a “spiritual geography” mapped. As “heart returns home” to Noongar country, there are opportunities for new approaches to the reconciliation of the past for the future. Th e beauty of the art and the story of Carrolup teach, inspire, and provoke. Th ese mobilities and immobilities hold lessons that continue to travel.

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