Within certain settler colonial nations, Indigenous peoples are increasingly becoming present and influential in the agencies legally responsible for the management of their ancestral territories, their environments and their hazards. On the Australian continent, for example, Aboriginal peoples are becoming more formally involved in the management of bushfire (or ‘wildfire’ elsewhere). This environmental phenomenon is at once of profound cultural significance to many Aboriginal peoples and a major natural hazard to human life and property, managed by an extensive professional bureaucracy of settler government agencies. Drawing upon a case study of collaborative bushfire management between Dja Dja Wurrung peoples and settler bushfire management agencies on Dja Dja Wurrung country (or, ancestral territory) in the southeast Australian state of Victoria, this article argues for an understanding of such collaborations as ‘decolonising experiments’. For geographers and others, this means paying attention to the open-ended character of collaborative initiatives, whether and how they materially improve the position of Indigenous peoples, as well as whether and how they give rise to new resources and strategies for the creation of other decolonising futures.

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Wildfire is a global environmental ‘problem’ with significant socioeconomic and socionatural impacts that does not lend itself to simple technical fixes (Gill et al., 2013: 439). In Australia, a country with a pronounced history of disastrous landscape fires, these impacts are expected to increase as the peri-urban population continues to grow and the climate continues to change. This paper draws upon the burgeoning literature on anticipatory regimes to analyse an in-depth case study of a government pilot in the highly fire-prone State of Victoria, where practitioners have utilised a simulation model to measure and intervene in the distribution of wildfire risk. The pilot presents the ‘calculative collective device’ (Callon and Muniesa, 2005) of wildfire management at a moment of what I label ‘calculative rearticulation’, wherein figurations of the future are rebooted, reconstructed or recalibrated; such moments, I suggest, can reorient the institutionally conservative spaces – such as environmental or risk management – providing opportunities for practitioners and others to interrogate the existing distribution of hazards and anticipatory interventions. Through such opportunities ‘hazardous’ more-than-human landscapes can be imagined otherwise.