The CFA says it is doing its utmost to protect sites of Indigenous heritage.
Such heritage sites, including cultural landmarks, artefacts and other evidence, are protected by legislation.
The CFA says it actively encourages a proactive approach to protect heritage values, whether they are of Indigenous or non-Indigenous (historic) heritage. Measures include:
- The CFA includes cultural heritage values advisers in incident management teams.
- The CFA includes cultural heritage awareness information in the annual preseason incident management team briefings.
- Joint fuel management program plans as part of CFA’s vegetation management program include thorough heritage values assessments for each treatment.
Increasingly, the CFA supports traditional owner groups in carrying out cultural burning, which can also help reduce local fire risk.
Other methods the CFA uses to reduce fire risk include non-burn fuel treatments such as mulching or slashing of weedy vegetation, and sometimes grazing animals to remove and lower grassy fuels.
Each treatment option has a different level of risk to identified heritage values present within the landscape.
Steps are taken to identify and protect those identified values to reduce potential damage to any known or recorded values at a site, whether of Indigenous or historic origins.
A CFA cultural heritage adviser reviews every fuel treatment nominated to identify any recorded Indigenous or historic heritage values.
If a recorded value does exist, a suitable way is found to protect the value identified.
“In CFA, as in emergency services more broadly, we do our best to make sure our people on the ground have the best information at hand,” cultural heritage adviser Michael Sherwen said.