Hidden clues in colonial journals reveal why Tasmania’s remote west keeps burning

In 1830, the Palawa people were in the midst of their guerilla war against the British colonists taking their land in what is now Tasmania. After flaring in the mid-1820s, intensifying violence had claimed hundreds of First Nations and settler lives. In response, the Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, Sir George Arthur, commissioned the preacher George Augustus Robinson to seek conciliation.

Guided by Nuenonne woman Truganini and her cleverman husband Woureddy, Robinson travelled southwest across Tasmania to persuade the largely isolated Toogee nation to be relocated to a Christian mission. They were assured they would eventually be allowed to return. The promise was broken. Almost 200 members of the Toogee and other Lutruwita nations were exiled to Flinders Island, where most died.

The consequences of Robinson’s empty promise have lingered ever since, from the erosion of Palawa culture to the abrupt end to millennia of cultural burning.

In our time, Tasmania’s west is thought of as wilderness – wild and lightly populated. Dry lightning storms triggered massive fires in 2013, 2016, 2019 and 2025, burning areas unused to fire.

To find out whether these fires were been made worse by the end of Indigenous cultural burning, we turned to Robinson’s detailed journals. In our new research, we show Robinson made very rapid progress across treeless areas. Many of these are now dense scrub. This is the first time this scrubby thickening has been shown to have occurred at regional scale in Tasmania.

With dry lightning storms projected to increase as the world heats up, our findings suggest a return to cultural burning in treeless areas could be one way to reduce the risk of these uncontrolled bushfires.

Rapid travel through open country

The forced removal of many Palawa by British authorities, and a poor ethnographic record, has made it hard for scientists and land managers to understand how and where Country was managed in Tasmania. Understanding early use of fire is of particular importance in western Tasmania, where national parks preserve many forests and grasslands.

This is why we turned to Robinson’s journals. While Robinson’s role as “conciliator” had catastrophic consequences for Palawa, his journals are one of the few detailed written records of Tasmanian’s ancient cultural landscapes. We analysed the accounts of his 1830 trip from Bathurst Harbour in the far south to Macquarie Harbour and up to Cape Grim, as well as his subsequent 1833 journey to the southwest – around 464 kilometres in total.

The way Robinson describes the vegetation of almost two centuries ago is broadly consistent with maps of current vegetation. Most of his routes (72%) went across treeless areas such as buttongrass plains or sedge and shrub-covered moorlands, or followed what Robinson called “native roads” – pathways through forests created through intentional burning.

Tasmania’s treeless areas are highly fire-prone. Despite this, about a third of these treeless areas haven’t burned in the last half-century.

Over time, these long-unburned treeless areas become denser and denser. Tasmanian bushwalkers describe walking here as “scrub-bashing”, as it involves fighting through thickets of vines, shrubs and dense undergrowth.

A striking feature of Robinson’s journeys was how quickly he moved across landscapes now notoriously difficult for modern day bushwalkers. Retracing Robinson’s west coast routes is a challenge even for well-equipped bushwalking groups. The distance Robinson travelled in one day would now take two or three days.

The phenomenon where moorlands turn into impassable scrub is well known in Tasmania. Cape Pillar in the southeastern Tasman National Park is now covered in thick scrub. Early colonial observers saw instead an open landscape.

While some ecological theories suggest increased shrub density will rapidly transform treeless areas to forests, this isn’t the case in this region.

Robinson’s journals and other historical sources leave no doubt the frequent low-intensity fires set by First Nations kept treeless landscapes open and passable in Tasmania.

Palawa burning of treeless areas required skilful coordination with seasonal weather and intimate knowledge of terrain to avoid destroying organic soils and fire sensitive alpine and rainforest vegetation. After cultural burning ended, large and more damaging bushfires increased. These have had a catastrophic impact on fire-sensitive plants such as King Billy pine.