While it had been discontinued in many parts of Australia, it has been reintroduced in the 21st century by the teachings of custodians from areas where the practice is extant in continuous unbroken tradition such as the Noongar peoples' cold fire.
[6][7][8] Aboriginal burning has been proposed as the cause of a variety of environmental changes, including the extinction of the Australian megafauna, a diverse range of large animals which populated Pleistocene Australia.
[9] Kershaw also suggested that the arrival of Aboriginal people may have occurred more than 100,000 years ago, and that their burning caused the sequences of vegetation changes which he detects through the late Pleistocene.
He argues that with the rapid extinction of the megafauna, virtually all of which were herbivorous, a great deal of vegetation was left uneaten, increasing the standing crop of fuel.
An early result of the disruption of cool burning was the devastating Black Thursday bushfires in February 1851, which burnt 5,000,000 hectares (12,000,000 acres) of the colony of Victoria.
[19] There are a number of purposes, including to facilitate hunting, to change the composition of plant and animal species in an area,[20][5] weed control,[20][5] hazard reduction,[2][5] and increase of biodiversity.
While it has been discontinued in many parts of Australia, it has been reintroduced to some Aboriginal groups[20][2][4] by the teachings of custodians from areas where the practice is extant in continuous unbroken tradition,[21][20] such as the Noongar peoples' cold fire.
Traditional practitioners had already worked with some fire agencies to conduct burns on a small scale, with the uptake of workshops held by the Firesticks Alliance Indigenous Corporation increasing each year.
Former Emergency Management Commissioner for the state of Victoria, Craig Lapsley, called on the Federal Government to fund and implement a national Indigenous burning program.
Firesticks Alliance spokesperson Oliver Costello said that a cultural burn could help to prevent wildfires, rejuvenate local flora and protect native animal habitat.
"[24] On 14 May 2021, a scheduled cultural burn took place in the Adelaide park lands by representatives of the Kaurna people, in a highly symbolic moment after years of preparation to restore the ancient practice.