When Wurundjeri people were last freely conducting cultural burns across their country in the 1850s, historical records show Gold Rush settlers interpreted it as a threat.
"The colonists thought we were actually at war with them and we were using fire as a tool to get them off the land," Wurundjeri elder Uncle Dave Wandin said.
"All Aboriginal people knew when a fire was happening … where to go to get out of the way, or to come in and actually assist with a burn.
"The settlers didn't understand that and so they called in the police and that was sort of part of the start of the movement — it was already happening — of getting us out of the way because they thought we were attacking them."
More than 160 years on, Uncle Dave has returned cultural burning to the iconic Coranderrk Station.
The property near Healesville, north-east of Melbourne, holds immense significance as the backdrop to one of the Victorian Aboriginal community's earliest battles for self-determination in the face of colonisation.
After the mission was closed in 1924, virtually all Aboriginal people were forced off the property, which only returned to Wurundjeri ownership in 1998.
On a crisp Tuesday morning, Uncle Dave showed a group of Indigenous land management students how a series of small, carefully controlled burns could promote the growth of native seeds and clear away introduced weeds.
Uncle Dave said the "cool" burning should not leave the soil underneath too hot, and each burn should only be started if the person running the burns can see where it will peter out.
Watching on, Wurundjeri woman Mandy Nicholson reflected on her ancestors, whose lives had been tightly controlled during Coranderrk's mission years.
"I feel quite emotional being here today because we're bringing back cultural practice to a place where culture wasn't allowed," she said.
"Language, ceremony and everything to do with being an Aboriginal person was not allowed."
Ms Nicholson plans to use her knowledge to help the new female division of the Wurundjeri people's Narrap Rangers care for country, including women's sites.
"If we clean country, maintain country, both on the physical and spiritual level, our murrup, or our spirit, is very healthy as well," she said.
A chance to restore the pre-colonial ecology
Scanning the property, Uncle Dave picked out the changes dealt to the landscape since European settlement.
"We've got lots of middle-aged trees, but we've got no young ones," he said.
He said that was in part because trees had struggled to have their seeds naturally generate, due to the introduction of pasture grasses for cattle.
"That doesn't allow the seed to actually get down in contact with the ground and actually generate," he said.
Plantation trees on the landscape have grown tall and straight, but don't branch out a great deal.
In a few years, he's hoping management of the land with fire will change things.
Trees will grow at their own pace, broadening out into the natural "big cauliflower shape" seen more commonly in older trees.
"The more widespread they are, that gets the dappled light, you get the right grasses underneath it," he said.
"Which allows all our ground-using animals, so our wombats, our wallabies, echidnas, goannas, lizards, snakes, all those kind of things, to actually thrive in a mixture of the biodiversity."
Conservation group Trust for Nature has been supporting the class of Indigenous students as they obtain their Certificate III in Conservation and Land Management.
The group's Ben Cullen, who has a 20-year background in ecology, said the conservation results he had seen with Indigenous burning spoke for themselves.
"We're seeing species and communities come back that we haven't seen before," he said.
He said part of the movement's success lay in the collaboration that invited traditional owners to set the agenda.
"What's become really clear is we need to be speaking to these cultural knowledge holders and learning from them," he said.
"They have so much for us to learn and in 2021 we really need to be enacting some of this knowledge that they pass on to us."
As birdsong filled the air and gentle spirals of white smoke rose from each small burn, Boon Wurrung and Yorta Yorta woman Renee Sweetman described the mood as "so peaceful".
She hopes to take the knowledge with her to undertake traditional burns on her country around the Bass Coast.
"Traditional burns should be mandatory, I believe, and also other cultural practices as well," she said.
"With everything going on with climate change at the moment it's so important that we are able to do that, that we are able to care for our land and our countries."
