“…The assertion of Indigenous fire management as a landscape management practice that can mitigate catastrophic bushfire in Southeast Australia is based on the enormous reservoirs of traditional fire knowledge in Indigenous communities [21,70], abundant ethnohistorical information depicting radically different landscapes under Indigenous management [23,66,69] and sound, albeit scant, empirical data that demonstrate how Indigenous fire management both mitigates large climate-driven bushfires and increases ecosystem health [58][59][60][61][71][72][73]. Despite the abundance of Indigenous voices advocating for the return of Indigenous fire management to both heal Country and heal its people [74][75][76][77], there are many barriers to the effective return of Indigenous fire management in Southeast Australian forests [78]; among these are the following: (1) the power of the nature-culture binary in mainstream society that sees the perpetuation of the myth of "wilderness" and its influence over public perceptions, land management decisions and confirmation bias in science [79]; (2) uncertainty about the degree to which Indigenous people actually managed these high biomass and extremely flammable forests prior to the British Invasion; (3) heavy reliance that non-Indigenous land managers place on empirical data derived from scientific observation and experimentation for decision-making; and (4) policy and legal barriers that prevent Indigenous people from managing landscapes according to their customary laws. These examples are interconnected, creating strong biases against the potential for Indigenous knowledge and practice to contribute to, guide and lead management (2) areas unmaintained by settlers becoming shrub-rich, dense woodlands [13]; (b) simplified process diagram demonstrating the pre-British Invasion, when under Indigenous land management current open landscapes (i.e., agricultural/pastoral land) were already dominated by grassy/herbaceous vegetation, and since the British Invasion, areas outside European-style land use (e.g., unmanaged Eucalyptus forests) have become shrub-dense, which in turn, has directly fueled an increase in the frequency and intensity of fires with other contributing factors (e.g., climate change and population/urban growth).…”