- Raised on Gunaikurnai Country, Aunty Charmaine Sellings learned traditional cultural burning practices and a deep responsibility to protect the land from her Elders and family
- After fires threatened her isolated community, she founded Australia’s first all-Indigenous, all-women CFA brigade dubbed the ‘Banana Women’
- Decades later, having fought major fires including Black Saturday and Black Summer, she continues to blend Indigenous knowledge with modern firefighting to protect both Country and culture
- Now, she’s recruiting the next generation of fireys
Here Aunty Charmaine Sellings, 58, Lake Tyers, Vic tells her own story in her own words.
Sitting on the back of the tractor, I pulled a water tank over the tinder-dry landscape of Lake Tyers on Gunaikurnai country, in eastern Victoria.
It was 1984 and, aged just 16, I was helping a local farmer moisten the ground to keep Country-decimating bushfires at bay.
It’s important work, I realised.
Growing up on the land, my grandmother Hilda, and mother, Lorraine, proud Kurnai people, were always sharing with me the stories of our ancestors who had walked this earth before us.
Caretakers of our land, we all played a part in its wellbeing and protection.
Before the heat of summer took hold, an Elder from Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation showed me how to do a ‘cultural burn’ to the overgrown scrub while the grass still had some green in it to prevent raging hot blazes.
The aim was to clear bushfire stoking fuel and the shrubs which act like a ladder, allowing flames to spread from the ground up to the forest canopy.
‘It’s important to do this when the wind is low,’ he explained, lighting a ‘fire-stick’ made of eucalyptus leaves and setting paperbark alight.
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The low intensity burn also gave native animals enough time to flee the flames, and encouraged dormant seeds – many of which provided bush tucker – to grow.
The practice has been passed down by Indigenous Australian generations and Elders for more than 60,000 years.
Years later in 2000, aged 32, and still living in Lake Tyers, I worked as a bus driver for the local school and medical transfer for the local hospital.
I took my role as caretaker of the land very seriously and shared the same ancient practices with my own children, Trisha, then 15, and Lorraine, 13.
In our self-governing Aboriginal community, we kept up the traditional blackfella ways.
‘The practice has been passed down by Indigenous Australian generations and Elders for more than 60,000 years.’
‘Just one crack of lightning on a stormy day could be disastrous,’ I warned the girls.
Then one day, a spate of deliberately lit fires threatened our tiny township.
Thankfully it was contained on the highway and didn’t spread to our sacred sites – just a short walk from my home 179 Indigenous artefacts have been found in the bush.
But one time, a blaze destroyed a home.
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Located on a peninsula and surrounded by dense bushland with only one road in and out, Lake Tyers is extremely high-risk.
Knowing the nearest fire crew was a 20-minute drive away in Toorloo Arm, I came up with an idea.
‘I’ve been training my whole life for this,’ I realised.
‘If I can make a team, will you train us?’ I asked the bosses at the Country Fire Authority (CFA) which was based 45 minutes away in Bairnsdale.
‘‘Just one crack of lightning on a stormy day could be disastrous,’ I warned the girls.’
Given the go-ahead, I called on my best friends Rhonda and Marjorie and together we started recruiting. Door knocking through the streets of our then 200 people community,
I recruited anyone willing to volunteer.
By the next afternoon I had a team of eight Indigenous women made up of brave grandmothers, mums, aunties and daughters who were ready to step up and join the inaugural brigade.
The next week the Toorloo fire crew started training our crew.
Within six months of daily training, we were completely up to speed on everything from fire and rescue to first aid, and the Lake Tyers Aboriginal Trust satellite of the Toorloo Brigade was born – Australia’s first and only all-Indigenous crew.
A highly skilled team of Gunaikurnai women, we were trained to protect 4000 acres of bushland, including sacred sites and more than 45 homes.
As we dressed mostly in bright yellow outfits, the men in town nicknamed us the Banana Women – and it stuck!
Juggling full-time jobs with being on call to fight fires, we also spent time patrolling the endless bush tracks that weave through the sacred bushland, talking to campers about fire safety.
Exasperated at times, we’d extinguish campfires smouldering long after some campers had gone home.
While we always prayed for a quiet summer, we were prepared for the worst.
In February 2009 I was called to the front line of the Black Saturday fires. And the team was called to battle the Black Summer bushfires in 2019 and 2020.
Now, after 26 years fighting fires, I’m a grandmother to three and still wearing my yellows.
Every now and then a fella joins up, but they never last long, which we Banana Women have a giggle about.
‘Us women are made of tougher stuff,’ I laugh.
But the brigade is much more than just protecting the community. It’s also about protecting our story.
So when we’re not fighting fires or attending emergencies, we’re travelling around Victoria educating people on preventing fires and teaching other firefighters how to recognise and protect ‘scatters’ – sacred clusters of artefacts.
‘As we dressed mostly in bright yellow outfits, the men in town nicknamed us the Banana Women – and it stuck!’
Towering eucalypts with visible wounds from where my ancestors stripped bark hundreds of years ago to make canoes, shields or infant carriers called ‘coolamon’, a special water hole where only women go, and a bush pantry of native food and medicinal plants, are all considered sacred land and need protection from bushfires.
We need to share all our knowledge – the white man’s ways and black man’s ways.
We have so much to learn from one another.
While I’m recruiting the next generation of fireys, I don’t plan on hanging up my bright yellow overalls any time soon.
You will have to bury me in my yellows!
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