yes they can...dogs under control are allowed in NSW State Forests. :)

there'd be plenty of water there now!

It's not just climate deniers. Different types of greens have different views. 'Bright greens' ('outcome oriented, evidence based but also culturally sensitive') are more likely to be supportive of cultural burning. "Deep greens' (sentimentally oriented, 'humans are a virus on the planet that are intrinsically destructive') are generally against it because it is being done by humans (doesn't matter if they are indigenous, they insist they are just as destructive in their use of fire and/or have lost touch with their traditional practices anyway). And there are various views along the spectrum in between People in northern Australia sometimes have a different view of fire than those in the south. In the north it's more "It's a natural phenomenon, aboriginal cultural fires lit early in the dry season help prevent major fires later in the season. Unless it threatens people or assets, just let nature take its course." Most of the fires there are in open tropical savannah, and the proportion of indigenous people is higher than in the south, so they have a proportionally greater voice. Nevertheless, newcomers to the Territory are often appalled by the extent of the fires. To them they appear to be 'rampant vandalism', often not even attended by Fire Services. They will only 'accept' fires that are started naturally by lightning, and even they should be put out as soon as possible. They deplore the constant smokey conditions and the sun turned red in a smoke darkened sky for weeks or months. And sure, big fires sometimes happen in northern Australia. For example, the Northern Territory 'Understanding bushfire: trends in deliberate vegetation fires in Australia', says: Intense fires commonly started by lightning strikes during particularly dry seasons have occurred throughout the Northern Territory’s modern history. The amounts of land burned in these events are extraordinary. The Council of Australian Governments report (Ellis, Kanowski & Whelan 2004) lists four major bushfire seasons in the territory since the late 1960s that collectively burned 168,000,000 ha. In 2002, approximately 38,000,000 ha burned in planned and unplanned fires. This represents 29 percent of the Northern Territory. In comparison, the January 2003 fires burned ‘only’ 226,000 ha in the Australian Capital Territory and 1,000,000 ha in Victoria. Those are very large fires indeed; the 2002 fire for example is many times larger than the recent 2019/20 fires mainly in the south, yet attracted much less attention. While individual cultural burns are usually fairly small, in total they create a large patchwork of burnt and unburnt areas that restrict more severe fire behaviour. That is not the approach taken in southern parts of Australia where hazard reduction is more about hotter burns to provide peripheral fuel reduction. In the case of fire services it's designed to protect the periphery of towns, villages and other assets. In the case of public land managers it's usually more about preventing fires from entering national parks or similar from outside. In the south, the weather patterns and vegetation are different, and people are even more likely to have a 'Western' view of fire - (It's not natural, it's evil and must be eliminated). Southern Australians generally would probably find cultural burning on the scale done in the north (sometimes up to a million hectares a year) to be utterly unacceptable. They barely tolerate the existing peripheral burning, let alone creating a patchwork of burnt and unburnt areas across vast wilderness. Yet without that, the sort of fires we've seen recently, particularly in climate change associated intensified Indian Ocean Dipole generated severe droughts, are probably inevitable. The 'Western' view of hazard reduction treats a prescribed burn pretty much like doing a 'development' (e.g. like a new housing estate) with all the red and green tape associated with such an activity. It doesn't allow as much for a more spontaneous use of fire on days and in places where conditions are just right in cultural burning. The cues for the Western system involve lots of intellectual effort by teams of experts covering a wide range of disciplines, whereas cultural burning is more based on using a deep indigenous understanding of how the bush works. At the base of it is often an even deeper difference in philosophy. Westerners want to 'manage' the environment as if humans aren't here, whereas Aboriginal people want to manage it in a way that they are an intrinsic part of it. It's a fundamental difference of view about humanity's place in nature. as different as 'green' and 'black'. For better or worse, the 'western experts' have a far greater stake and voice in the South and are likely to prevail politically.

Great videos John!