The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made AustraliaExplodes the myth that pre-settlement Australia was an untamed wilderness revealing the complex, country-wide systems of land management used by Aboriginal people. Winner of the Prize for Australian History in the Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2012; The History Book Award in the Queensland Literary Awards 2012; the Victorian Prize for Literature 2012; and the ACT Book of the Year 2012 Across Australia, early Europeans commented again and again that the land looked like a park. With extensive grassy patches and pathways, open woodlands and abundant wildlife, it evoked a country estate in England. Bill Gammage has discovered this was because Aboriginal people managed the land in a far more systematic and scientific fashion than we have ever realised. For over a decade, Gammage has examined written and visual records of the Australian landscape. He has uncovered an extraordinarily complex system of land management using fire and the life cycles of native plants to ensure plentiful wildlife and plant foods throughout the year. We know Aboriginal people spent far less time and effort than Europeans in securing food and shelter, and now we know how they did it. With details of land-management strategies from around Australia, The Biggest Estate on Earth rewrites the history of this continent, with huge implications for us today. Once Aboriginal people were no longer able to tend their country, it became overgrown and vulnerable to the hugely damaging bushfires we now experience. And what we think of as virgin bush in a national park is nothing of the kind. |
Contents
Why was Aboriginal land management possible? | 101 |
How was land managed? | 155 |
Invasion | 305 |
Appendix 1 Science historyand landscape | 325 |
Appendix 2 Current botanical names for plants named with capitals in the text | 343 |
Notes | 347 |
Bibliography | 379 |
Index | 417 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
Aborigines acacias Adelaide Alice Springs Allan Cunningham animals Arnhem Land Aust Australia banks beautiful belts Brisbane brush burning burnt bush bushfires camp Canberra clear clumps coast Compare pictures covered creek Cunningham dense desert drought east edge eucalypts Europeans Eyre vol Fensham fire flats Gammage grass grassland green ground Hallam hills Hobart Hoddle HRNSW hunting inland kangaroos kilometres Lake land landscape Latz Leichhardt lignotubers Macquarie mallee Melbourne miles Mitchell 1839 vol Mountain Mulga Mulvaney natives newcomers open forest Oxley park park-like patches pine places plains plants Port Queensland rain rainforest rich ridges river scrub seed sheoak slopes soil South Australia South Wales species Spinifex SRNSW Sturt 1849 vol summer swamp Sydney Tasmania templates thick timber totem trees tribe Uluru valley vegetation Victoria wallaby wattle wooded wrote yams