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Winner of the Queensland Literary Awards 2012 - History Book
Book Description
Explodes the myth that pre-settlement Australia was an untamed wilderness revealing the complex, country-wide systems of land management used by Aboriginal people.
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.
About the Author
Bill Gammage is a historian and adjunct professor in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. He is best known as author of the ground-breaking The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War.
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Comments about The Biggest Estate on Earth : How Aborigines Made Australia:
These kinds of forms annoy me. I've filled in as much as I want to but it keeps sending me back saying it's incomplete. That's the second today! It feels like some kind of harassment when the forms do that. You feel willing to start with and annoyed at the end.
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Comments about The Biggest Estate on Earth : How Aborigines Made Australia:
Easy to follow. To learn more about this beautiful country is always good. Learning more about its vegetation... Australian plants constantly amuse me.
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Comments about The Biggest Estate on Earth : How Aborigines Made Australia:
Illuminating. Provides overwhelming evidence, from historical documents, that the Aborigines groomed the Australian landscape with fire up to 1788, adapting their methods to suit local soil and vegetation. Also provides a detailed rebuttal of the arguments to the contrary of those modern environmentalists who deny that aboriginal land management practices had any but a marginal role in the Australian landscape of 1788. In summary forms, tailored to student's ages and it should be considered as required reading in schools. I'm lending it to each of our teenage grandchildren, for whom it has turned out to be an eye-opener.
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Comments about The Biggest Estate on Earth : How Aborigines Made Australia:
I ordered this book to use for research into Aboriginal people and their belief that they are at one with the land.
Displaying reviews 1-4
"This bold book, with its lucid prose and vivid illustrations, will be discussed for years to come." --"Australian Book Review"
| Illustrations | p. x |
| Thanks | p. xiii |
| Sources | p. xv |
| Abbreviations | p. xvi |
| Definitions | p. xviii |
| Foreword | p. xxi |
| Australia in 1788 | |
| Introduction: The Australian estate | p. 1 |
| Curious landscapes | p. 5 |
| Canvas of a continent | p. 18 |
| Why was Aboriginal land management possible? | |
| The nature of Australia | p. 103 |
| Heaven on earth | p. 123 |
| Country | p. 139 |
| How was land managed? | |
| The closest ally | p. 157 |
| Associations | p. 187 |
| Templates | p. 211 |
| A capital tour | p. 239 |
| Farms without fences | p. 281 |
| Invasion | |
| Becoming Australian | p. 307 |
| Science, history and landscape | p. 325 |
| Current botanical names for plants named with capitals in the text | p. 343 |
| Notes | p. 347 |
| Bibliography | p. 379 |
| Index | p. 417 |
| Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved. |
ISBN: 9781743311325
ISBN-10: 174331132X
Audience:
Tertiary; University or College
Format:
Paperback
Language:
English
Number Of Pages: 384
Published: 1st June 2012
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Dimensions (cm): 24.5 x 17.4
x 3.0
Weight (kg): 1.062
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