Bill Gammage
The Biggest Estate on Earth
Explodes the myth that pre-settlement Australia was an untamed wilderness revealing the complex, country-wide systems of land management used by Aboriginal people.
Allen & Unwin, 2011
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.
Winner 2012 Prize for Australian History in the Prime Minister's Literary Awards
Winner 2012 History Book Award in the Queensland Literary Awards
Winner 2012 Victorian Prize for Literature
Winner, ACT Book of the Year 2012
Winner, Canberra Critics’ Circle Award, 2012
Winner, Manning Clark House National Cultural Awards (Individual), 2011
Shortlisted, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards (Douglas Stewart Prize, 2013
Shortlisted, ABIA General Nonfiction Book of the Year 2012
Shortlisted, Australian Historical Association Prizes (Kay Daniels Award), 2012
About the Author
Bill Gammage AM FASSA is an Australian historian, Adjunct Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University (ANU). He is also the author of The Broken Years, and The Sky Travellers.
