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Bill Gammage

The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia Paperback – 1 June 2012

by Bill Gammage (Author)

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Explodes 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.

Print length

384 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Allen & Unwin
Publication date

1 June 2012
Dimensions

16.51 x 3.05 x 24.13 cm
ISBN-10

174331132X
ISBN-13

978-1743311325
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Product description

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.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Allen & Unwin; Main edition (1 June 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 174331132X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1743311325
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.51 x 3.05 x 24.13 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 2,265 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 2 in Agronomy (Books)
- 5 in Historical Geography
- 6 in Human Geography (Books)

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2 star		4%
1 star		2%

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Retrac

A different perspective on land management- worth a read

Reviewed in Australia on 13 January 2018

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Bill Gammage’s book is an interesting thesis on land management by Australian indigenous peoples. He has collated some great stories and evidence coupled with illustrations. The book uses robust arguments. Unfortunately the book only reports one side of his argument. Gammage makes logical leaps from a few examples to a generalisation. While the book is for lay readers, he does not report for example where old maps, descriptions, paintings or drawings do not agree with his theory. He also does not seem to reported any indigenous descriptions of the landscape or whether there were none. The title assumes one group managed the land as one - but this is not demonstrated. That being said, the book certainly challenges our thinking about indigenous land management - that is a good thing.

9 people found this helpful

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Stephen Collins

Utterly convincing. We must change the way we manage land in Australia.

Reviewed in Australia on 13 October 2020

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This astounding piece of historical research should be utterly convincing to artists, historians, scientists, politicians, agriculturalists and anyone else who wonders just how structured land management occurred in Australia under the stewardship of our Indigenous Australian cousins.

The wealth of contemporaneous evidence Gammage has assembled to illustrate and conclusively prove his argument is so great as to be inarguable; pre-1788 the people of this land undertook serious, structured, and holistic land management with the help of controlled fire as a way to endure healthy ecosystems, adequate food for gathering, and enough prey for hunting. To argue otherwise seems foolish on the face of the evidence presented.

This book should be part of the increasingly convincing argument that European styles of farming and Western industrial agriculture are unfit for use in Australia, and that holistic, regenerative, and integrated land management using fire and land templating is a more sustainable approach.

I can only hope that even now nearly 10 years after its first publication, Gammage's work is brought to the attention of more people with power to make decisions about how Australia manages its natural resources.

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Susan R.

Not a Good Book to Read on an Electronic Device

Reviewed in Australia on 3 February 2020

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While the book and story itself may be good I found it terribly hard to follow the story because it kept referring to other parts of the book. When reading on an EReader it's hard to go backwards and forwards to refer to photos and then try and find your way back to where you were up to. I gave up in the end. I suggest this book should only be sold in paper versions.

3 people found this helpful

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H. Lam

Problems with sentence structure/grammar in the electronic version.

Reviewed in Australia on 30 January 2018

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Don’t know whether it’s just the case with the electronic version of this book, but there are problems with the sentence structure/grammar throughout this book. This makes it a grind to read and interpret the meanings of each paragraph. This is a shame because I know the content is there.

3 people found this helpful

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geoff byrne

Attitude changing.

Reviewed in Australia on 9 July 2019

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What a truly enlightening book. Sometimes ponderous reading, but something that should be promoted to educate not only all Australians, but the rest of the world, on an ancient but continuous culture. Who needs the many definitions of sustainability when Australian aborigines have defined it over the past 60,000 years?

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Amazon Customer

Land managers extraordinaire

Reviewed in Australia on 19 June 2021

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A meticulous scholarly work that establishes without room for doubt that the Australia of 1788 was a very different environment to now & how it was created and managed by aboriginal people and destroyed by colonisers. Very interesting to read in the context of the current discussion of Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu.

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Rick

The magnitude of the great Anglo wrong startled me

Reviewed in Australia on 12 April 2020

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Gammage puts it best: "If terra nullus exists anywhere in our country, it was made by Europeans. ... If we are to survive ... we must begin to understand our country. If we succeed, one day we might become Australian."

This book will change the way you think.

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Geraldtonjjeeper

Aboriginal knowledge of Australia

Reviewed in Australia on 6 February 2020

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Best book on Indigenous fire stick management of the Australian landmass I have read! These are practices we should have adopted 200 years ago. Bill Gammage explains it all clearly concisely and your understanding of the Australian bush will be forever improved. Great book!

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Drabbich

An important book about what happens when we do not treat our world with respect

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 December 2019

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A hugely important book about the managed landscape white settlers found when they invaded Australia and their appalling treatment of the Aboriginal owners AND the land they took over. In one sentence: We take more and leave the future less. Isn't that the story of the climate change disaster unfolding today?
A book which takes up the story of Australia is Dark Emu, by Bruce Pascoe. Also highly recommended

DAVID WILLOUGHBY

A fascinating account of Australia's Aboringinal history

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 March 2020

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This book should be a lesson for every country that has destroyed the heritage and culture of the original native occupants by substituting their own religion and regulations.

One person found this helpful

Erik van Lennep

This could revolutionaize your thinking

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 May 2018

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Halfway through reading this and I love it. My understanding of Australian ecology, the millennia-deep knowledge and fire technologies of the Aboriginal nations and the intensity of their landscape management has been ignited (pun sort of intended). This isn't just a retrospective; it could be used as a foundation for rethinking the entire relationship that contemporary Australia has with herself, the land and all her peoples.

paul marks

Fascinating insight into aboriginal land practices.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 February 2018

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Anyone who wants to understand Australia should read this book.

1788 was a very different landscape from today. Highly recommended.

David Smart

HEAVY READING

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 September 2020

Verified Purchase

IT MAKES YOU REALISE WHY THE ORIGONAL INHABITANTS ARE STILL FIGHTING FOR THEIR RIGHTS

One person found this helpful

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