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.
That's the core of a book by historian, Professor Bill Gammage, who examined written and visual records of the Australian landscape for more than a decade.
The Biggest Estate on Earth explodes the myth that before the British invasion Australia was an untamed wilderness, and reveals the complex, country-wide systems of land management used by Aboriginal people.
Gammage dicusses his findings in a video recorded at The Australian National University in December 2011. It runs for about a quarter of an hour. Click for it here.
I've heard the clip, used parts of it in my radio programme and read some of the book. It was utterly fascinating, enlightening - and enraging about how we have raped the land. We are paying for it now.
Sometimes I think it's the Aborigines' Old Ones taking the land back.
From the publisher's blurb:
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.
Read the first chapter by clicking here.
From reviews:
This is a beautiful and profound piece of writing, one that has importance for us all. We live in the most fire-prone environment on Earth. It was built to burn. Aboriginal people thrived in this environment for thousands of years, their chief defences being mobility, continual burning and an intricate understanding of the bush. – The Sydney Morning Herald.
A remarkable book that conveys a sense of the Aboriginal methods of land management in a comprehensive and accessible manner. This book dispels the sometimes enduring 18th & 19th century myths of Aboriginal backwardness. Instead we learn of a people who thought globally and acted locally, who did not merely survive but who successfully created a life of abundance through intimate knowledge of their land and cooperation with neighbors. Click here.
Should be compulsory reading for anyone over the age of 10 interested in land management - i.e. how to save the planet and ensure that our kids survive to have kids of their own and theirs also. Click here.
Gammage is determined to open our eyes to the fact that in 1788 there was no wilderness, but a landscape that reflected a sophisticated, successful and sensitive farming regime integrated across the Australian landmass. Fire was not an indiscriminate tool of fuel reduction or grass promotion, but carefully employed to ensure certain plants and animals flourished, to facilitate access and rotation, and to ensure resources were abundant, convenient and predictable. - The Monthly.
Gammage's book is a stark challenge to environmental groups that have clung to the idea of 1788 Australia as a "pristine wilderness untouched by man", when Gammage's book showed comprehensively that it was a managed landscape. Aborigines would never have allowed national park "wilderness" areas to grow into such profusion and would have regarded it as "dirty bush", and intensely threatening. In Darwin, Joe Morrison, chief executive of the North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance, said it was hoped savanna burning would become an income earner for Aboriginal people through the Carbon Farming Methodology. He said The Biggest Estate on Earth was not only welcome recognition of how Aborigines "made Australia", but a warning for people living in volatile fire-prone areas. – From a news story in The Australian.
Painters have been accused of replicating England but the oral record - remarkably consistent over wide-ranging territory - supports the artists' vision and this book's thesis: that the indigenous people had long controlled the land until much of it was as man-made as the English countryside. It is compared time and again with an English gentleman's park. Gammage maintains ''hot'' and ''cool'' fires were deployed with virtually scientific precision to kill certain vegetation while allowing others a controlled presence. He offers impressive information on the responses of different plants to fires of varying intensity, arguing that the Aborigines must have known this. What other explanation, Gammage asks, could there be for woods that halt abruptly on grassland or are surrounded by grass like islands in the sea (or picturesque groves), while the soil is the same beneath wood and meadow? By controlling the extent of forest, the Aborigines confined certain animals that could then be driven by fire towards the spears of hunters. – The Sydney Morning Herald.
What is new in Gammage’s work is the astonishing volume and breadth (and the clear and systematic presentation) of the supporting evidence. This is drawn from a wide spectrum of sources (the bibliography alone lists 1500 books), and includes detailed discussion of the Australian biota, a comprehensive review of the writings of the first European explorers and early settlers, analysis of the paintings and sketches of the first artists, and a myriad of examples taken from diaries, journals, maps, newspapers, and photographs. Gammage has a good knowledge of the Australian bush, much of it based on personal observation, and this allows him to illustrate the variety of processes whereby the Australian biota survive or recover from fire.
The book has some weaknesses. I think that he under-rates the importance of soil type and fertility in determining vegetation type and structure. It is going too far to suggest that Australia’s pre-1788 vegetation was shaped solely by fire; clearly there were (and are) interactions between fire and site factors which lead to variations in the biota. For example, Gammage wants to attribute patterns in the jarrah forest to Aboriginal burning but which are clearly the result of drought deaths of forest on shallow soils over massive granite. Also he could have made more of the fascinating linkages between fire, nutrition and health in Australian forests.
The Biggest Estate on Earth is a monumental work, with detail piled upon detail, all meticulously and methodically assembled..... indeed by the time I was 80% through it, the word “overkill” almost came to my mind. But then I remembered that this work was not aimed at people like me, but at a wider public, including those who continue to deny Aboriginal fire use, or who cannot accept that the Australian biota is able easily to survive in an environment in which fire occurs frequently; indeed it deteriorates in its absence. Gammage himself recognises that some of the book is repetitive, but he knows he has to almost go overboard in anticipation of the response of his critics. In an appendix Gammage actually takes these people on and is devastating in his commentary on their views.
However, I am glad that I persisted and read to the end, because Gammage’s final chapter is quite remarkable. This is almost a stand-alone essay, entitled Becoming Australian and in it he pays tribute to the Aboriginal achievement in their management of the Australian landscape and biota, and of what has been lost since 1788. He does not need to dwell on the costs that have resulted from the abandonment of the Aboriginal approach. These continue to mount as we speak, as modern Australians persist in trying to overlay a European concept of land management onto the Australian environment...., or just as futile, to apply an American approach to suppressing fires in heavy fuels. And yet while he recognises that there can never be a return to the pre-1788 situation, his cry is that we must redouble our efforts to understand it and learn from it..... not just for community protection but to sustain our forests, woodlands, tropical savannas, rangelands, deserts and rainforests. The book concludes with the lines: “We have a continent to learn. If we are to survive, let alone feel at home, we must begin to understand our country. If we succeed, we might one day become Australian’. With this statement, Gammage presents a challenge which goes to the very heart of land management in this country. - Roger Underwood. Scroll down to an article headed Review of two important books, located in the left hand column.
