Let the Land Speak: A History of Australia - How the Land Created Our Nation

by Jackie French

From highly respected, award-winning author Jackie French comes a fascinating interpretation of Australian history, focusing on how the land itself, rather than social forces, shaped the major events that led to modern Australia.

Our history is mostly written by those who live, work and research in cities, but it's the land itself which has shaped our history far more powerfully and significantly than we realise. Reinterpreting the history we think we all know - from Terra Incognita to Eureka, from Federation to Gallipoli and beyond, Jackie French shows us that to understand our history, we need to understand our land. Ranging widely from the impact of Indigenous women, who shaped their landscapes far more profoundly than firestick farming, to the role of the great drought of the 1880s and 1890s in bringing about Federation, Jackie French shows us how the land shapes our history, our present and our future.

Taking us behind history and the accepted version of events, she also shows us that there's so much we don't understand about our history because we simply don't understand the way life was lived at the time. Eye-opening, refreshing, completely fascinating and unforgettable, Let the Land Speak will transform the way we understand the role and influence of the land and provide insight into how it has shaped our nation.

Genres: Nonfiction, Australia, History

405 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2013

About the author

Jackie is an award-winning writer, wombat negotiator and the Australian Children’s Laureate for 2014-2015. She is regarded as one of Australia’s most popular children’s authors, and writes across all genres - from picture books, history, fantasy, ecology and sci-fi to her much loved historical fiction. In her capacity as Australian Children’s Laureate, ‘Share a Story’ will be the primary philosophy behind Jackie’s two-year term.

Reviews

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jackie French is the Australian Children's Laureate and a super-prolific writer of over 115 books: numerous children's and teen novels and series, picture books (my favourite is still Diary of a Wombat ), adult novels (general and historical) and non-fiction for adults and children. Her work is often concerned with the truth of Australian Aboriginal heritage and contemporary circumstances, with history that's been forgotten, wilfully misunderstood or deliberately shunned, and a deep and abiding love and respect for the land.

All of these things come together in this brilliant, superbly-written account of Australia's formation as a nation, our attitude and 'care' of the land, and our myth-making. Centred around the thesis that the land makes a nation, especially this one, French delves into several topics with a fine eye, a sense of humour and a critical approach to farming and mining practices.

I have always believed that Australians - both Indiginous (which would seem obvious) and 'white' Australians - are and have been shaped by the land. That all the stereotypes associated with Australians - from the positive (laconic and irreverent sense of humour; self-deprecating abhorrence of 'tall poppies'; community spirit and neighbourliness; bravery and courage; hard-working; laid-back and easy-going; innovative; friendly and welcoming) to the negative (racist etc.) - have their roots in our relationship with the land and what it takes to survive here, whether you adapt to it as the Aboriginals did, or whether you try to mould it into a semblance of an English pastoral landscape as the British did. This understanding started to form when I was studying for my undergrad many years ago; Let the Land Speak confirms and explains it.

There was so much to learn here. So many things I had never studied properly, or hadn't learned about in so long I could barely remember anything about them (Gallipoli, for example), or had never really known anything about at all (the Eureka Stockade). French brings it all to life and writes an unflinchingly realistic account that wouldn't have been welcomed even thirty years ago. Aboriginals, like Asians, weren't even human; the world had been provided to us by God to do with as we will (such arrogance still survives today, but few people will admit it); our victim-hood at Gallipoli is more important to focus on than the fact that we were the invaders; Joseph Banks was a great man; Aboriginals didn't farm or have any impact on the land - these are just a few of the common understandings that have been around for a long time. Let the Land Speak is the best kind of history book, because it allows you to see history being made - not the events themselves, but how they're disseminated, recorded, passed down, understood and misunderstood. French's book shows quite clearly not just how important and necessary the study of history is, but just how far from the truth kids' common understanding (that history is about memorising facts and dates) truly is. Also, you can almost see French's keen historical mind at work as she investigates, uncovers, links and connects details and context to form a likely account.

Mixed in with history and an examination of contemporary agriculture and mining practices are short snippets, stories and anecdotes from French's own experience, that truly bring the book to life. It is this contextualisation and authorial presence that really makes the book accessible, relateable, fascinating and almost intimate. The idea that historians have no bias or angle or perspective has never been true, but you rarely get to see it. Jackie French makes free with hers, not only using a few of her own experiences with Aboriginal people to flesh out her - and our - understanding of their culture and lifestyle, but also using the place of her home, the Araluen Valley in NSW, as an example of one of thousands of micro-climates and micro-landscapes in Australia. The detailing of how gold mining, farming, drought and wildlife interact and affect this one valley is an example of what can occur, but it also serves to illustrate just how varied and diverse the landscape is. One of French's persistent calls is for us to stop seeing the land as a "One size fits all" landscape. We continue to view Australia through a British lens, seeing a uniform landscape everywhere we look. Even here in Tasmania, an island state that has rainforest, alpine climes, hot and dry areas and misty, frosty regions, people still tend to think that what works in one area will work in another, that what is native to one place is, by default, native to all.

Perhaps the most alarming moment for me was in learning about 'firestick farming' - a misunderstood Indigenous technique that "has led to disastrous bushfire strategies" [p.5]. The 'myth that the land must burn' to protect us, to rejuvenate and replenish is a dangerous one because it is applied across the board, and by people who don't really understand it - or what they're burning. What I learned from Let the Land Speak is that, alongside our fire-dependent ecosystem (the one we've all heard about, and assume is a blanket case for al bushfire-vulnerable areas), we have 'fire-resistant' areas, the kinds of trees and plants that can actually halt a bushfire - but if aggressively burned, will be replaced by a fire-dependent ecosystem.

So called 'controlled' burning has created fire-dependent forests. Ironically, large parts of Australia are now far more prone to bushfire, all in the name of trying to reduce it. Once you have created a fire-dependent landscape, it does need burning to reduce the fuel load. But even in these areas the wrong kind of burning increases the risk of uncontrolled bushfire, it doesn't decrease it. In fire-dependent areas, burning in the wrong way and at the wrong time can leave dead wood that will make a bushfire burn hotter, as well as encourage grass growth that may dry like tinder in summer.

'The bush' is not homogenous. Even in a small area of, say, fifty hectares there may be several forest types, with different burning regimes needed to maintain them. Most fire agencies try to control burn on a regional basis, ticking off a certain number of hectares each year. In doing so they are making the bushfire danger far greater, creating larger areas that burn easily because the only plants that survive are the fire-dependent ones that burn hard, fast and often. [pp.56-7]

Since reading this, I have felt moments of panic when I hear people talking - sounding so reassuring and knowledgeable, too - about controlled burning and preventing bushfires. I want to jump up and grab them and shout, "Don't! Just stop a moment, let's think more carefully about this. Don't do it so you can look like you're doing something! How many people, Aboriginal or others, do you employ who understand the landscapes in each area?" Just this week, bushfires have wiped out large areas of South Australia, close to Adelaide, and Victoria. While most big bushfires are deliberately started by idiots, the way they get so out-of-control, so big, so hungry, so quickly could be a much larger problem, and one we need to look at closely before we make it even worse.

In fact, that is an on-going pattern of Australia since the arrival of the British. French does well in explaining their context and reasoning, without diminishing the repercussions. Let's face it: we've fucked up this land good and proper. Landcare wasn't established until the 80s and while it's done a lot, it's not enough. French sheds some light on why we persist, as a nation, a government, a culture, an economy, to focus on mining and agriculture - but mining especially - as a source of wealth even though it isn't one. It ties back to the centuries-old belief among European nations that there existed, somewhere in the vast unmapped Southern oceans, a vast land of gold. It was an entrenched belief, an unfounded certainty, that means we're still looking for some kind of untapped wealth. Gold mining here doesn't bring in much money, in reality, and uses mind-boggling amounts of water (yes, in a country that really doesn't have any to spare), yet we keep on opening new mines. Australia is a country founded on, in French's words, 'five hundred years of misunderstandings' - and many of these persist. We are still determined to farm as if this was England, just on a larger scale, and - this is one of my pet peeves - we build stupid houses poorly designed for the climate, then spend extra money heating and cooling them (interestingly, older houses - with thick walls, high ceilings, verandahs and, in the case of Queensland, raised up on stilts to allow for floodwaters to pass by as well as air to circulate and cool the house - are better built for this climate and landscape than all the houses I see around me on a daily basis).

French covers a great deal in Let the Land Speak, and while this is a history book like most history books in the sense that it is humans who are the focus much of the time, the land of this continent really is given a voice. More specifically, French ties everything back to the land, to the land that shaped us. From the interesting explanation of why the continent wasn't settled prior to the First Fleet, despite it having been 'discovered' and partially mapped so many times before Cook, to the big drought of the late 19th to early 20th century that brought the states together into a single country, at the end of the day the land itself is the dominant force here. The book covers the following topics:

Introduction: the goat droppings that changed history
1 The real First Fleet
2 The Ice Age that made three hundred nations
3 Cooperate or die
4 The women who made the land
5 Terra incognita: Dreams of gold, and a land without grass
6 The goat, the grocer's assistant and the mistake that led to a nation
7 The colony that didn't starve
8 The second, third and fourth Australians
9 The lost tigers and the sheep that ate Australia
10 How we almost won Eureka
11 The history of our nation in a pumpkin scone
12 How a drought made us one nation
13 Truth or propaganda? The bronzed Anzacs of Gallipoli and Kokoda
14 A land of flooding rain
15 A short history of great big farming misunderstandings
16 This generous land: Terrapaths, moral omnivores and how to survive the next millennia
17 The next hundred years: Twenty-four predictions

The first four chapters cover Indigenous Australian habitation, from the arrival of the first humans to how the women shaped the land - all of it fascinating. As much as I love this land right down to the marrow of my bones, and feel so incredibly at home here, I still often feel like an invader, trampling and contributing to the destruction or ill-use of an ancient and fragile land of which I understand too little, while the 'original' inhabitants can only watch, made voiceless and toothless. I am empathetic enough to feel what it must be like for me as a privileged white to have some other, alien being muscle in, evict me, and clumsily try to apply alien farming and food-gathering techniques to a land they don't understand. Between the inability to communicate and the ingrained belief that the natives are subhuman, or not human at all, why would the invaders even think to ask them about the land, or seek their help and advice? It's a common theme throughout modern Australian history and storytelling, this blind arrogance and fear that in seeking Aboriginal assistance, you acknowledge your trespasser status, your ignorance, your wrong-doing. It is this instinctual, ingrained but silenced, denied and terrified knowledge that have done wrong and continue to do wrong that is behind our incredible racism towards the Aboriginals. We all have it, this niggle, this tiny spike right in the cockles of our hearts, that we are born with, that we are in the wrong, that we are invaders, that we have harmed the land - it unites us as much as anything the land can throw at us, but as long as it stays there rather than be drawn out like a splinter from a pus-filled abscess, it will continue to fester, we will continue along the path we have trodden down to bare dust, and nothing will change.

I have to confess, I skimmed through the final chapter of this book. I wouldn't normally do such a thing, but I found French's 24 predictions to be so dispiriting, scary, pessimistic and depressing that I just couldn't read them all. The sad truth is, this book isn't and won't be required or even popular reading, it will be shunned and dismissed by conservatives, and merely stoke the ire of "true blue Aussies" who don't like their personal beliefs in our myths to be confronted. And it's a damn shame. This is a book I must and will read again, and again. It not only taught me a lot, opened my eyes to new understandings and truths, but it also reinvigorated my love for this land and its peoples - all of us, all us 'boat people'. I would like nothing more than if this book became seminal - if it influenced future policy or changed attitudes etc. But I know Australians. We have such a great life here, we don't like change, we want to achieve a level of comfort and then stay there. Like most people in the world, we hang on to our prior understandings of our world, and the older we get, the more dogmatic and bigoted we become. At the end of the book, I realised anew just how little I know and understand about my land, my country and continent. I can't name the bird making that song, apart from the obvious few (kookaburra, magpie, plover etc.). I'm no good at identifying trees or plants. I don't know enough about the different climates and ecosystems. I only recently learned that quolls ate meat! Shameful. I've got a lot to learn, and this book was a fantastic place to start.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. While it is as much storytelling as it is history, Jackie's perspective as a woman and a farmer provided me with new perspectives on well known events. I felt the thesis was stretched a little thin in the middle of the book, but the start and finish kept me well engaged. I am in awe of Jackie's knowledge of her local area and what she's learnt through observing it. This book hopefully will help me observe and understand more too.

[PaulDalton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book. I liked reading Jackie French's reflections based on her observation, over the past 40 years, of changes in the ecosystem of the Araluen valley, south-east of Canberra. The first 3/4 of the book, illustrating ways in which the climate and landscape have influenced human and social development in Australia over the past 60,000 years, were the most interesting.

[Delryne Sharrett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exceptionally well researched and thoughtful book. I enjoyed reading this and have recommended it to several others. I particularly enjoyed the first 3/4 of the book.

[Andrew Carr · Rating 2 out of 5]

An idiosyncratic and potted history of Australia, with an emphasis on environmental history. I initially had high hopes for this book, as I am keen to explore more how Australia's geography and landscape shaped our societies from the indigenous population to today. The book begins with that theme, but it somewhat disappears as the chapters move on.

There is some interesting material on how indigenous women used to farm the land, planting specific plants at key locations, read the landscape and find food. There are also well told popular accounts of events such as Cook's journey up the east coast and Eureka. But it's never quite clear why some events are chosen, and though there remains a connection to environmental issues, geography somewhat recedes as a theme.

Instead, we get lots of personal anecdotes and asides about the valley the author lives in, and somewhat random selection of events and periods. This might be an ideal book if you had an environmentally conscious young teenager who wanted a basic outline of key moments in Australian history.

This can be a charming book, but it's also of a populist sort. The first nation people are infinitely wise and kind. The colonial's were hard workers escaping British tyranny, the ANZAC's rugged soldiers whose bush training made them among the world's best. There's nothing wrong with positive histories, indeed too many writers confuse criticism with insight. But page after page it begins to defy credibility. When French cites her mum's concern about a Japanese invasion as evidence the threat was real, you just have to smile and move on.

A good premises only somewhat fulfilled.

[Minh Ngoc Pham · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciate history writers that show how they collected evidence and arrived at their version of the story. But I first fell in love with the book in the beginning chapters - the narrative about the arrival and survival of the First Nations people was very moving.
There is a personal, local element that is probably not to everyone's taste when it comes to history books, but I thoroughly enjoyed. It is written from the perspective of a farmer, a woman, a person rooted in the land and the communities she lives.
The part that I think could be better is the last chapters. I wish it wasn't like an advice checklist for current/ future generations (even though I saved some!). I wish there were more accounts of practices to recover the land, or how knowledge from First Nations people could be or has been transferred to next generation or applied into practices. But maybe that is or will be another book.

[Lynne Cairns · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a tour-de-force. By well-known novelist Jackie French, it brings the story of Australia's past, from ancient times to the present, to readers who normally wouldn't read history. The idea that the peculiarities of our land and its weather have shaped our society is not really new, but has never been applied so thoroughly and succinctly to the whole of our history. To thorough research, wide reading and consultation, French brings a mind open to new ideas. Some themes might be thought controversial. For instance, her views of pre-colonial indigenous agriculture echo those put forward in Bruce Pascoe's 'Dark Emu', so I'm surprised that this book didn't cause the same fuss. Because French is thought of as a novelist and in particular a children's author, 'Let the Land Speak' perhaps slipped under the radar of the combatants in the History Wars. Definitely a good read.

[Andrew Macneil · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is no conventional history of Australia, but it's much more interesting and more important than any normal history. It is a heartbreaking account of over two centuries of misunderstanding and mistreatment of the land and its original people.

But Jackie French is not without hope, and if enough of us read her book and learn to understand the limitations and the potential of the land, perhaps we can live sustainably in it instead of destroying it. Maybe in another two hundred years we might approach the connection that the first inhabitants developed with their country.

[Tracey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was brilliant. So incredibly interesting. Admittedly, I’ve enjoyed most of Jackie French’s books, but I really wasn’t expecting to like this book as much as I did. I believe that all Australian high school children should have to read this book. In fact, I read it aloud to my 18 year old. He found it fascinating as well.

[Heidi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was recommended to me by my best friend, who knows my reading tastes perfectly! I LOVED this book. I believe it should be required reading for the senior grades in ALL high schools in this country. Do yourself a favour and read this book!!

[Ian Bates · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was disappointed. Too many inaccuracies of historical fact and too many assumptions. The book might serve as an introduction for young adult readers but as a history is is light.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book with many enlightening glimpses of Australian history that I had previously been unaware of.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Australia's land and history. It is the best book I've read this year and one of the best non-fiction books I have read in my life. I have read my fair share of Australian history books and I can't think of one I enjoyed (and was informed by) more.

It tells the story of how the land shaped Australia's history, how the indigenous Australians lived with the land and how the Europeans often failed (and still fail) to understand it. There is a strong environmental message running through this book - which correlates with the wonder and delight that Jackie French obviously has for this land, particularly her own land at Araluen. It is hard to read this book without feeling some of that wonder and delight yourself - and a desire to understand it and protect this amazing and diverse land we live in.

Perhaps these two sentences from the book sum it up best: "Our nation was created and shaped by the land. It is time we paid more attention to its voice."

[Katharine (Ventureadlaxre) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well it took me almost a year, but I finally finished reading this. Probably the best account of Australian history I've come across, and has such a wealth of knowledge within. Highly recommended.

[Loretta Kaval · Rating 5 out of 5]

overall loved it, very thought provoking, and challenging to.many pre conceived ideas