The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia

by Bill Gammage

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Australia, Indigenous, Anthropology, Science, Historical

466 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 2011

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

When my family first arrived in Australia I was five and it was August, that is, the end of winter, and it was raining and bitterly cold. All of which my parents hadn’t quite prepared us for, because, well, we were going to Australia, the land of sunshine… the problem was that we aren’t really going to ‘Australia’ so much as to Melbourne…

All the same, throughout my childhood summers were something to look forward to. Sure, there were the occasional bushfires, but as someone said recently, those had names like Ash Wednesday, or Black Friday. That is, they were associated with a single day – even if they might have lasted for a bit longer than that. This summer’s fires have been referred to by our Prime Minister as Black Summer – and for him, in particular, this really has been a black summer – I’ve never seen a politician fall from grace quite so comprehensibly as he has since Christmas. But even in calling it the Black Summer he is wrong. The fires started in August and are still burning now in March – from the end of Winter to the start of Autumn.

We have a government that is controlled by a small group of climate change deniers. These politicians are best described as fanatics. They have repeatedly said that they will bring their own government down if there is even the slightest movement towards addressing the chief causes of the fires, that is, climate change. ‘The elephant in the room’ here is that while the government tries to sound like it is doing something to protect Australians, it is also allowing new coal mines to dug that will contribute to us having more summers like the one we have just lived through. The whole situation is tragic and beyond satire at the same time.

To show that they are doing something, or to show that there is nothing that can actually be done, our government and the Murdoch press have pushed mostly lies. For instance, that the fires have been lit by crazy arsonists – something utterly disproven by the facts – or that the Greens (who are in power in none of the states, territories or federally) have somehow forced governments to not do the levels of controlled burning that would have stopped these fires before they started. Or that we have always had bushfires – to which they invariably quote Dorothea Mackellar’s ‘My Country’. Honestly, if you are going quote 19th century Australian poets, maybe you could try Lawson, instead.

I needed to give you that background, because this book is about how Aboriginal people’s in Australia used fire to create and sustain the Australian landscape. A large part of the point of this book is to encourage Australia to go back to using Indigenous Australia’s land management techniques. But, this could easily sound like the author is promoting the same kinds of solutions that the Murdoch press has been. And that really isn’t what is happening here at all.

When white people arrived in Australia in 1788 one of the things they often noticed was that the land appeared like a series of extensive parks – that is, lots of grass, with very few trees studded around to make the place look pretty. Some noted that the local Aboriginals where constantly burning the land. If you were to do this today, it could very easily get out of control. However, those burning off parts of the land in 1788 were remarkably skilled at knowing how and when to start fires – few of these fires, it seems, ever continued to burn over-night. Knowing when and how to burn off country meant that various plants could be encouraged while others were killed off. It also meant insects could be controlled – nothing controls an outbreak of insect pests quite like burning them and their eggs to death. The other benefit was that burning the tough old grasses meant that new shoots would sprout almost immediately – and these new shoots were particularly favoured by the kangaroo and other animals hunted as game. That is, by burning a small part of land, you would also direct game to where it would be relatively easy to hunt them.

All of this required a remarkably detailed understanding of the botany of local plants, as well as methods to control both the ferocity and heat of the fires you might light. That is, the Indigenous peoples could light fires that would be relatively cool and that would remove undergrowth and old grasses, but leave trees intact, or they might light a much more intense fire that would kill off a patch of trees and create a clearing. Aboriginal customs and traditions are not merely tied to the land, but are much more tied to the notion that the land needs people to manage and it. And that management was primarily done by fire.

And this is where the story becomes interesting. How can we really know all this? We could ask Indigenous Australians – but white people have never been particularly good at doing that.

A favourite joke… A white fella is lost in the desert and sees an Aboriginal sitting under a tree. He goes up to him and says, ‘hey, Jacki-Jacki – how do I get to Alice from here?’ The Aboriginal asks, ‘How did you know my name was Jacki-Jacki?’ The white fella says, ‘I don’t know, I guessed’. The Aboriginal replies, ‘then if you’re so bloody good at guessing, you can guess where Alice is’.

Often explorers preferred to die that ask locals who had lived on the land for 60,000 years where they might get something to eat. You know, we white people have our pride… However, the author hasn’t relied on what might be considered the ‘dubious stories’ of Indigenous Australians, but rather has done a careful study of the diaries and paintings of early settlers and explorers. And when I say a careful study – look, this book has been researched to within an inch of its life. A large part of the start of this book involves the author standing where various paintings had been painted. Obviously, some features don’t change – hills, rocky outcrops, that sort of thing. But some things do change – and those changes are what the author discusses in most depth. Now, one of the things that has changed is the number of trees. And this was something I wasn’t expecting. Australia now has many, many more trees today than it did in 1788. And this is because the Indigenous Australians who once were able to manage the land by the judicial application of fire were mostly killed off. They were often killed off because they were using fire... This meant that the seeds of trees that had been kept at bay by constant controlled burning by Indigenous Australians were then allowed to flourish and that meant that where there had been planes and fields and grasses, soon there were just trees, that is, essentially just forests.

This massively increased the fuel load on the land – meaning that when fires did start they burnt out of control – and therefore these fires didn’t achieve what needed to be done by planned and controlled burning so as to be effective.

Another problem was the introduction of sheep and cattle, animals with hard hooves that compacted the soil and changed it to make it less friable – which it had previously been since it was so often mixed with the ash from fires. This then went on to impact the water cycle too – since the hard, compacted soil encouraged rain to rush off the land in sheets, rather than remain caught in the friable soil. Which in turn impacted the water table which also increased the salinity of the soil.

You know, it is hard to imagine a greater disaster than the coming of white people to Australia. We now have the fastest rate of extinction of plants and animals of any country on earth. Really, a more self-reflective people would be deeply ashamed, but the majority of us Australians think we ‘saved’ this country from the uncivilised savages who once lived here and lived off the land. Our delusion is about as sad a story as it is possible to tell.

It isn’t totally clear to me how we could really go back to Aboriginal land management techniques. One the things that is clear from the title of this book is that those techniques were only really possible because the entire country was managed as if it was one, single estate. That is, it was all maintained in much the same way whether in Broome or in Sydney, if also taking into consideration the local context for variations. Today the controlled burning that might go some way to removing the dangers of our most recent summer, would have to worry about fences and property boundaries and of stock on the fields. The new ‘ownership’ rights of the land would make using the old methods deeply problematic, to say the least.

This is a strikingly interesting book. I don’t really know very much about trees – one of the things I like to say to people is that I only know two types of trees: gums and the other trees that aren’t gums. But this book made me wish I knew much more about Australia’s native flora – in fact, it made me which that I had this guy beside me explaining the life cycle of plants and how fire might be used to maintain the landscape, pointing out trees and other plants along the way. At the end of the book, the author points out it is so long because his views are still quite controversial and so he has needed to present all of the evidence to support his claims – but, look, I can see people might find this book a bit over long, it is seriously worth the effort.

[Chris Fellows · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very important book. It has forever changed how I see my country. I am in awe at what was once here. Gammage persuasively argues the case for the existence of a sustained, intelligent and incredibly complex regime of fire use that created and maintained a distinctive Australian landscape for thousands of years. The scope of this achievement is staggering. The intelligently-designed mosaic we once had prevented the large and destructive fires we now experience, encouraged biodiversity, and made a park-like landscape nothing like the thick uncontrolled growth we see in reserves today.

Australia's dense forests are not the remnant of two hundred years of energetic clearing, they are the product of one hundred years of energetic growth.

Gammage uses the 'extreme numbers of repetitive examples' style of argument, which can be wearying. His section on the pre-invasion landscapes of the capital cities is evidently designed to drag readers in by describing places they know, which is sensible, but I only know Sydney well enough to enjoy the bit about it; I would have loved to read more about the landscapes I know better in their current form, near Townsville (was there really rain forest on Mt. Cutheringa?) and the New England (I was amazed reading stories of early settlement how easily they seemed to go back and forth to the coast; but if the ridge tops were open woodland it explains a lot).

Gammage is from the humanities, and so relies entirely on written and oral history, and this is the one big gap in the book. There is sure to be a lot of physical evidence that can target when this mosaic landscape came into being, and how - I am thinking of fossil pollen, which if Gammage's thesis is correct should clearly mark a transition from a less diverse to a more diverse flora at some point, regardless of climatic changes. I would love to know the history of intelligent land management with fire - a development as momentous as the Industrial Revolution - on this continent. Gammage never mentions pollen, and he never (wisely) wades into the politicised question of the extinction of the megafauna. But it is all tied together, as sure as eggs are eggs... the unwritten history of humanity on our continent that one day will be figured out.

Take home message for people who are not Australian and so will not be viscerally moved by this book: Indigenous people are not interesting bits of local colour in the foreground of a 'natural' landscape; they adapt country to their own needs, just like modern people, only in a different way. The line between 'natural' and 'artificial' is one that only exists in the heads of sedentary peoples.

[Ben · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is popular enough it deserves a review not just of its content but also of its impact. One very serious and welcome impact is that it's put Indigenous land management in the spotlight in a way that no previous publication did (although Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu is now doing that job, and probably more effectively).

However, there are significant weaknesses in the book that should cause readers to treat the author's conclusions with caution. Indigenous voices are few and far between, for a start, which seems incongruous given their undoubted ability to contribute to their own history. My colleague with whom I reviewed it for Green Left Weekly found the discussion of Indigenous culture to be reflective of outdated, early 20th century concepts of white anthropologists, such as the notion of a uniform "Dreaming" that supposedly all Indigenous people followed - just as they all supposedly followed a uniform use of fire as their principal tool of land management.

The appendix consists of a sustained polemic against the views of scientific ecologists, who are painted as denying that Indigenous people systematically used fire to manage the land. I have a degree in botany and I find that is far from what most ecologists think, but at the same time, would not assume that Indigenous people used to burn everything, all the time (at least every 5 years in most country, Gammage suggests). What evidence there is, including from Indigenous sources, suggests a much more nuanced use of fire, quite variable from one environment to the next.

Along with other well known authors like Eric Rolls, Gammage contends that the absence of traditional burning has led to the disappearance of the park-like woodlands that early colonists wrote about, as the thickening of vegetation has led to large areas being overtaken by thick scrubby regrowth. Undoubtedly this is true in some areas, but it's not true in others, as some ecologists have pointed out (unfortunately in articles less well publicised than Gammage and Rolls).

I would love to see a spatially referenced study of this, but I suspect the original observations of open grassy woodlands were heavily biased by the fact that early explorers were typically searching for such country, and would have preferred travelling through it compared to thick scrub, creating a serious confirmation bias in the use of their observations. Likewise, mourning the loss of these environments to regrowth scrub ignores that most grassy woodlands and open grasslands have been lost, not to scrub, but to clearing and ploughing for agriculture.

I find that Gammage's account is inconsistent. There are areas where he gives a fairly nuanced and qualified description of the Indigenous uses of fire, and then there's the point where he says most areas were burned at least once every 5 years. Unfortunately, a reader not following the nuance closely enough might take a fairly crude prescription to just light more fires as the message of the book.

In fact, lighting more fires is exactly what the white colonists did. If you doubt it, have a read of Paul Collins' Burn, a very readable history of Australia's great bushfire disasters. Colonial farmers, well into the 20th century, burned more than Indigenous people did - attested to by an increase in charcoal in the soil profile post colonisation. Farmers burned more often, larger areas, hotter fires, more indiscriminately, with more disasters.

There's a lot more to be said about the history and future of fire in Australia than this review, or the book itself, will tell you. The book is brilliant in sections, yet misleading and confusing in others. There's no denying it's already massively influential, but whether it's helpful overall is another question.

[K. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trigger warnings: fire. That's probably it, other than some racism and outdated language courtesy of quotes from historic sources.

I've been meaning to read this book since I first heard about it when it came out. It was EVERYWHERE when it was first published, and there was much talk of how it was going to revolutionise Australian history.

Sadly, that doesn't seem to have happened, but this *is* an astonishing book that does completely turn Australian history on its head. Gammage essentially argues that Australia's Indigenous population were farming the country prior to European arrival in 1788, but because the method of farming looked so different to the "traditional" (i.e. white) approach, the British just went "Pff, look at these poor fools. THE LAND IS UNOCCUPIED! LET'S TAKE IT ALL" (which, fuck y'all). And then the entire country went to shit because turns out Australia *needs* to be burnt regularly in order to maintain balance within the ecosystem.

This reads far more like a land management book than a history book, to be honest. It's full of quotes from early European colonists (possibly a little TOO full, frankly), but there was far more in it about the various species of trees and grasses than I anticipated.

This was fascinating, not only from an historic perspective, but because it discusses Aboriginal reactions to Australia's increasingly horrific bushfires and how damaging they are to the land.

So yeah. Not entirely what I expected, but definitely an engaging and compelling read.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very very interesting book. It has taken me a while to read as it really isn’t the sort of book you need to read sequentially. You can dip into it at different places.

It is prompting me to think about how ill-equipped terms such as nomad and hunter-gatherer are to describe First Nations society here in Australia. Even the term wilderness may be a white euro-centric term, considering how curated this continent appears to have been by First Nations peoples.

We think nomad and we think wanderer; we think hunter-gathered and we think of people ‘stumbling’ upon resources. In our narrow conception it never occurred to us to consider that First Nations peoples knew exactly where they were going, why they were going there and when they should be going there. Or even that they might have helped to ensure the resources they were hunting and gathering were going to be there when they got there.

We are stuck in our four walls and think a settled and sedentary lifestyle makes us advanced. Maybe First Nations peoples are onto something, they know that the way to ensure a place can be all the things that they need is to think outside of the four walls that box us in, be adaptable and be mobile.

These sorts of books are revealing to me how little I understand about this country.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Tim O'Neill · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that will mean you never look at the Australian landscape the same way again. Most Aussies have some vague idea that the Aborigines used fire to manage the land. I know I'd read enough references to burning by "the natives" in early settler and explorer accounts and was aware that this had something to do with hunting. Gammage's book makes it clear exactly how careful, well-calibrated and effective this use of fire on the landscape actually was.

Starting with comparisons of early depictions and descriptions of various parts of the Australian landscape with the same areas today, he makes it very clear how much the land has changed since white settlement. Regions which are thickly scrubbed bushland today were painted or described as "open parkland" or "like a gentleman's estate" by the first white settlers. By a slow accumulation of careful evidence, Gammage makes it clear that this now largely vanished "parkland" was created and carefully maintained by the Aborigines via a program of controlled and deliberate burning. By the end of the book the pre-1788 landscape he lays out is one of carefully created "templates", which encouraged game via the creation of grasslands and forest refuges as well as channelling them into traps and killing zones for hunters. The same systems worked for the cultivation of yams, root foods and swampland forage.

Probably the best part of the book is the chapter "Heaven on Earth" which explains how this system of land management and farming of animals and plants fitted with indigenous cosmology, especially the idea of an eternal and ever-existent "dreaming" and the process of on-going, ever-existent creation. The contrast between this and white, Western, European ideas of linear time, technological advancement and progress is probably made more clearly in this book than any other I've come across.

Gammage does not have a narrative style and the book could be too dense in approach and too diffuse in its argument for many casual readers. Instead, it works via a slow accumulation of layers of evidence and implied argument, rather than emphatic didactic arguments and this may not be to everyone's taste. The result, if you stick with it, is still highly effective and I found even points I was sceptical about were eventually convincing thanks to his slow, careful layering of information.

Gammage draws from a huge range of evidence, accumulated over many years, in a book that was ten years in the writing with a bibliography that runs to thousands of works. His examples of landscapes shaped by 40,000 years of this highly successful and sustainable method of working the land are drawn from all over the country, and Australian readers will be able to find places they know mentioned that they can consider and examine themselves. I know the next time I visit some of the places he analyses in northern Tasmanian I will be looking at the land with a new understanding and a greater appreciation of the now vanished indigenous people who once lived there.

This is not an easy read, but it's also one of the most important and genuinely significant books on Australian history of the last ten years or more and will remain a landmark work of research for many decades to come.

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dense, meticulously researched opus which posits a comprehensive theory- that pre-invasion, Aboriginal people managed the land minutely and without exception, shaping a land conducive to human habitation and food supply. This will easily go down as one of my most memorable reads of 2012.
Gammage's approach is relentlessly historical. He has gathered thousands of quotes from white explorers and settlers describing the land they first encountered. According to the forward by Henry Reynolds, 1500 works are cited in the bibliography, and a good portion of these must be quoted. This can make for less than enthralling writing at times, but leaves the reader in little doubt bout whether Gammage is simply selectively quoting exceptions. Gammage uses these quotes to build a picture of early Australia as a diverse country, full of 'edges' and 'clumps' where ecosystems varied considerably in a short space. he takes Australia's capital cities as examples, explaining how each contained the necessary variety and ingredients for human habitation.
He compares this ecology to the ecology we now know grows "naturally", and uses the difference and our understanding of Aboriginal firestick farming, to posit theories of how Aboriginal people shaped the land, through carefully controlled, and perfectly timed, cool and hot burns.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the book for me was one of the briefest - Gammage discusses how the theological world of Aboriginal people supported an inherently ecological worldview - one which viewed progress (individual or collective) as abhorrent, and favoured conservation above all.
The scale of this book is breathtaking - Gammage's theory is assertively not just about one time or place, but about all of Australia - the whole estate from Cape York to Perth and Launceston - and he covers theology, ecology, history and even touches on Peter Andrews' theories about waterways. It is clearly the product of many years work. At the same time, the implications are just as sweeping. If Gammage is right - and this is far from decisive (he does have a frustrating habit of skipping over arguments against his thesis - in particular arguments that Aboriginal custodianship may not have been as perfectly sustainable as he paints - no megafauna extinctions in this book!) the tragedy inherent in Australia's invasion and colonisation is that much sharper than we knew. The problem with Terra Nullius not that Europeans found it, but that, in large sections of our continent, they created it.

[Martin Chambers · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the “The Biggest estate on earth” Bill Gammage has created an exhaustive thesis that sets out that Australia at the time the first Europeans came was not the wilderness most Australians think it was. Rather, it was a managed landscape attended by an advanced society. The notion is contrary to the popular idea that Aborigines were primitive hunter-gatherers, and it challenges our concept of what might be the natural landscape of Australia.
Gammage’s research is exhaustive, although much of it as presented here is repetitive. For example, this quote from Sydney Parkinson, Banks’ draughtsman : ‘The country looked very pleasant and fertile, and the trees, quite free from underwood, appeared like plantations in a gentleman’s park,’ is a sentiment repeated from Tasmania to Cape York, from the east to the west coast, time and again, in quotes from explorers, settlers, and convicts.
Early art is further proof, and Gammage debunks the common opinion that the artists of the time painted not what they saw but what the people back home wanted to see – green fields and pleasant views, not dry barren land with a wilderness of tangled shrubs and trees. His contention is that the artist did indeed paint what they saw, a view co-incident with Parkinson’s description in the quote above.
The third part of the argument is in the growth and habit of trees whose shape reflects the type of vegetation they grew up within. Tall thin trees signify crowded forest, and trees grow with a spreading canopy in open country. These three bodies of evidence show that Australia was a managed and modified landscape at the time of European arrival. It is a compelling case and I commend every Australian to read this book. However, I suspect many will give up along the way as it is at times tedious. This is a shame, for reading the entire thing and not just my summary is perhaps the difference between knowing and understanding.
There is a trend to idolize indigenous cultures and first nations as being wise and sustainable. To take only that from this book would be a disservice. Towards the end of the book Gammage says, of the settlement of Adelaide and the clash of cultures there, ‘both of them lost’.
The Aborigines had a complex, successful and ritualized land management imbedded in their culture, a culture successful over tens of thousands of years. They were well fed and had a lot of spare time for dance and ritual. Modern Australia has a complex and frequently failing land management, we are overworked and stressed and don’t do nearly enough dancing. Can we learn something?
Well, yes, but probably not what you think. In his book ‘The Blind watchmaker’ Richard Dawkins explains how complex systems can evolve without the existence of God or some intelligent master craftsman – all it takes is a ruthless assessment of what works and what does not, and lots of time. In relation to species Darwin called it survival of the fittest and he recognized that nature was ruthless and had a lot of time. If things don’t work, the individual/species/culture dies out unless it can change.
And so, with 50,000 years of practice and a small population the Aborigines managed the entire landscape of Australia, a sort of nomadic farming that provided plenty. Their tool was fire. What they created varied over the expanse of the continent, but for example long cleared green pastures of succulent new growth, sloping down to a shelter of forest where hunters could hide. After a hunt they would move on to another similar area, thus giving the animals on that pasture time to settle.
This semi nomadic lifestyle- more correctly referred to as ‘planned seasonal migration’ – was necessarily devoid of permanent settlement structures, and this gave rise to the idea that the people were primitive and there was no land tenure, and it was all the justification Cook needed to stand on a headland, plant a flag, and declare for King and country. And yet, even Cook recognized that vast areas of what he saw was not natural : it was ‘like an English gentleman’s park’.
The term mosaic burning has been used for some time. In this book the complexity of it is revealed. It was a ritualized and religious duty of people. Each location was the responsibility of those who lived there and the duty was to maintain the land as it was found. Land was allocated equally as much as it is now, but without a public records office and with no fences. It was a remarkable achievement, but it was not the result of elders sitting down, making a plan and then allocating tasks. Darwin would say it evolved. Those that did things that didn’t work starved, and those who survived would be copied by their neighbors until the entire continent was part of a vast fire managed mosaic.
We owe first nations a lot. After all, we stole their land. But then, as now, life on this planet evolves ruthlessly and we need to always be mindful of what is working and not to mistake what might have worked in the past as wisdom. It is pretty clear a lot of what we are now doing does not work and it may be that we are running out of time, so this makes rigorous and honest assessment even more critical. And we have the tools – pen, paper, computer, simulation – to ensure that mistakes do not have to be as fatal as before.
For all that we can look back and learn it would be a mistake to be looking through rose coloured glasses. Maybe, food was plentiful and it was an egalitarian world. But was life easy? Was it a paradise? In any case, we can’t go back.
Acknowledging that one culture was superior to another does not insist that one people were superior to another. In ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ Jared Diamond answers the question of why we (white Europeans) invented ships and guns and antibiotics, while the indigenous cultures we subverted did not. And in ‘Collapse’ he examines those cultures who have failed without being invaded. (You can read my full review at www.martinchambers.id.au) In ‘The Biggest Estate on Earth’ we have proof that the culture we overran was far more advanced and sophisticated than at first thought, and that the ‘natural’ landscape of Australia was nothing of the sort.
But for all of us a future where we do not join those in ‘Collapse’ will be when we can take both cultures and merge the best of them together as equals. And that will require change from all of us.

[Martin Empson · Rating 4 out of 5]

In The German Ideology Marx and Engels write "nature, the nature that preceded human history...is nature which today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral-islands of recent origin)". They were arguing that the natural world is transformed by humans, constantly recreated and rebuilt. It is an insight that kept returning to me as I read Bill Gammage's excellent book The Biggest Estate on Earth. Gammage's contention is that the Australian landscape as seen by European colonial explorers, settlers and convicts post-1788 (the date of first arrival of the British first fleet) was not natural, pristine or untouched and certainly not terra nullius. Rather as the author says, "there was no wilderness". The Australian landscape was shaped by thousands of years of careful, planned human labour.

Full review on the blog: http://resolutereader.blogspot.com/20...

[Thomas Isern · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gammage has produced a landmark work, albeit an exasperating one. His presentation of evidence is encyclopedic and, eventually, deadening. He just keeps piling it on, without forming it up for us. He succeeds in making exceedingly important points, but then stretches them just a bit too far. The aborigines of Australia, we are informed, engaged in sophisticated landscape management through mosaic burning, what on the prairies of North America we call patch burning. The evidence for this is quite persuasive, but not so categorical as argued, it seems to me. Mosaic burning, yes, but everywhere? Not necessarily. There may have been a variety of approaches, because no matter how many descriptive passages Gammage quotes, his verbal evidence cannot cover the whole continent. Neither, necessarily, did aboriginal management cover every bit of the continent, as Gammage would have us believe. There certainly is evidence of evidence of extensive management of landscapes. This does not prove complete management of every acre of every landscape. The degree of comprehensiveness and of coordination across Australia simply cannot be proven. Gammage, too, gets a little chippy when he recounts the obstinate attachment of scientists to natural causes, rejecting human causes in landscape formation. He seems somehow surprised that scientists should be so thickheaded. In my experience the response of most scientists, when confronted by historians and their evidence, is, "Yeah, well, we're scientists, and we're smarter than you, so you have to believe what we say." There is no arguing with this. The only answer is to find better scientists. As John Lewis Gaddis has observed, the best scientists and the best historians pretty much think the same way. In the end you have to admire what Gammage has accomplished, which is quite similar to what Bill Cronon did for North American with Changes in the Land. Now, this may sound like a bit of gamesmanship, but I'm going to posit that the natives of the North American plains trumped either Cronon's eastern Indians or Gammage's aborigines in their sophistication of landscape management. The natives of the plains not only formed the landscape through use of fire but also deployed animal allies--specifically bison and beaver--to do the heavy lifting of landscape management with their hooves and teeth.

[Tia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Phew. Finishing this was a challenge and I’m relieved to be done. Not for the content, but the way it was presented.

In The Biggest Estate on Earth, Gammage proposes that Australia’s landscape was far more by design than historically, and typically, credited. Gammage explores how Indigenous Peoples of Australia managed land prior to Invasion, examines the purposes and reasons behind this land management, and suggests these strategies represent greater sustainability than farming and agriculture since. Gammage clearly states that Indigenous land care debunks the myth of terra nullius.

The difficulty in this read stems from huge chunks of historical quotes essentially saying the same thing, on repeat. These quotes establish that invaders saw Australia as a land similar to a park. Invaders recalled and drew the land in ways that suggest it was crafted, rather than natural. However, I feel this could have been much more succinctly discussed.

On a critical level it’s important to note the lack of Indigenous voices in this text. While establishing historical account was important, I feel there is an incredibly simple solution to establishing reason and purpose: ask Indigenous Peoples. (There would have been more space for this if not for those enormous quotes).

Overall, I learned some things and found some magnificent perspective shifts. I’m grateful for the loan of this book. And I won’t be reading it again.

[Mat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every Australian should read this book. An eye-opener.

[Richard Reese · Rating 5 out of 5]

The British colonization of Australia began in 1788. Historian Bill Gammage, a white fella, spent ten years studying the writings of early observers, as well as paintings, drawings, and maps from the era. The landscape in 1788 looked radically different from today. Much of what is now dense forest or scrub used to be grasslands. Early eyewitnesses frequently commented that large regions looked like parks. In those days, all English parks were the private estates of the super-rich. Oddly, the Aborigines who inhabited the park-like Australian countryside were penniless bare naked Stone Age heathens. Their wealth was the land.

For unknown reasons, the British immigrants did not immediately discard their clothes, metal tools, livestock, and Bibles, fetch spears, and melt into the wilderness — freedom! Instead, they attempted to transplant the British way of life onto a continent for which it was unsuitable. In his book, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, Gammage focused on the first century of the colony (1788–1888), an era he refers to as “1788” in the text. He refers to the Aborigines as “people,” and the aliens as “newcomers.”

In a nutshell, he describes the people as being brilliant at surviving in a brutally bipolar drought & deluge climate, and the newcomers as a hapless demolition team. Gammage’s academic peers, stodgy old gits faithfully clinging to the glorious myths of Empire and white supremacy, did not leap to their feet cheering for his scandalous nonsense. So, his book is jam-packed with images and lengthy quotations that support his heretical conclusions (1,522 footnotes!). The endless parade of historic evidence may test the endurance of general readers, but Gammage had to do it in order to avoid being dismissed as a raving nutjob.

A core subject in the book is firestick farming — using fire to deliberately reconfigure ecosystems in order to better satisfy human desires. Our species originally evolved as grassland hunters that loved dining on large herbivores. In Australia, the people used a variety of fire strategies for transforming rainforest and scrub into lush grassland. This greatly expanded habitat for delicious grass loving critters.

The people used both hot fires and cool fires to manage vegetation that was fire intolerant, fire tolerant, fire dependent, or fire promoting. Different fires were used to promote specific herbs, tubers, bulbs, or grasses. To prevent new grassland from reverting to woody vegetation, it needed to be burned every two to four years. Eventually, after decades or centuries of repeated burnings, there would be no more dormant tree seeds that could germinate. According to Gammage, “Most of Australia was burnt about every 1 to 5 years depending on local conditions and purposes, and on most days people probably burnt somewhere.”

Ideally, in selected locations, patches of dry grassland were burned as rains approached. Several days after a shower, fresh green highly nutritious grass burst through the ashes, and the wildlife raced in to feast on it. After a burn, the grass grew waist high, and often head high. Some sites were deliberately designed to optimize ambush hunting for kangaroos or wallabies. Without managers or fences, the wild game animals capably raised themselves, and eagerly moved to where the people provided fresh food. By keeping most fires small, the people chose when and where game would be concentrated. On outstanding years, when herds got too large, surplus animals were slaughtered, to avoid rocking the ecological boat. Australia had few large predators that competed with the people, or ate the people.

Gammage saw that the people lived in affluence. They had learned how to live through 100 year droughts and giant floods. No region was too harsh for people to inhabit. Their culture had taboos that set limits on reproduction and hunting. Hunting was prohibited in breeding grounds for important animals. Lots of food resources were left untouched most of the time. Newcomers were astonished to observe the great abundance of wild herbivores, fish, birds, and edible plants. Abundance was the norm. “People accepted its price. They must be mobile, constantly attendant, and have few fixed assets.”

In 1788, the people were also growing crops, including plums, coconuts, figs, berries, macadamia nuts, tubers, bulbs, roots, rhizomes, and shoots. Yams were grown in paddocks that could cover many square miles. The people planted grains, including wild millet and rice. Early newcomers described millet meadows of a thousand acres (405 ha), as far as the eye could see. The people’s method of farming did not require a permanent sedentary life. They stored food, but they didn’t remain by their stores to guard them. Even in harsh times, theft was uncommon. The people were astonished to see how hard the newcomers worked to grow food. Whites perceived hard work to be a virtue.

The people made farm and wilderness one. Also, their way of life intimately married spirituality and ecology. Gammage provided a fascinating chapter to the spiritual life of the people. While many different languages were spoken in wild Australia, all places shared the same cosmology, the Dreaming. Reality was created by their original ancestors in the Dreamtime, and they established the Law, which required the people to care for all of their country.

“The Dreaming has two rules: obey the Law, and leave the world as you found it.” Thus, fundamental change was outlawed. Many other societies are possessed with a pathological desire for change, and see it as natural — progress. Their god word is Growth. “People prize knowledge as Europeans prize wealth.”

The native kangaroo grass was excellent (“caviar for grazers”). It was a deep-rooted, drought tolerant perennial that held the soil in place, retained soil moisture, survived fire, and was highly nutritious. It remained green after four months without rain, a great asset for wildlife in drought times. The newcomers’ sheep grazed it down to bare clay, killing the grass.

Wetlands were drained to expand pasture. Livestock compacted the soil, which dried out, and cracked. Springs, ponds, and creeks evaporated, eliminating the critters that lived in them. When rains returned, runoff was increased, leading to erosion, landslides, deep gullies, floods, silt chokes, and the spread of salts. An observer in 1853 commented on the growing soil destruction: “Ruts, seven, eight, and ten feet deep, and as wide, are found for miles, where two years ago it was covered with a tussocky grass like a land marsh.”

The unclever solution was to continue overgrazing, and plant exotic grasses from Europe and Africa. These were shallow-rooted annuals that flourished in winter and spring, wheezed in summer, and died when burnt. When “the land looks drought-stricken; it is cattle-stricken.” Before long, the finest native grasses were greatly reduced, and in many places eradicated.

The newcomers wanted to live like rural Brits — permanent homes, built on fenced private property. They freaked out when the people set fires to maintain the grassland. Before long, districts began banning controlled burns. This led to the return of saplings and brush. So, in just 40 years, the site of a tidy dairy farm could be replaced by dense rainforest.

Without burning, insect numbers exploded. In 48 hours, a pasture could be nuked by caterpillars or locusts. Dense clouds of kangaroo flies drove newcomers crazy. Leaf-eating insects defoliated entire forests. Without burning, fuels built up, leading to new catastrophes, called bushfires. Since 1788, there have been many catastrophic bushfires. The Black Thursday fire hit on February 6, 1851. It burned 12 million acres (5 million ha), killed a million sheep, thousands of cattle, and countless everything else.

Newcomers generously shared smallpox and other diseases with the people, who proceeded to die in great numbers. Too late, the people realized that the newcomers intended to stay. They resisted, but were badly outnumbered. Newcomers “brought the mind and language of plunderers: profit, property, resource, improve, develop, change. They had no use for people who wanted the world left as it was.” They were champions at the dark juju of genocide.

Without people hunting them, the kangaroo population exploded, gobbling up the grass intended for sacred cows and sheep. Bounties were paid for kangaroo scalps. “In 1881, New South Wales paid a bounty on 581,753 roo scalps — 1600 a day — and in 1884 on 260,780 scalps in the Tamworth district alone, but roo plagues continued.”

Australia is an especially salty continent. There are large lakes saltier than the ocean, and numerous saltwater rivers and creeks. In many regions, topsoil sits on a layer of clay, which keeps water from penetrating into the salt below. Since 1788, the salt problem has become far worse. The bigger trees grow, the more water they drink, saltwater rises, killing the trees. Also, forest clearing increases runoff, and faster moving water cuts deeper into subsurface salt — so do plows and other mutilations. The salt predicament befuddles the experts, but all agree that salt is an effective cure for agriculture.

One question perplexes me: Was firestick farming genuinely sustainable for the long run? It significantly altered the ecosystem of a land the size of 48 U.S. states, minus Hawaii and Alaska, and the alterations had to be regularly maintained, century after century. Nobody is sure when the practice eventually became time-proven and widely adapted. Obviously, Australia wasn’t interested in being continually forced to dress scantily, like a park. At the first opportunity, she rushed to return to her preferred wardrobe, primarily forest and scrub. Could the burning have continued indefinitely, without additional harm? Should we consider firestick farming to be a form of domestication?

Gammage’s benediction: “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, one day we might become Australian.”

There are several Gammage videos on YouTube.

[Nedret Efe · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very detailed account of the way in which Aboriginal Australians actively managed the land and shaped a mosaic of grasses through controlled burning, and the ecological implications after European settlement in 1788 when such burning largely ceased

[John Davie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The second most frequent adjective when describing Australia in early colonial writings was 'park'. It was an apt description. Indigenous Australians managed the land brilliantly. Through the dreaming, Aboriginal life was centred around nurturing and protecting the land, country, allowing it to thrive. They did this using fire. Despite a lack of any modern firefighting equipment, or any advanced barometric information or devices, the land was burnt far better than it was now.

Today fire is an enemy, something to be feared, supressed, contained, limited. To aboriginals fire was an ally, the central tool in their land management system.

This land which was supposed to belong to no-one, belonged to everyone. The dreaming didn't fence off land, it didn't exclude, it didn't divide. It weaved humanity into the fabric of ecology, it mandated its protection.

Its product was a land of beauty and abundance . Its inhabitants were fit, tall and healthy, more so than the invaders. People had time for culture, family, recreation, spirituality and religion. Much more than now.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy in human history is the annihilation of this civilization. The oldest in human history, the one which produced The Biggest Estate on Earth.

[Justin Jonson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some excellent insights are provided in this treatise, however Gammage may have been able to tell the same story with half the text. A valuable contribution to gaining insights into how Aboriginal cultures managed the land, none-the-less. Well worth it.

[Lloyd Downey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well Bill, you pretty much had me until your last chapter (which is really an appendix). But thou "dost protest too much, methinks". This appendix is very defensive and highlights the fact that Bill's thesis has its critics. I think there is certainly enough evidence cited to show that Aboriginals did use fire extensively to manage the landscape and, in fact, we are "given a Tsunami of evidence". But I found myself asking all the way through ......."Is this ALL the evidence?....Is this balanced?......are there other views that we are not being exposed to? Has Bill cherry-picked this evidence?" Because without knowing the answers to these questions it's impossible to know how reliable the arguments are. I did some work myself on Riverine soils ..and published a few scientific papers on them and one thing I did learn was that Cypress pine in that area is almost always found on sandy loams ...not on the red-brown cracking clays. So there are certainly environmental factors at play in tree distribution.
I guess we are shown enough evidence for me to be persuaded that pre 1788, fire was used extensively to open up land for animals such as kangaroos. And this was responsible for much of the parklike landscape observed. But I did get a little bored with the seemingly re-iteration of the same point ad nauseam. I'm not necessarily more convinced by 1000 quotes than I am by 10. I'd just like to be convinced that he hasn't been "cherry-picking" his quotes. For example, this extract from a journal kept on the Nijptangn ...one of de Vlamingh's ships north of Perth in 1697; "Having come to the beach, we found many oysters and started at once out on our march but sometimes had to rest through fatigue caused by the heat of the sun and the heavy going through the thick scrub". I guess one could find a lot of similar quotes...with no mention of "park-like" conditions......in fact just the reverse. But what does this PROVE? How do we know these were balanced comments? Obviously it is harder to have to force your way through thick scrub than through bushland. And maybe explorers chose the easy routes. Anyway we have plenty of bushland in Australia that hasn't seen a fire for say 8-10 years and has just the kind of park-like conditions talked about. Basically it's because of competition for light and for water ...and the bigger trees have the advantage with both. Clearly, the WHOLE continent was NOT being managed as Bill would have it. Some parts were thick scrub. (See the quote above).
A basic thrust of his argument is that with the use of the fire stick, the aborigines cared for the land better than the newcomer europeans and our land has degraded dramatically since 1788. That is probably correct. But it is also supporting a population of about 25 million whereas before 1788 it was (according to the best evidence I can find) about 200,000. But surely we can do better even with extensive agriculture. Reduce erosion, clean up the streams, manage water tables better, preserve wildlife corridors and habitat and so on.
Interestingly enough, managed fires are being introduced as a way of cutting greenhouse gas emissions and better managing "Country". I did some work with the Kimberley Land Council on such managed burning. Nowdays, the fires are lit from helicopters and overseen via helicopter. But the basic idea is the same. Slow cold burns every few years (in a kind of patchwork) rather than one wildfire every 6-10 years which burns even big trees to the ground and emits a lot more greenhouse gases in the process.
I actually found his description of the aboriginal dreamtime/religion and relationship to country most interesting, maybe the best part of the book.... especially the idea of the songlines...the path or corridor along which a creator ancestor moved to bring country into being. And the way these songlines threaded Australia linking people of many local groups ...separated by great distances. And being born on or near a songline decides a person's most important totem. And for an emu man, he does not have emu as merely symbolic; he IS emu, of the same mould and of the same flesh. He must care for emu and for his habitat. etc. All Australia obeyed the dreaming. By world standards this is a vast area for a single belief system to hold sway. (I think this is a really interesting point). It leads on to the sacred duty of aborigines to leave the world as you found it ....hence the adherence to long established practices about burning the land.
Clearly burning the land regularly did a number of things. It burnt insects; it burned young seedlings and seeds, it allowed grass to regenerate and with fire resistant trees it allowed them to continue growing...especially where there was a cool fire. (Actually, there is another advantage that Bill does not mention and that is that a cool fire emits less Nitrous Oxide than a hot fire and Nitrous Oxide is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide). And, of course, it provided pathways through the timber. Though there are also some downsides. Back-burning now around Sydney gives us the days with the highest (and most dangerous) levels of small particle pollution ...and these small particles are carcinogenic.
I must admit, to my shame, that I had never fully appreciated before just how the aborigines felt attached to the land (country). (Though I had heard it claimed many times) ; how they were displaced and what an impact this had on them; and how ignorant the newcomers (settlers) were ...and still are.....about this casual displacement. I wonder how much the situation was destabilised by the introduction of smallpox, measles, etc into the early communities. As Bill Says..."For the people of 1788, the loss was stupefying. For the newcomers it did not seem great".
Bill briefly touches on some other activities of aborigines that I have only just read about in "Dark Emu". The fact that Aborigines did cultivate yams and grass seeds...and if this wasn't farming it was pretty close to it. They also, in at least one area, built stone houses and extensive fish traps; they dug wells in stone and built dams and aqueducts. So in many respects they were on the cusp of that development phase that elsewhere led to a more highly developed agriculture, writing and civilisation as we have come to know it. Though Gammage makes the interesting point that with their world view ..."They considered themselves superior to "us" ; they preferred their mode of living to ours....they pitied us that we troubled ourselves with so many things".
Overall, an interesting book...makes his point very strongly...but he hasn't convinced me that it's a balanced view. He's best when he talks about the aboriginal view of their world and attitude to country.

[Stanley Xue · Rating 3 out of 5]

The content itself and the pre-1788 world described in this book was truly amazing (++++ stars). How there was large swathes of 'open forest' in Australia (often described by colonists/settlers as reminding them of a 'gentleman's park') - as compared to the thick bush I think of when thinking about 'nature' (at least for me in coastal/urban Australia). How these 'open forests' were bound together in templates with thick forest or grassy plains - at times purposefully for the hunting of game (i.e. areas for animals to hide, areas for animals to graze, and places where animals could be driven into traps for easy hunting). It was compelling how these templates came about as a result of intentional land management by Indigenous Australians - chiefly the knowledge and expertise of fire management (when and where to use fire, how hot to let it burn) - which is quite astounding. Knowledge which we seem to be in dire need facing the challenges we are today. But lots of knowledge which sadly seems to have been lost (and forced to be lost) since colonisation.

The writing and enjoyment of reading is disastrous (+ star). It seems that the main point of each chapter is made in the first two pages. Then there is copious quotation from early colonist sources - so so so so much written description of natural geography across the country. Stuff I don't think I got much out of. The only times I felt like there was good flow and pacing in reading was the first two introductory chapters + the chapter on Indigenous farming practices (which was very interesting) + the final chapter. The middle chapters were a slog.

But I think the thesis is very interesting. I don't think anybody told me about this type of stuff in school. It almost seems to invent an entirely new reality. Definitely a paradigm shift. And thus seems important to know about.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This must be one of the most important books ever written about Australia. Bill Gammage is an extraordinary scholar. He set out to discover how humans have shaped the Australian environment, and spent a decade trawling the libraries and landscapes of Australia for clues. The mass of evidence he presents is truly overwhelming. He quotes letters, journals, newspaper articles, books and scientific papers. He includes 59 carefully selected images: paintings, drawings, photos. He is a profound observer of the natural world. He can read the shape of a eucalyptus to infer what the world was like when it grew. He can distinguish ancient Aboriginal tracks threading a modern landscape. He can the generations of tree in a forest. If you were ever in doubt that Aboriginal people managed every square inch of this vast landmass, you shall doubt no longer. Gammage's weight of evidence is too vast to deny.

I was at first surprised that he expended so much effort to make this point. I think that members of my generation are quite aware of firestick farming, and are generally quite willing to accept that Aboriginal people had a close and intelligent bond with the land. It was therefore quite an eye-opener to read the Appendix to this book. There are apparently dozens of writers—many of them conservative polemicists, but many of them also respected scientists—who continue to deny that Aboriginal land management was extensive, intentional or effective. Good riddance to them, is Gammage's quite reasonable conclusion.

I normally find polemic a distraction in a fine work of history like this. It was a clever move to demote the polemic to an Appendix. Too many academics begin with long introductions, positioning themselves for and against and million different things, before even coming to present their own evidence and make their own arguments. By saving the polemical part of the book till last, Gammage is able to speak with the weight of all the arguments he has made. More than this, he is able to present a considered and persuasive account of scientific reason, reminiscent of Paul Feyerabend's theories. But polemic it still is, and perhaps in a second edition Gammage would be less inclined to imply that historians are in general more reasonable and open-minded than scientists.

The final two chapters of the main text, "Farms without Fences" and "Becoming Australian," are extremely moving. They are in fact two of the finest essays on Australian culture I've ever read.

"Farms without Fences" calmly and gently examines the European obsession with the idea that there was no agriculture in Australia till the British came. In the end, Gammage shows, Aboriginal people did all the things modern farmers do—cultivated plants, tilled the soil, managed fodder, and so on—they simply didn't store their produce and stay put in one place. They didn't need to, because they cared for the land rather than exploiting it, and could rely on ecosystem services.

"Becoming Australian" is a revival of the old nationalist case, which first appeared long ago among the radical poets and artists of the early colony, and has been periodically revived by the most cosmopolitan and clear-minded of Australian writers since. We must love and attend to our country for its own sake, he says, and the First Australians have shown it is possible to do so.

The Biggest Estate on Earth is a brilliant book, and it saddens me to have to identify some of its flaws. Gammage has amassed a huge pile of evidence, as I mentioned. What he has not managed to do is shape and synthesise it effectively. The first nine chapters are extremely messy. Gammage leaps from place to place, from species to species, from era to era, and it is extremely difficult to keep up—even for a reader who has read several works of Australian environmental history already. He has made some strange choices as to how he structures particular chapters. It is telling that all the images are in Chapter two, while another chapter is literally in note-form. He also tends to quote at great length from his primary sources, and the quotations he selects are often rather repetitive.

I understand why he has made these choices. He wants to be as persuasive as possible, and believes that what is most persuasive is the evidence itself. This is true, up to a point, and Gammage is also a fastidious analyst of the evidence, making his interpretations persuasive too. But if he had imposed more order on the book, its arguments would stick better in the memory, and it would slake more of the curiosity all his writing does so much to evoke.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most people who have some interest in Australian history have some understanding the Aboriginal people previously did 'burn offs' on the land. What Gammage shows is not only did they just 'burn off', however had a system of complex system of land management using fire as a tool. In brief laymans terms, this involved creating a mosaic template across the land of shaded forest, waterholes, and grassy patches of field that attracted game for hunting. Where the complexity came in, was their knowledge around controlling cool fires, burning before rain, fire promoting vs fire killing plants and trees, what would regenerate over certain times and what would not, and 'black soil' of ash creating golfcourse green grass over time which provided perfect hunting grounds.

Gammage covers this in incredibly detail, with a tsunami of evidence (over 1000 citations), from the endless and monotonous comments from early explorers remarking about how Australia looked like a managed 'gentleman's estate' and the evidence of constant fires, to comparisons of 1788 landscape paintings compared to today, to a botanists examination of evidence in areas that were once free of scrub, to a chapter on the resilient gum, with it's remarkable survival factors such as rebarking. All these factors allowed for a sustainable land management system that allowed nomadic people's to live, freely, for 60,000 years.


Read this book if you want to understand and gain more than just a tokenistic respect for Aboriginal people and want to understand what precontact 1788 Australia looked like, and awe at the knowledge and management of a rather large island with no animals suitable for land labour.

Despite being incredibly dense and repetitive in some parts, 5 stars from me for a truly groundbreaking thesis.

[Jenny Kirkby · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only thing that stops me giving this book 5 stars is the amount of repetition in the multiple examples the author gives to support his assertions. I understand that this is required for skeptical readers struggling to acknowledge that, despite a different approach to Europeans, Australia's indigenous peoples had/have a far superior understanding of land management here and took superb care of this land. I think this book deserves public acclaim as much, if not more, than "Dark Emu" as Gammage has done extensive research from what the skeptics could only concede are 'acceptable sources' to show that the assertions of both books are not only logical but well recorded in the accounts of the first Europeans to come to Australia. Our indigenous population know a lot that is worth learning and it's time to listen more carefully.

[Tiffany · Rating 5 out of 5]

A compelling re-reading of early colonial Australian landscapes, backed up with an astounding number of citations. A must-read for any person interested in the early agronomy practices and land management strategies that Australian First Nations people developed.

[Daniel Lorne]

Fascinating history of the management of Australia's land prior to 1788. Heartbreaking to consider how much has been lost, how different the land now is, and the change in perspective of what's "natural". Thoroughly recommended.

"These early fires gave people control when they burnt most ground in late summer. They might burn grass valleys or the Darling Scarp twice a year, but dry ridges only every 15–25 years. Summer fires got into crops, angering settlers, yet some saw their value." (174)

"Most fire was to make grass. Grassland is pleasant and bountiful, and visibility matters to hunters and gatherers, so people cleared trees and scrub, and burnt old grass to make new." (175)

"Scrub has now locked up this country, and fit walkers take days longer than early Europeans to walk it. How much grass and how little undergrowth there was in 1788 manifests persistent and purposeful burning. The spread of scrubs since it's among Australia's most visible but least recognised landscape changes." (181)

"Five features marked 1788 fire. It was planned; it was precise; it could be repeated hence predicted; it was organised locally; and it was universal – like songlines it united Australia. People accepted its price. They must be mobile, constantly attendant, and have few fixed assets. In return they could ration its feed, unleash but never free it, and move it about, sustaining more diversity than any natural fire regime could conceivably maintain. It was scalpel more than sword, taming the most fire-prone country on earth to welcome its periodic refreshing, its kiss of life. Far from today's safe and unsafe fires, campfire and bushfire were one; far from a feared enemy, fire was the closest ally." (185)

"People today think of what animals need. In 1788 people thought of what animals prefer. This is a crucial difference. What animals prefer always attracts them." (211)

"Within a few decades koalas were a plague. In 1844 Robinson thought them 'in places abundant' in Gippsland; 30 years later they were a pest there. On the Goulburn (Vic) no-one reported them in the 1840s; by 1870 there were 'thousands.' Around Bega (NSW) they were not noted by the early settlers, common by 1860, and then streets and gardens from the 1880s until 1905. At Port Stephens (NSW) no-one thought koalas common until the 1890s. In southeast Queensland early Europeans occasionally noted them; after 1900 millions of skins were sold there, including a million in 1919 and 584,738 in one month in 1927." (288)

"She concluded, 'women's work...compares favourably with a European eight-hour day and possibly overtime as well'. Blainey too pointed out that people worked many fewer hours in a day to secure food and shelter than farmers anywhere. Perhaps neither counted fire or ritual as work, but only people untroubled about food could have held so many corroborees and ceremonies. Of course there were hungry times, or people would not have managed their resources so carefully, but this is true of farming, and as with farming was not the norm. People were not hinging on uncertainty or toil." (302)

"Such changes make 1788 Australia hard to recognise now. It was even a different colour. It had more green grass in summer, much less undergrowth, and fewer trees. In 1888 it had more trees than in 1788, deceiving newcomers into thinking that regenerating forest marked virgin land. Today there are fewer trees on farms, swampland, and I suspect arid and semi-arid country, but more in forests, national parks and remote places. Soil and water have changed, species have come, gone or moved. Australia is a world leader in animal and plant extinctions, reflecting how ancient and vital 1788's unnatural fires were." (320)

"There is no return to 1788. Non-Aborigines are too many, too centralised, too stratified, too comfortable, too conservative, too successful, too ignorant. We are still newcomers, still in wilderness, still exporting goods and importing people and values. We see extinctions, pollution, erosion, salinity, bushfire and exotic pests and diseases, but argue over who should pay. We use land care merely to mitigate land misuse. We champion sustainability, which evokes merely surviving, whereas in 1788 people assumed abundance, and so did Genesis. We take more and leave the future less. Too few accept this behaviour cannot survive the population time bomb. When the time comes to choose between parks and people, species and space, food and freedom, 1788 values will be obliterated." (321)

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book reminded me to skim books before deciding to read them deeply. For some reason I treated the subject of this book with an almost holy reverence and therefore planned to read almost every single word.

This was a mistake.

The Biggest Estate on Earth is a mind-numbingly repetitive onslaught of quotes and excerpts, all of which are meant to prove the thesis that pre-1788 Indigenous Australians were very sophisticated managers of the land.

Gammage musters lots of evidence to prove this, but at a cost: this book with its almost-holy theme, which ought to be deeply moving, is instead an almighty bore.

I won't read this again, but I do plan to read other, more readable accounts of its central revelation. Indigenous Australians managed their country better perhaps than any other people on earth. Their chief tool was fire, which they wielded with all the expertise of master craftsmen.

Fire transformed forest and scrubland into open parks. Europeans constantly remarked that Australia resembled a gentlemen's park through which one could walk with ease. This was so because First Australians strategically burned the landscape to promote the growth of grasses. In doing so, they transformed Australia from a wilderness into a thinly-treed paradise that could be easily traversed. Europeans noted how quickly this changed when Aborigines were slaughtered and banned from using fire. It again became a wilderness.

Fire cleared land for the cultivation of edible plants. First Nations people burned ground to eliminate undesirable plants then sowed or allowed the spread of plants such as the ubiquitous murnong. They also burned the edges of these plots to prevent the encroachment of competitor plants. All they did was burn, reap, sow, and let alone, which compared to typical farming required very little work. In this way, Indigenous Australians were probably the only people in human history to farm without becoming sedentary.

Similarly, First Nations people created tracts of land full of plants beloved by certain animals. Thus they "herded" animals such as kangaroo by creating artificial feedlots. They also burned highways and cul-de-sacs into forest that they would herd animals into. These made hunting routine, predictable, and easy.

They lit small, cool fires to burn litter and undergrowth that would if left to accumulate provide fuel for wildfires. Indigenous land management made the kinds of bushfires that have ravage contemporary Australia impossible. It is extremely exciting that Indigenous people are being given the autonomy to conduct burns again for the purpose of bushfire mitigation. For example, check out the very successful West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement Project (WALFA), a project so important it was mentioned in Superpower: Australia's Low-Carbon Opportunity.

They burned to kill weeds, to manage insect and vermin populations (early settlers mentioned encountering flies only in very small, isolated pockets of land; regularly burning the land destroyed their larva and made them controllable nuisances instead of a plague), to hunt lizards and snakes, the cull animals whose populations had grown too large (an early and effective version of modern animal conservation), etc.

This book, though it was an unpleasant slog to read, impressed on me the belief that Indigenous Australians may have had the best and most comprehensive system of land management of any traditional society ever. It also convinced me that some of their practices are superior, perhaps far superior, to our own and ought to be incorporated into our low-carbon and environmentally conscious futures. It is so important that we do this, and I agree with Gammage, who ended this book by saying that in learning about this history we might at last become Australian.

[Geoff Wooldridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Biggest Estate on Earth, the story of how the local Australian people managed the landscape through the judicious use of fire, is a thoroughly researched and compelling work by Australian historian, Bill Gammage.

Gammage has his critics and his skeptics, those that are unconvinced by the historical and empirical evidence that he cites to support his proposition. Mostly they are scientists who have approached the issue from a purely data-based perspective and have concluded that there is no definitive proof to support Gammage's views.

As such, and Gammage acknowledges this, the book has been assembled to include many supporting examples from historical and scientific sources, covering the length and breadth of the continent, and the full extent of its climatic variation, such that, at times, it makes for dry and repetitious reading for a general reader.

From my perspective, Gammage has made a substantially compelling case for his proposition, one that makes sense and explains phenomena that scientists have been unable to either prove or disprove, and which would appear logical to any reasonably thinking person.

There are so many examples of British settlers and visitors to Australia in the years immediately after 1788 who described the local landscape as 'park like', almost like a carefully manicured English park but with different species of trees and shrubs. And these examples come, not just from Sydney or the broader NSW, but from all over the country, from the lush tropics of north Queensland, to the chillier climes of the Tasmanian island, the extreme west of Western Australia and the central inland deserts.

The core of the argument is that Australian people, before 1788, used fire in a controlled, regular, locally adapted pattern, to shape the environment in such a manner that food was more readily available, movement between campsites and food sources was easier, ground crops grew more plentifully and reliably, and the native fauna (not just the edible ones) thrived within sustainable populations. Over the course of 60 - 80,000 years, the local population learned, and passed on, the knowledge and skills to ensure that regular fire, used effectively, made life easier.

The landscapes that the British colonists encountered when they arrived were NOT natural - they were carefully cultivated, with a mix of vast open grasslands, lightly wooded areas cleared of clogging undergrowth that were easier to travel, and stands of denser forests of larger trees that provided habitat and resources. The countryside was designed, landscaped to suit the people, to reduce the effort they needed to expend to access the food and other resources required to live prosperously.

The locals even 'farmed' after a fashion - farms without fences - ensuring that food crops such as yams were never over exploited and that a decent crop the following season was more or less ensured.

Yes, I found the evidence fascinating, compelling and insightful, and I am prepared to accept the broad premise until someone can prove that it is wrong.

[Graham Catt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gammage’s book details the management of land by Native Australians before the arrival of Europeans in 1788. His observations are supported by extensive research, including contemporary accounts, illustrations and scientific data.

A fascinating and important achievement.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bill Gammage's book was kindly leant to me by a new found friend while I was away in Western Australia. Unfortunately, owing to the many wonderful distractions one encounters during a family reunion visit, I was unable to sit down and actually read the whole body of text from start to finish. I did though manage to read significant portions of it - including the many copious illustrations with their very fully detailed and lengthy explanatory captions. In some ways this book reminded me somewhat of Oliver Rackham's excellent Woodlands published not too long ago in the Collins New Naturalist Library series. Both books' authors hold tremendous regard for the methods and traditions used in managing landscapes by the local peoples (be they indigenous Australians or traditional British woodsmen).

Obviously the two books' similarities end there as in the former case the traditional land management techniques were more or less effectively obliterated by an advancing tide of British colonialism, while in the latter case traditional woodland management was effectively ended in significant scale by the industrialisation of forestry that followed the First World War. The book's title refers to the fact that to newly arrived European eyes the lay of the landscape (as controlled pre-1788 by the local inhabitants) reminded them repeatedly of the vast landed estates that the wealthiest in their own societies back home were so earnestly trying to replicate.

Gammage's fascinating book is concerned with more than traditional woodland uses and management though. The Aborigines' vast understanding of their homelands, accumulated through hundreds if not thousands of years' worth of knowledge passed from one generation to the next, was truly a wondrous thing. They knew every aspect of every facet of flora and fauna in their landscape at a level that very few (if any) learned modern land use professionals would ever approach. Every wild flower, grass type, fungus, tree (and that includes foliage, fruit, bark, root or lignotuber, etc.) or shrub, bird or animal, would be intimately familiar to both men and women of all ages.

Most crucially, the skilled use of fire - whether it be naturally occurring or instigated deliberately - would often determine the cyclical movements and seasonal reactions of various flora or fauna, most notably the right grasses that would attract kangaroos for hunting. Controlling the bushfires would be an integral tool for not only hunting, but also in managing pathways, communications, and woodland regeneration. This knowledge would be all but lost, or rather abandoned through ignorance, by those authorities in power following the transformative year of 1788 and the commencement of systematic colonialisation of Australia. Gammage's book also illustrates wonderfully how various European colonials initially approached the landscape and their interactions with it in terms of surveying, mapping, drawing and painting, writing, and farming.

An extensively illustrated book with a multitude of primary references (together with a very comprehensive bibliography), this is an incredibly valuable and important book - not only for Australians, but for anyone interested in learning about any indigenous people's understanding and management of their own ancestral lands, and the devastating effects that the 'civilisation' of newcomers - be they through farming, forestry, land division, and creeping 'development' into the modern era can have. Books such as this can go some small way in perhaps helping to reverse those effects where those in control of the land have a mind to do so.

[Duncan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am one of those Philistines who read Dark Emu first, and the contrast between the two books is very clear.

Pascoe and Gammage face the same challenge - a tsunami of sources supporting their arguments, in the face of a wall of established thinking and opposition. I suspect that Pascoe has benefitted from Gammage doing the hard yards here - he doesn’t feel the need to rely on the repetition that characterizes Gammage’s work, and probably moves me to mark this a 4 rather than a 5.

It’s always fun to jump on Goodreads and read other reviews - both positive and negative. Generally I concur with the positives, but there are definitely a few points in the negative which I take on board.

Primary among these is the relatively casual way that Gammage deals with the indigenous voice, and the incredibly important issue of whether or not there was really a continent-wide Dreamtime. It is a very attractive notion, and would certainly support his central argument. But it isn’t there in the evidence he presents - one could imagine a stand-alone book on the topic, documenting contemporary and oral historical accounts of this phenomenon. Perhaps such a work exists, but if it does then Gammage devotes far less time to it than he does to an exhaustive recitation of white settler accounts.

Criticism I’ve seen of his central thesis however doesn’t seem to have read the actual book all that closely. One can’t equate the kind of precise day-to-day burning practices of 1788 with modern burns done from a helicopter. Nor do the critics seem to deal with his argument that different templates would have included thick brush alongside open plains.

Setting aside the criticism and the difficulty in the read itself (I found the section on landscape pictures strange the way it was presented; could have has easily been plates through the text), the power in this work lies in its exhaustive research and persuasive argument. It makes one look both at our landscape and at pre-1788 Australian culture with different eyes. And that is so important.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had read a review in the New York Times Book Review for a book called Dark Emu based on this work which became a best seller in Australia in 2014 and recently reissued(which I hope to read next month). Anyway, this book was referenced in the review and I decided to read it first. And it is just a totally amazing book about how a native people worked together over hundreds of years to transform and conserve and maintain an entire continent.
The book is divided into sections. In the first Australia in 1788, the author uses primary documentation including sketches and paintings to sketch out what Australia looked like at the beginning of the European invasion of the continent prior to the eventual take over and destruction of its people and a realized balanced ecology. Also included are more modern pictures of the same areas in the sketches and paintings to show the changes that took place. The second and third sections looks at the Aboriginal beliefs and their methods and reasons for land management which essentially goes back to all is intwined and essential for life.
What really stands out are all the comments of the Europeans about how gorgeous Australia was, that so many areas resembled “a gentleman’s park” which they knew took a lot of care and work, but somehow here it was just natural because otherwise they would have to acknowledge that those “lazy” natives knew more and were better at what they did. The other big stand out what the major tools the Aborigines used in the effort: knowledge of all from tiny grains of sand to kangaroos was learned and passed on in detail from generation to generation; that all the peoples had the same overall vision of the land and that separation across great distances did not stop their working together on that same vision. And that fire, judiciously used, is a wonderful tool. Awesome, awesome book!