The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia by Bill Gammage

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Ex library copy with no external stickers. Partial date due slip now covered with blank ex libris bookplate sticker. No stamps or stickers on inside pages. RFID patch on inside back cover. Wear to book corners and edges, particularly at spine tail. Marks on foredges. Light creasing to the dust jacket. Small mark on dust jacket front cover near title. Body text and binding are still very good.

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. (back cover)