Indigenous Australian land management
before the European settlement in 1788:
a review article
Margaret L. Faull
Bill Gammage. The Biggest Estate on Earth: how
Aborigines made Australia (Allen & Unwin, Sydney,
Australia, 2011). 180 × 250 mm. 434 pp. 59
illustrations. ISBN 978 1 74237 748 3. Price
AUD $49.99.
Australia has an incredible diversity of unique
forms of life; in addition to the well-known
marsupials, it has some 25,000 native plant
species, 10 per cent of the world’s total, including
1,000 out of the 1,300–1,400 acacia species in
the world (pp. 111–14; unattributed references
simply with page numbers are all to Gammage
2011). Of 770 known eucalypt species, only five
are not native to Australia (pp. 115–17). But in
recent years the Australian landscape has been
beset by ever-increasing problems. In addition
to the usual fluctuations of climate that made
Dorothea McKellar refer in her national poem
to a land of ‘droughts and flooding rains’, bush
fires have raged more frequently and with a
greater intensity, salination of the land is an everyincreasing problem (pp. 110–11) and droughts
and floods are occurring more and more often,
partly as a result of climate change (as with bush
fires) and partly as a result of farming practices
(as with salination). This has led people to look at
alternative ways of doing things and how others
have farmed in the past or elsewhere in the world.
One outstanding work in this regard, Back from the
Brink, by Peter Andrews (2006), advocates a new
way of managing the Australian landscape. Now,
to complement that work, comes this magisterial
DOI: 10.1080/01433768.2014.981396
study, looking at how Australia’s indigenous
inhabitants1 managed this vast and diverse country
so successfully for tens of thousands of years.
This book is essential reading, not just for those
studying the Australian landscape, but as well
for those interested in environmental matters in
general, while it also has implications for studies
of Mesolithic societies of the past.
It is but seldom that a work appears which
funda­mentally changes how the general public,
as opposed to the specialists in the field, view
the exploitation of the landscape, but this is such
a book. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution
was built on the work of previous scholars,
such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, but needed his
meticulous examination of all the evidence in
The Origin of Species in order to convince the rest
of the world. Similarly the ideas in this book
have been much discussed by specialists in the
field, but it is Bill Gammage who draws together
evidence from a multitude of sources in a book
for the general public to show that the Australian
indigenous people also systematically managed
their entire landscape in as sophisticated a manner
as that developed in Europe with the Agricultural
Revolution.
The main sources he uses are in fact the
early European commentators, who frequently
recorded the deliberate setting of fires by the local
inhabitants, but completely failed to appreciate
the significance of what they observed. They
were incapable of comprehending that the people
described by Charles Darwin, amongst others,
68
landscape history
as ‘a set of harmless savages’ (pp. 43, 309, 312)
had the ability to manipulate their environment
in just as sophisticated a way as any gentleman
farmer on the estates of the Old World from
which they had themselves come. The general
view was that the indigenous people moulded
their way of life to the country, rather than
the country being moulded by those people
(p. xxii). Yet the eminent Australian historian,
Henry Reynolds, points out in the introduction
that Bill Gammage ‘establishes without question
the scale of Aboriginal land management, the
intelligence, skill and inherited knowledge which
informed it’ (p. xxiii). A very few perspicacious
observers did realise this, such as Edward Curr
in the mid-nineteenth century (p. 2), and indeed
the great Yorkshire explorer, Captain James
Cook, acknowledged that ‘they are far more
happier than we Europeans’ and that ‘they think
themselves provided with all the necessarys of
Life’ (p. 309). Modern research has shown how
far the indigenous inhabitants of Australia were
from being that ‘set of harmless savages’ and how
they interpreted the meaning of the landscape
(Benterrak, Muecke & Roe 1996).
The early explorers and observers, including
Captain Cook (p. 5), described the landscape that
they found as being like a country gentleman’s
park with grassy slopes. For example, Watkin
Tench, who took part in the First Settlement of
1788 and said that ‘he has spoken from actual
observation’ (1789, p. 15), wrote that:
The face of the country is such as to promise
success whenever it shall be cultivated, the trees
being at a considerable distance from each other and
the intermediate space filled, not with underwood,
but a thick rich grass growing in the in utmost
luxuriancy (ibid., p. 65).
Indigenous people saw themselves as having
a religious duty to look after all of the land
(p. 133), which Gammage (p. 1) argues was one
great Australian estate that they considered to be
single and universal. They believed that they had
an obligation to leave the world as they found it
(p. 2), so that theology and ecology were fused
(p. 133): people did not ‘own’ land; the land
owned them (pp. 142–3). This was the same with
all tribes across the whole of Australia (p. 14),
including Tasmania, which was cut off from
the mainland about 9,000 b.c (p. 20). On the
whole, their obedience to the Law discouraged
fundamental changes (p. 124), although there was
one major change in about 2,000 b.c. (see below).
The prime tool that they used for this was fire,
unlike the plough and domesticated animals of
the Old World. Apart from the dingo, Australia
has no native animals that can be domesticated
and farming is made more difficult by the
extreme climatic variations resulting from the El
Nino Southern Oscillation, which causes more
differences between years than between seasons.
By using fire people could manage the plants
more easily than by laboriously cultivating them
(p. 297); in northern Australia they were in contact
with people who were sedentary farmers (Isaacs
1980, pp. 261–77), but realised that their own
methods were more effective (pp. 297–8, 300).
In fact, European women worked harder than
indigenous women, who nevertheless produced
more food and were probably happier (pp. 302,
310–11). But the times, intensity and frequency
of burning were much more complex than the
modern, crude method of ‘burning off ’, which
is usually done in the winter season, whereas
the indigenous people burned throughout the
year, mainly during the summer, when it is now
illegal (p. 169), and controlled the fires by the
time of day that they were lit (p. 56). There were
sanctions against improper burning, and setting
fires was the responsibility of the senior men
(pp. 160–1), who knew the intervals required
between burning.2
Again and again landscapes were recorded
in the early years of the Settlement that did
not accord with what would have been found
naturally. Eucalypts were found growing in rain
forests, which is not normal (pp. 12–13), but in
other places where they would be expected there
were no gum trees, which can only be killed
by repeated and deliberately set fires (pp. 12–
14). Perennial grassland, as seen by the early
observers, can only be produced in the Australian
environment by repeated burning every two to
Indigenous Australian land management before the European settlement in 1788
four years (p. 14) and spinifex country will not
support food plants until it has been burned
(p. 14). The degree of control of the environment
is shown by early pictures depicting eucalyptus
forest with no undergrowth almost immediately
next to dense rain forest (p. 83), while elsewhere
trees occurred in some areas but not in others,
although the soils were identical (p. 6) and where
trees, when planted, grew well (p. 9). It was noted
that typically grass grew on good soil, with trees
on the poor land, which is the reverse of what
would be expected in nature (p. 6).
The indigenous inhabitants manipulated the
environment by use of what Bill Gammage calls
‘templates’. Plates I, II and III3 of illustrations and
accompanying text from the Biggest Estate on Earth
illustrate the principles and operation of three
such templates. The various types are discussed
in detail in the book; for example one aim was
to associate water, grass and forest, in order to
entice forest-dwelling game out to feed and drink.
This facilitated hunting by the men (pp. 61, 90–2,
199–210), while the women gathered vegetables
and fruit in areas screened so that they would
not startle the animals (p. 79). People made sure
to hunt different mobs of prey in rotation, with
sanctuaries to safeguard game (pp. 284‒5), so that
individual groups of animals would not become
spear-shy (p. 216). Another template ensured that
animals were kept away from plants that people
used as food (p. 214). Modified water systems
were created to trap fish and eels (p. 283) and, as
well, possums, emus and cassowaries were reared
and then fattened for eating; fish and crayfish
were moved to other parts of the country and
dingoes were domesticated (p. 282).
Indigenous people were in fact manipulating
plants as well as animals, with bans on eating both
plants and animals at breeding time (pp. 283‒4),
but allowing the culling of animals when they
were deemed to be in excess (pp. 285‒7). Women
often moved plants to more favourable areas (p.
294), and seed was traded between people as gifts
at the major traditional gatherings (pp. 295, 297).
On his 1844 expedition in north-west New South
Wales, Charles Sturt saw native granaries (p. 295).
The women were always careful to leave some yam
69
roots behind to ensure that they regenerated and
millet seed was scattered and then people waited
for rain, as millet crops a year after rain (p. 304).
Australian indigenous people regularly made
use of virtually every available plant in some way
(p. 111), eating a greater variety of foods than
any other society on earth (p. 151; see also Jones
& Meehan 1989; Meehan & Jones 1986). Elders
were able to name 420 species with details of
each (pp. 288–9), whereas Europeans tend to rely
on about thirty basic foodstuffs, especially wheat
and dairy products. Indeed the areas that the
incomers thought were the most barren were the
ones most productive of a wide variety of plants
for those who knew how to use them (pp. 169,
239). Once indigenous people living on reserves
were forced to adopt a diet high in white flour
and sugar, rates of Type II diabetes soared to
amongst the highest levels in the world. When,
however, they returned to their traditional way of
life, in the course of teaching indigenous school
children about indigenous lifestyles and customs,
their diabetes disappeared. This was one of the
first times that it had been shown that dietary
changes could have a substantial effect on Type
II diabetes, which had previously been thought
to be irreversible, and has made Australia into
one of the centres of the world in research into
diabetes (see, for example, Gallop 2003).
The incoming settlers were conceptually
incapable of appreciating the levels of sophistica­
tion of indigenous landscape manage­ment. From
the earliest years of the settlement, views were
expressed such as those of Watkin Tench:
The country, I am of opinion, would abound with
birds did not the natives, by perpetually setting fire
to the grass and bushes, destroy the greater part of
the nests (1789, p. 241).
The incomers believed that fire was used only
for hunting:
When the Indians in their hunting parties set fire to
the surrounding country (which is a very common
custom), the squirrels, opossums and other animals
who live in trees, flee for refuge into these holes,
whence they are easily dislodged and taken (ibid.,
p. 112).
70
Plate I. Illustration and text from Gammage 2011, p. 67 (© text and illustration Bill Gammage).
landscape history
Indigenous Australian land management before the European settlement in 1788
71
Plate II. Illustration and text from Gammage 2011, p. 91 (© text Bill Gammage; illustration from Lycett 1830 — out of
copyright — held by the National Library of Australia, Canberra); Joseph Lycett (1774–1828) was a convict artist.
72
landscape history
There were two consequences of this. Firstly,
the incomers assumed that all the resources were
naturally available and used them freely. The
original inhabitants had always restricted their
own numbers to ensure that they remained well
within the capabilities of the land to support
them, even in a one-hundred-year drought (p.
150). The incomers were oblivious to this, while
despising the landscape (‘a country destitute of
natural resources’: Tench 1789, p. 92), they very
rapidly indeed began to use up those resources.
Tench commented that
fish, which on our arrival and for a short time after
had been tolerable plenty, were become so scarce as
to be rarely seen at the tables of the first amongst
us’ (ibid., p. 65).
In addition to the smallpox that they had
inadvertently introduced, the local inhabitants of
the Sydney area also very soon began to starve.
Tench reported of the body of a dead woman,
with that of a child nearby, that it ‘showed that
famine, superadded to disease, had occasioned
her death’ (ibid., p. 103). And when the starving
people complained, as for example those at
Parramatta who ‘expressed great dissatisfaction
at the number of white men who had settled in
their former territories’, the response was that
‘the detachment at that post was reinforced on
the following day’ (ibid., p. 140). And when they
tried to obtain potatoes from the gardens of
those depriving them of their nutrition, they
were condemned as robbers and killed (ibid.,
pp. 176–7). This sort of deprivation continued
throughout Australia, as incomers selected for
themselves the areas that were most valued by
the indigenous people (p. 308).
Secondly, the Europeans saw the fires as a
threat, to such an extent that laws were passed, for
example in West Australia in 1847, to imprison or
flog indigenous people who lit fires (pp. 97, 312).
But to the indigenous people the use of fire to
care for the land was a religious imperative, even
in the face of death, so that people, while being
hunted down and killed and knowing that fire
would betray their location, still felt obliged to
burn the land (pp. 137–8), becoming effectively
religious martyrs. Once the indigenous people
were no longer allowed to control the landscape,
it began to revert to the state in which it would
have been had it not been burned, with a great
deal of damage being done even in the first ten
years after the First Settlement (pp. 313, 316–20).
Uncultivated and ungrazed Australian landscapes
are now totally different, with many more trees,
from those of 1788 (pp. 11, 195–9, 210). The
islands of the Whitsunday Passage, described by
Captain Cook as so covered with grass that one
was named Grassy Island, are now wooded (p. 5).
White incomers did not believe that they could
learn anything from the indigenous people. In
fact it was the common expectation that they
would eventually all die out (p. xxi; Thomas 2003,
pp. 67, 178) that led to their incarceration on
reserves; the disastrous results of this policy still
blight Australian society. The parks that were so
attractive to Europeans have now gone as a result
of overgrazing, and the introduced European
grasses are winter- or spring-flowering annuals
(pp. 108-9), unlike the native grasses which are
perennial and reshoot green when burned and
which flower in the summer, when they were
needed as feed for the native animals (pp. 17,
32–6, 56).
While breaking new ground, it is depressing
to see how long it has taken for these ideas to be
put forward in print for the general public and
granted a degree of acceptance, when Australian
botanists and landscape historians have been well
aware of many of the problems raised here and
the damage that has consequently been done
to the fragile Australian landscape. My mother
graduated in botany from Sydney University in
1939 and she often bemoaned many of these
effects on the landscape. In particular she was
well aware of the damage done to the soil and
to the native flora by the sharp cloven hooves of
sheep and cattle and the shod hooves of horses.
She maintained that Australian native grasses had
evolved alongside the native fauna; the long legs
of wallabies and kangaroos in contact with the
ground spread their weight and so do not damage
native grasses in the same way as the hooves
of the ungulates did. And that then, when the
Indigenous Australian land management before the European settlement in 1788
delicate native grasses were replaced by farmers
with foreign species, these led to the problems
of erosion outlined by Gammage (pp. 32–4,
106‒8, 111). Indeed it has recently been argued
that similar environmental damage has been done
in Britain by sheep, which are not indigenous to
the United Kingdom, but come originally from
Mesopotamia (Monbiot 2013).
She was similarly horrified by the indiscrimin­
ate ‘burning off ’, so beloved of many Australian
farmers (p. 216) and so unlike the carefully
selective and frequent burning done by the
indigenous people, who confined fire-sensitive
species to poor areas with little fuel (p. 164).
Her view was that such regular burning, without
reference to the nature of the plants being burned,
killed those plants that were fire-sensitive, while
encouraging the overgrowth of fire-dependent
plants. These then became the dominant species
and, having developed to promote fire, with
their dominance they then caused the larger and
fiercer fires that now threaten settlements. The
pre-1788 system maintained a balance in the
ecosystem (with fire-sensitive and fire-tolerant/
dependent plants, growing side by side; p. 11),
which then became seriously out of kilter with
regular burning off.
Other Australian landscape historians and
archaeologists have previously addressed these
issues (Blainey 1975; Flannery 1994; Jones 1969;
1980; 1985; 1995), the late Professor Rhys
Jones, for example, dealt with how fire was
traditionally used in ‘cleaning up country’ to
prevent dangerous conflagrations (Jones 1980)
and ‘firestick farming’ to assist with hunting
(Jones 1969). Bill Gammage, who is a landscape
historian (p. xxiii), albeit one with a botanist for
a father (p. 326), has acknowledged their insights
into the indigenous use of fire, although not all
their work reached as wide an audience as this
book has done.
Gammage deals well with the problems
of introduced animal and plant species. In
the nineteenth century there was actually an
Acclimatisa­tion Society dedicated to experiment­
ing to discover which European plant and animal
species were best suited to Australian conditions
73
((Brown-May & Swain 2005, pp. 7–8), rather
than looking at which Australian conditions
could accommodate European species without
endangering the ecosystem. Unfortunately,
despite protests as early as 1868 — in that case
against the depredations of introduced sparrows
(ibid., p. 7), now endemic in Australian cities,
— this attitude survived well into the twentieth
century; all Australians are well aware of the
extraordinary damage done to native fauna by
introduced species against which the indigenous
species have not evolved defences. The worst
culprits are camels, foxes, rabbits, rats, domestic
cats gone feral and, worst of all, poisonous cane
toads. The toads were introduced from Hawaii in
1935 to try to control the native cane beetle and
are now spreading across Queensland and the
Northern Territory, decimating virtually all other
species in their path. One introduced species that
Gammage does not mention is the ubiquitous
water-hungry willow tree. In the 1960s my mother
was appalled to see willows being deliberately
planted throughout the Snowy Mountains of
New South Wales and argued fiercely with the
managers who were sponsoring this destructive
and misguided programme; since then willows
have spread far and wide in the Snowy and
concerted efforts are now having to be made to
eradicate them, a much more difficult task than
introducing them had been.
It has to be admitted that not all Australians,
including a number of those who have reviewed
the book, accept the basic premise of this work,
as Gammage himself acknowledges (pp. 325–42).
Indeed the evidence of early paintings showing
extensive grasslands and scattered trees has in
the past not been accepted as accurate; as a
school child in Sydney in the 1960s, I was taught
that the first artists did not know how to depict
the Australian landscape, so used European
templates, and it was only in the late nineteenth
century that the artists of the Heidelberg School
mastered it. It is certainly true that the early artists
did not understand how to paint the leaves of
the eucalypts, which hang down. They tended to
show them, as they had been taught in Europe, as
massed leaves (see the trees in Pls II and III). It
74
landscape history
Plate III. Illustration and text from Gammage 2011, pp. 92–3 (© text Bill Gammage; illustration from Lycett 1830 — out
of copyright — held by the National Library of Australia, Canberra).
Indigenous Australian land management before the European settlement in 1788
has been pointed out that some of the drawings
have impossible perspectives or were by artists
who had not actually seen the views depicted,
so that the drawings may have been produced
to reflect the written descriptions or indeed ‘the
class project of settlement’ (Neale 2013). But
Gammage believes that the artists’ recording
of the overall proportions of grass to trees is
accurate and in accordance with the early written
descriptions (pp. 18–19).
Other objections are that the book is simplistic
in assuming a unity of religious beliefs about the
Dreaming throughout the whole of Australia,
drawn with a broad brush, and that the sources
of evidence used are overwhelmingly those of
the white settlers, rather than drawing directly on
information obtained from indigenous inform­ants,
whether contemporary or recorded earlier (ibid.).
There are certainly indigenous communities living
remote from white settlement, in areas such as the
Northern Territory, who still retain knowledge of
traditional ways. Indeed, as mentioned above, in
recent years the transmission of this knowledge
to indigenous school children has been actively
promoted. So there are certainly indigenous elders
who could have been consulted for their views
on the arguments put forward by Gammage, and
this is certainly a major shortcoming of the book.
One commentator has pointed out that this
book fits into the ‘quest for the Grand National
Narrative’ of Australia (Lunt 2013). In recent
years Australians have been re-examining their
history; some of this has been critical, such
as the question of the stolen generation of
mixed-race children or that of the shipping of
British ‘orphans’ to Australia. But on the other
hand there also has been a movement for an
encompassing national identity and The Biggest
Estate on Earth could be viewed as a highly
polemical part of that debate.
One piece of evidence adduced against
the argument of the book is the fact that the
palynological records show no increase in levels
of burning of the landscape after the arrival of
the Aboriginal people, some 50- to 60,000 years
ago. It is accepted by all sides that the Australian
bush has always burned, as a result of lightning
75
strikes, long before there were any humans on
the continent —70 per cent of Australian plants
either tolerate fire or else require it as an essential
part of their life cycle (p. 1). Eucalypts promote
fire by having bark and leaves containing highly
inflammable oil (p. 27), showing that naturally
occurring fires were a constant feature of the
landscape before human settlement. Gammage
does not argue that the indigenous people intro­
duced increased burning of the landscape, only
that they ensured that the burning was of a
controlled and directed nature, with the intention
of systematically exploiting the agricultural
potential of the Australian landscape.
The questions also arise of, firstly, how this
very intricate knowledge was obtained when, after
more than two centuries of white settlement, we
are only just beginning to grope our way towards
some wider understanding of how to manage
the bush, and, secondly, how such detailed
information was transmitted in a pre-literate
society. An extremely good parallel for western
audiences would be that of development of
knowledge of solar matters in the pre-Roman
period. Recent discoveries, in particular the Nebra
Sky-Disc (dating to the sixteenth to fifteenth
centuries b.c.: Mathias 2012, pp. 28–9; Meller
2002; 2004; for a summarised English version
see Maraszek 2009, p. 32), show an incredibly
sophisticated and advanced knowledge of the
heavens in the European Bronze Age: on the
Nebra Disc a gold circle, crescent and cluster of
dots show the night sky with thirty-two stars, full
moon and crescent moon; the dots represent the
Pleiades, whose disappearance in the Bronze Age
around 10 March at the time of the young new
moon and reappearance around 17 October with
the full moon marked the beginning and end of
the arable farming year in Europe. The Sky-Disc
further encodes two different ways of calculating
when leap years will occur and enables the rising
and setting points of the sun to be tracked
throughout the year (Marazek 2009, pp. 46–50).
In fact it was about 38,000 years ago that the
balance of the Australian flora changed, with a
decrease in rain-forest vegetation and an increase
in eucalypt and acacia woodland. This is usually
76
attributed to the effects of burning begun by the
indigenous inhabitants about that time (Molnar
2004, p. 53); this would be approximately 7,000
years before that great outburst of creativity
in Europe that resulted in such works as the
paintings in the caves of Altamira in Spain and
Chauvet in France (Clottes 2001; Gautheron
2011), while indigenous Australian rock art
appears to pre-date the European examples
by about 10,000 years (Brillaud 2011, p. 38).
So the realisation of how to use fire to mould
the landscape to their requirements came some
12- to 22,000 years after the arrival of the first
humans on the Australian continent. Then, about
2,000 b.c., there was a movement described as
‘intensification’, which is defined as change in
economic systems not initiated by environmental
or other external changes but by social changes
(Lourandos 1997; Lourandos & Ross 1994). At
this time there was an increase in population
and of trade between tribes, development of
more elaborate smaller stone implements, more
exploitation of the landscape, and possibly
development of more elaborate social systems.
A fair idea of how learning could be passed on
in a pre-literate society comes from the classical
references to the druids. Classical writers, such as
Caesar, tell us that it took up to twenty years of
hard work to qualify as a druid (West 2007, pp. 27,
30), while in India the education of a Brahman
took thirty-six years (ibid., p. 30). As they did not
use written records, knowledge of sacred matters,
traditions and poetic wisdom was confined to
the druids, who had to commit everything to
memory and who were also responsible for the
administration of justice (ibid., p. 71). Although
they must be used with caution as not being
contemporary with the culture they describe,
later records such as the Irish tales show that
druids (for example Cathbad in the Táin Bó
Cuailgne: Kinsella 1969) were an integral and
important part of early Irish society. Australian
indigenous society similarly involved extended
periods of learning before initiation at various
levels, both for boys and girls. Certainly much
of this information related to religious matters
involving the Dreaming and the Law. These were
landscape history
matters that had to be kept secret by initiates,
while the Men’s Law and the Women’s Law
both had to be kept confidential from those
of the opposite sex (for the often-overlooked
importance of the ritual role of women in
Australian indigenous society, see, for example,
Bell & Ditton 1980). Also involved were matters
relating to an individual’s totemic animal and
the relationship that they should have with their
totem (pp. 126–7, 130), as well as with features
of the landscape that they ‘owned’, either through
their father or their mother. Fire itself was in fact
a significant totem, which people were expected
to consult before lighting it (p. 128). It does not
take a great deal of imagination to realise that
encompassed in the learning about all the features
of the landscape and how these places came
into being in the Dreaming was the knowledge
about how each of those natural features was
to be treated, including when each should be
burned. As Gammage says, ‘in 1788 who could
burn, how much, when and why, was intricately
regulated’ (p. 96).
Such information could be, and was, handed
on over considerable periods of time: it is
recognised that the environmental conditions
described in accounts of the Dreaming, such
as grassy plains where there are now deserts,
are in fact those pertaining in Australia during
the Pleistocene (Isaacs 1980, pp. 14–15), with
accounts of giant animals (Hancock 2012) that
all seem to have disappeared in Australia about
46,000 years ago and had certainly all gone by
the end of the Pleistocene (Molnar 2004, pp.50,
58, 80, 163). In the Blue Mountains to the west
of Sydney, Mount Wilson is famous for its lush
temperate rainforest with enormous tree ferns;
the rainforest is based on the rich volcanic
soils of the now-extinct Mount Wilson. The
local people have a legend, ascribed by them
to the Dreamtime, of how the earth blew up,
great flames filled the sky and rocks and debris
spread over the land (Isaacs 1980, pp. 29–31),
which can only represent a memory of the last
eruption of the Mount Wilson volcano. Indeed
it is just possible that the much-feared mythical
creature, the bunyip, may be a memory of the
Indigenous Australian land management before the European settlement in 1788
carnivorous monitor lizard, Megalania prisca, the
largest terrestrial lizard known to have existed,
with a possible length of up to 7 metres (Molnar
2004, p. 118). It was similar to the Indonesian
ora (Varanus komodoensis), popularly known as
the Komodo dragon (ibid.), but double its size.
It had survived since the Early Pliocene, 4.5
million years ago, but disappeared about 30,000
years ago (ibid., pp. 104, 107), possibly as the
result of predation by the first humans to arrive
in Australia.
Obviously this book is of importance for
studies of the historical Australian landscape. It
is, however, of equal importance in two other
spheres. The first has already been acknowledged
by the number of prestigious awards that this
work has won to date, such as the Australian
Prime Minister’s Literary Award for History;
for farmers to accept and assimilate the lessons
taught by this book and adopt a totally new
approach to handling the Australian landscape.
It is not too late to retrieve some of the old
ways and thereby to reduce the dire effects of
landscape mismanagement, which are being
magnified by the effects of climate change on
the weather. Gammage admits that we can still
learn from 1788 (pp. 321–2), but that this is a
politically charged issue (p. 329), although he does
not acknowledge that one politically charged issue
relates to ‘contemporary Aboriginal attempts to
reclaim land precisely through the identification
of a deep history of inhabitation’ (Neale 2013,
p. 58).
It would be good to see a second book
by the author examining how many of the
original principles of indigenous landscape
management could be retrieved. This was first
suggested by Alfred Howitt in 1890 (pp. 322–3),
while in the 1920s some farmers copied the
old burning techniques (pp. 167, 177), but this
did not really take on. Gammage points out
that some of the traditional fire-management
techniques are beginning to be revived (pp. 56,
100). The results of regular cool fires, which
usually lasted only a day and did not go up into
the tree canopy (pp.159–60, 242), as against the
present infrequent hot fires (p. 27), meant that
77
before 1788 the modern disastrous bushfires
that devastate settlements, the wildlife and the
landscape and also kill people were very rare or
unknown. This was because the large quantities
of fuel that now feed infernos were not allowed to
build up (p. 160). Gammage quotes a Pitjantatjara
elder who explained that when
the country had been properly looked after …
it was not possible for such things as large-scale
bushfires to occur (p. 160).
The present-day recurrent population explo­
sions of mice, insects and kangaroos were
prevented and the hordes of flies that plague
modern life used to be kept under control
(pp. 81–4); Watkin Tench, writing just after the
First Settlement, commented that
insects, though numerous, are by no means, even
in summer, so troublesome as I have found them
in America, the West Indies and other countries
(1789, p. 76).
If a return to these conditions could be
effected, all Australians would welcome the end
of the famous ‘Australian wave’.
The second is the implications for studies
of Mesolithic landscapes throughout the world.
In the past it has often been assumed that
Mesolithic peoples, including those of Australia,
were conditioned more by their environment
than that their environment was conditioned by
them. Recently the extent to which Mesolithic
people were modifying their environment has
been recognised in Europe and elsewhere. For
example, in Europe they fired woodland both to
attract deer to the new growth at specific places
and to encourage recolonisation by hazel, whose
nuts are extremely nutritious and are frequently
found on Mesolithic sites (Cunliffe 2008, p. 89),
while similar sophisticated landscape manage­
ment has been identified in Eurasia (Harris
1991; 1996; 2010; Harris & Hillman 1989). The
Biggest Estate on Earth shows that, where such a
culture survived long enough to be recorded in a
literate era, it can be seen how considerable were
the modifications made to their environment by
a Mesolithic people. As Gammage points out
78
landscape history
(pp. 296–7), pre-European Australian culture
should really be classified not as hunter-gatherer,
but as hunter-gatherer-cultivator, as they were
harvesting crops whose location was known,
rather than randomly gathering (p. 148). He
claims that:
Only in Australia did a mobile people organise a
continent with such precision. In some past time,
probably distant, their focus tipped from land use
to land care. They sanctioned key principles: think
long term; leave the world as it is; think globally; act
locally; ally with fire; control population (p. 323).
This effectively sums up the approach of
the indigenous inhabitants of Australia, but we
only know about it in Australia because there
are records, written and pictorial, and surviving
descendants of these people. Were it possible to
go back in time to Mesolithic cultures in Europe
or elsewhere in the world, it might be the case that
there were similar extensive adaptations of the
landscape, as many of the indigenous practices
found in Australia would leave little or no trace
in the archaeological record.
The book itself is a pleasure to read, with an
extensive bibliography, good point size (11/15.5)
and attractive typeface (Caslon Classico Regular).
It is printed on good-quality paper, so that the
excellent colour illustrations, which demonstrate
the principles of templates better than written
descriptions can, are able to be placed wherever
appropriate in the text to complement points
being made. The only criticisms are that the
index is not sufficiently comprehensive and
some terms unfamiliar to European audiences
do not appear in the glossary (pp. xviii–xxx), for
example ‘lignotubers’, and that some references
would similarly be unknown and should have
been explained, for example what the Mabo and
Wik judgments (p. xxii) were or who the Aunungu
(p. 48) are. But overall Allen & Unwin are to be
congratulated on their part in this publication.
In a review of an outstanding work with
magnificent illustrations of Australia’s people
and landscape (Faull 1983), I concluded with
a quotation from Kath Walker, the indigenous
Australian poet:
We are nature and the past, all the old ways
Gone now and scattered.
The scrubs are gone, the hunting and the laughter.
The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are
gone from this place.
The bora ring is gone.
The corroboree is gone.
And we are going (1964, p. 25).
Nothing could be more apposite to the present
situation in Australia as described in The Biggest
Estate on Earth. We can only hope that Bill
Gammage’s book, together with other works such
as Back from the Brink (Andrews 2006), may go
some way to redress the balance and reverse the
disastrous way in which the Australian landscape
has generally been managed since 1788.
notes
1. Gammage refers throughout the book to the
indigenous inhabitants of Australia as ‘people’,
qualifying Europeans as ‘newcomers’ or ‘settlers’
(p. xix).
2. For the very different regimes for various plants see
pp. 121–2.
3. These three plates are reproduced courtesy of Bill
Gammage and Allen & Unwin. I should like to record
my thanks to Sam Redman of Allen & Unwin for
his assistance in the preparation of this article.
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