Toowoomba First Nations Allies

Listening – Learning – Connecting

The biggest estate on Earth

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by

Web Editor
in ,
AuthorGammage, Bill
Year2012
TitleThe Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia
PublisherAllen & Unwin
NotesExplodes 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.
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.
Available from Toowoomba Region Library.

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