RELEASED quietly about a year ago is one of those rare
Australian books – one that will change how you see your country.
“The Biggest Estate on Earth” by Bill Gammage describes how
the lush, verdant and productive character of Australia in 1788 was no accident. It looked this way because of the systematic
and precise way it had been managed by Aboriginal people.
The title comes from the pens of the earliest white
explorers. Account after account
described how they found the land undulating with alternate grassy meadows and
forest patches, like an English gentleman’s country estate.
They were astonished to discover a land dominated by well-spaced
large trees, with a lack of undergrowth and an abundance of long swishing
grass.
The way Gammage compiles these colonial
impressions, collated for us to read in one place for the first time, is a
masterful display of the historian’s art.
He can genuinely alter how we view our land and our past,
something that few historians can claim.
A farm without fences.
Gammage describes how this land was managed and moulded by
pre-1788 people, how subtle dams were built, water channels cut, and how fire
was used to replace plant communities.
Australia, he writes, was a farm without fences. It challenges what we define as a farmer or a
primary producer.
 |
| Bill Gammage (Nat Library Australia, Louis Seselja) |
If you replanted the
top of every yam you used, so as to create hectares of yam fields, and
continually weeded it, as happened on Cape York, I’d call that being a
cultivator or a farmer.
If you built fish weirs and constructed wooded channels to
guide water, as happened on the Darling River, you were engaging in aquaculture
on a grand scale. And the produce was
harvested on a scale that ensured longevity in the food supply over differing
seasons and many lifetimes.
“The Biggest Estate On Earth” changed how I see fire in the
Australian landscape. I once derided
those with an urge to burn the land as red-eyed fire fanciers. Gammage has demonstrated how it is an
essential part of the landscape and many plant communities, a primary resource
and a tool.
But we tend to use it as a blunt club upon the land, using
it in fiery ignorance, whereas it was once used as an instrument of supreme
delicacy.
There were many different types of fire, and Gammage
describes how just one valley had four different types of fire regimes. There were “cool” fires, fires used for burns
every two years, or every 50 years in a different place.
And they were never allowed by Aboriginal people to roar
into the incinerating infernos we know today.
First Australians, Scientific Land Managers.
In our lifetimes, the First Australians have gone from being
seen as indolent inhabitants of Terra Nullius to prudent and scientific
caretakers and cultivators. “The Biggest
Estate On Earth” will significantly add to this evolving realisation.
And “scientific” is not a loose term. Bill Stanner in 1969 wrote that Arnhem
Landers used country classifications “as accurately as any ecologist”.
Gammage writes of one grass plain in a eucalypt forest in north
east Victoria (page 72). It is drained
by a small creek, and slopes gently to the west where the creek drops away over
a 5-metre cliff.
It is in fact a “brilliantly placed trap”, writes
Gammage. “Wallabies panicked on the
plain would flee downslope and crash over the cliff, and the survivors would be
ambushed in the narrow gully.”
It was a template repeated across Australia, created by fire and stone axes, and a masterful example of landscape design.
Whenever I take the time to stop and gaze over the
landscape, I now try to image what it would have been like pre-1788. If there are a lot of spindly trees on a
north-facing slope, I think it was once a paddock, now being colonised by trees
after the loss of the fire-burning regime.
Any large tree with a massive trunk may well have been there
for over 200 years, and it is there for a reason.
Still, “The Biggest Estate on Earth” is not an easy book for
everyone to read. It is a catalogue of
land practices, and has pile upon pile of detail and examples. It can be a botanist’s bibliography of plant
species and their ecosystems.
But it is a book whose importance and impact will grow and
grow over the years.
Take time over Christmas to read it, slowly and with
perseverance, and read it somewhere you can look over the Australian landscape.
