Скачать или смотреть The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia by Prof Bill Gammage

1st Indigenous Seminar Series - 17 October 2013

Bill will discuss about his book ‘The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia. This book argues that Aborigines made Australia in 1788, by using fire or no fire to distribute plants, and plant distribution to locate animals. People made a plant community such as grass or open forest a favourable habitat, associated such communities to link feed to shelter, and used these associations to lure and locate animals. This put every species on ground it preferred, while people knew where their resources were, and subject to Law could harvest them as they chose. They could make paddocks without fences, because in Australia, almost uniquely, the only large predators to disturb prey were human. People were not aimless hunter-gatherers; they planned and worked hard to make plants and animals abundant, convenient and predictable. They depended not on chance, but on policy.

Bill works in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University (ANU), researching Aboriginal land management at the time of contact (“1788”). He grew up in Wagga and went to Wagga High School, and was an ANU undergraduate and postgraduate before teaching history at the Universities of Papua New Guinea (1966, 1972-6) and Adelaide (1977-96). He wrote The Broken Years on Australian soldiers in the Great War (1974+), An Australian in the First World War (1976), Narrandera Shire (1986), The Sky Travellers on the 1938-39 Hagen-Sepik Patrol in New Guinea (1998), and The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia (2011). Most of these books have won prizes. He co-edited the Australians 1938 volume of the Bicentennial History of Australia (1988), and three books about Australians in World War 1. He was historical adviser to Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli and to several documentaries. He served the National Museum of Australia for three years as Council member, deputy chair and acting chair. He was made a Freeman of the Shire of Narrandera in 1987, a fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences in 1991, and an AM in 2005.