Biggest Estate on Earth - Bill Gammage

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.