A book about fire in Australia has won the nation’s top literary prizes while encouraging discussions about the role of fire and how it was managed before settlement by Europeans. In The Biggest Estate on Earth, historian Bill Gammage writes about settlers in the 1700s describing the land as looking like a park, with extensive grassy patches and pathways, open woodlands, and abundant wildlife. He explains this was because Aboriginal people managed the land, including the use of fire as a tool, in a far more systematic and scientific fashion than most people realized.
Below is an excerpt from the transcript of a very interesting video piece produced by ABC in Australia about Mr. Gammage’s thoughts concerning the role of fire in Australia:
TIM LEE: And that helps explain why his book is called The Biggest Estate on Earth. Bill Gammage is not the first to show Aborigines used what has been dubbed fire-stick farming – burning extensively and systematically throughout the year to ensure plentiful wildlife and plant foods. Several scientists have previously done that. But he is the first to exhaustively study the written and pictorial record left by the first European settlers.
BILL GAMMAGE: The scrub was very open when Europeans arrived. There’s stories of driving coaches through country which is now very thick scrub. And what happened was simply that Aboriginal burning was stopped and that allowed the scrub first and then the Eucalypts to regenerate and gradually the bush became denser and denser and denser. And you can see that particularly on hills, but you can see it in all kinds of vegetation. Open, dry, Western Plains-type of Eucalypts, the wet sclerophyll forest, rainforest. Rainforest expands, wet sclerophyll forest gets thicker. So, Aboriginal fire was actually making Australia, not a natural landscape, but a made landscape. Aborigines made it. And Europeans, when they came, assumed it was natural and so they left it alone. And what that meant was that trees and scrub were promoted to the disadvantage of grass.
Mr. Gammage is not the first to write about this, but the interest the book has generated is resulting in renewed discussions about the role of fire in Australia. Should one of the primary goals be to replicate conditions prior to settlement by Europeans? But was that “natural”? Since Aborigines altered the natural landscape with fire for centuries did that become the new “natural”? After settlement, priorities other than “plentiful wildlife and plant foods” emerged, such as protecting property and the lives of millions of people.
“Pre-European Settlement Conditions” are but a small moment in time as to what the landscape “looked like”, and I would hardly think those conditions as seen by early settlers were stable – Nature never is. So, rather than trying to restore ecosystems based on historical looks, we should focus on restoring those lost processes, functions, associated native plant communities, and keep on doing prescribed burning!
Excellent
This information should be published far and wide
Bill Gammage’s labour of love over so many years has resulted in a book that could change Australia – change it from its suicidal course that tried to Europeanise teh landscape.