By Bill Gammage, Allen and Unwin ($49.99).
“The Biggest Estate on Earth” By Bill Gammage.
THIS might well be the most important and influential Australian book of the 21st century.
In 323 pages Bill Gammage, adjunct professor at the ANU’s Humanities Research Centre, recasts our entire perception of Aboriginal Australia.
His thesis is that by 1788 Aboriginal society had created an Arcadian continent, an estate that supported an entire nation in leisured abundance comparable to the wealthy estate owners of Europe.
To support his argument, he draws on a vast body of research and scholarship that make his conclusions all but unanswerable. Descriptions from explorers and early settlers supplemented by paintings and surveys from the colonial era are his starting point. But then he takes the reader in a scholarly time capsule through all the elements – from fire, soil, vegetation, social mores and religious beliefs – to the continent as it was in 1788.
It is a fascinating journey. The result is a quantum leap in our understanding and appreciation of the world our Australian forebears had created… and lost with the coming of the Europeans.
“Knowledge of how to sustain Australia, of how to be Australian, vanished with barely a whisper of regret,” he writes.
Gammage’s 1974 World War I classic “The Broken Years” changed our perceptions of that conflict and of the frontline Digger. His latest work will light fires of controversy; but in the end it will change what it means to be an Australian.
A great review, sounds like the book should be compulsory reading in schools (and for voters). Also sounds like Bill Gammage should be Prime Minister, as he obviously understands this country better than most of its relatively recent (ie in the last 233 years) immigrants and descendants. One can only hope that his book will find traction. But I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting.