The Biggest Estate on Earth by Bill Gammage

JUDGES' COMMENTS

Rarely does a work come along that reshapes our sense of place and its history. Bill Gammage’s magnum opus recreates in astonishing detail Indigenous land use prior to European arrival. It describes a complex, interlinked set of practices that allowed Aboriginal Australians to maintain this continent as an immense park, ecologically balanced, abundant and generally hospitable to its denizens.

Latecomers have been so effective in erasing these management regimes that grasping the nature of this earlier continent is almost inconceivable. It is a tribute to Gammage’s wide and deep research, his powerful retrospective imagination, and his bold and vigorous arguments, that we can once again hold that ideal landscape in our minds.