The Biggest Estate on Earth, by Bill Gammage
Moving on and complimenting Regenerative Read 8, Dark Emu, Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth is heavily referenced by Bruce Pascoe.
This book paints a very different picture of the Australian landscape, one that had been meticulously managed through fire and millennia of Indigenous knowledge in land management. with an emphasis on how sophisticated, interconnected and even intra-continental Aboriginal land management was to culture and country.
The book has a great section with colour plates in which it compares landscapes and outlines the different bands of growth – pointing out new scrub-like growth and pioneer establishment where fire once managed the landscapes.
Other sections are filled with early encounters with the Australian landscape that appear to be very different to what we now see as ‘pristine bush’ as well as a number of detailed land management techniques employed by Indigenous cultures across the continent.
This is another read that is pretty dense to get through but a great resource for anyone with an interest in fire management and landscape regeneration
Click here to Bill talking about The Biggest Estate on Earth in 2015 as part of the Lunchbox / Soapbox series presented by The Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas.
For the next little while LPLN Facilitator, Danny, will be featuring resources aimed to inspire.
Stay tuned every here or on the facebook page Wednesday and Friday for another resource off the shelf.