Original Land Management

The received wisdom about our earliest colonial painters was that they portrayed this strange Gondwana landscape through the prism of their European-trained eyes, producing idealised images of ordered environments very different from the natural world they were confronted with.

Now a fascinating new thesis has emerged in a book by Bill Gammage,”The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia”, challenging that notion.

The Global Mail has an introduction to this seminal work, which demonstrates that those painters accurately recorded the landscape they found; and in fact documented aboriginal land use practices which may have profoundly shaped our continent and its eco-systems right up to European invasion.