Mr Bill Gammage The biggest estate on earth: How Aborigines made Australia

Venue:  Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga - Swan Theatre (Building 12)

Explode the myth that pre-settlement Australia was an untamed wilderness revealing the complex, country-wide systems of land management used by Aboriginal people. Early Europeans commented the land looked like a park. With extensive grassy patches and pathways, open woodlands and abundant wildlife, it evoked a country estate in England. Mr Gammage has discovered Aboriginal people managed the land in a far more systematic and scientific fashion than we have ever realised. Mr Gammage is an historian and adjunct professor in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, best known as author of the ground-breaking The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War.