Top book began with a burning question

BILL Gammage was farming in the Riverina district of NSW in the 1960s when he read accounts of the area from a century before that described it as a "pastoral paradise". It wasn't the country he recognised.

IBNA: According to news, "I knew that country was now red gum forest," Gammage said in Melbourne yesterday.

"If it's red gum forest now, why was it grass then? It was the first time I thought that the Aborigines have been involved in this."

Gammage last night won the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature for his history The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, describing pre-European land management.

The Canberra historian said the "woods and lawns" described by early settlers and depicted in colonial art were the result of Aboriginal burn-offs.

The clearing of forests created grass-covered hunting grounds and also gave protection from bushfires.

Gammage is also the winner of the $25,000 award for non-fiction in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. The awards were presented by Premier and Arts Minister Ted Baillieu in the Regent Theatre ballroom.

Other category winners were Gillian Mears for her novel about Depression-era NSW Foal's Bread, playwright Lally Katz for A Golem Story, poet John Kinsella for Armour and John Larkin for his novel for young adults, The Shadow Girl. They each received $25,000.

The $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature was inaugurated by Mr Baillieu last year, when it was won by Kim Scott for That Deadman Dance.

"The Premier has demonstrated monumental support for these awards and the literary sector," said Michael Williams, director of the Wheeler Centre, which administers the awards.
Gammage and Mears earlier this year won $80,000 each in the Prime Minister's Literary Awards.

Gammage said he had engagements around the country until next September to talk about his research and its implications for land and fire management.

While others had described Aboriginal methods, Gammage said, he had shown they were used across the continent, and their links to Dreaming beliefs.

He said burning of the kind carried out by Aborigines could have helped prevent tragedies such as the Black Saturday bushfires of February 2009 in Victoria.

"That bush is going to grow up and there will be another fire," he said.

"What the Aborigines would have done, the next winter, they would have burned that bush . . . to make sure it was clear."