Historian wins $80,000 Prime Minister’s prize

Professor Bill Gammage from the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences has won the prestigious Prime Minister's Literary Prize for Australian History, taking home $80,000 for his book The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia . The Biggest Estate on Earth is the result of a decade-long study that dismissed the widely-held idea that pre-European Australia was an untamed wilderness. In fact Indigenous Australians had been using their knowledge of fire, water and life-cycles to manage the landscape for thousands of years. "When Europeans first came to Australia, they assumed that what they saw was natural," Professor Gammage, Adjunct Professor and Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Centre, said. "They often described the landscapes as 'parks' - like the gentlemen's parks in England. "It never occurred to them that the parks in Australia could have been made. It didn't occur to them that 'wandering savages' could have done such a thing." Professor Gammage says there are many lessons about the relationship between people and the landscape that have been lost since the First Fleet landed.