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Country : Future fire, future farming

by Bill Gammage, Bruce Pascoe

This work explores the sophisticated agricultural and land-care techniques developed by Indigenous Australians over millennia. It examines how traditional practices, such as firestick farming and water manipulation, offer sustainable solutions for modern environmental challenges.

Accession 9781760761554 ISBN 9781760761554 Publisher Thames & Hudson

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Topics and Themes

1. **Indigenous Fire Management & Cool Burns**
Aboriginal Australians employed sophisticated, seasonal fire programs — "cool burns" calibrated to dew point, season, latitude, and vegetation type — to shape and protect the land. This was not random burning but a precise, continent-wide discipline that prevented catastrophic wildfires by keeping fire below the tree canopy.

Connect to books about: prescribed burning, pyrogeography, wildfire science, ecological restoration, bushfire history.

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2. **Aboriginal Agriculture & Sovereignty Over the "Hunter-Gatherer" Myth**
A central argument of the book is that Aboriginal Australians were not merely hunters and gatherers — they farmed, stored food, harvested grains, and managed water flows across the continent for tens of thousands of years. This directly challenges colonial narratives used to justify dispossession.

Connect to books about: agricultural history, food sovereignty, colonialism and land rights, revisionist history of Australia.

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3. **Indigenous Ecological Knowledge (Traditional Ecological Knowledge / TEK)**
The book draws on an accumulated archive of knowledge — spanning plant behaviour, animal cycles, seasonal patterns, and geography — developed over at least 65,000 years. This knowledge system is presented as a living, practical science, not merely cultural heritage.

Connect to books about: ethnobotany, traditional ecological knowledge, biocultural diversity, environmental anthropology.

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4. **Country, Songlines & Spiritual Relationships with Land**
"Country" in this book is not real estate — it is the physical expression of Songlines, Dreaming, and lore. The relationship between people and Country is mutual and obligatory: totem holders must care for their species and habitat, and in turn, those species care for them.

Connect to books about: Songlines, Dreamtime, Aboriginal cosmology, human-nature relationships, place-based philosophy.

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5. **Climate Change, Bushfire Crisis & Sustainable Land Use**
The book is explicitly framed as urgent and contemporary — the catastrophic bushfires of today are presented as a direct consequence of abandoning Aboriginal land management. Indigenous practices are offered as practical, evidence-based responses to the climate and fire crises.

Connect to books about: climate adaptation, fire ecology, sustainable land management, environmental policy, Black Summer bushfires.

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6. **Colonialism, Knowledge Erasure & Cultural Appropriation**
The book interrogates how colonial settlement systematically ignored and suppressed millennia of Indigenous land management expertise. It also warns against non-Indigenous people "commandeering traditional expertise" for economic gain — a practice described in the literature as "bio-piracy."

Connect to books about: settler colonialism, decolonisation, intellectual property of Indigenous peoples, postcolonial studies.

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7. **Biodiversity, Habitat & Animal Stewardship**
Aboriginal fire and farming practices were not anthropocentric — they were designed to maintain feed and habitat for native animals across different growing cycles, protecting species at every stage of their life. Ecological balance was a built-in goal of land management.

Connect to books about: wildlife conservation, ecology, biodiversity loss, rewilding, human-animal relationships.

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8. **Indigenous–Non-Indigenous Collaboration & Knowledge Dialogue**
The book itself models a cross-cultural intellectual partnership — a non-Indigenous historian (Gammage) and an Aboriginal writer (Pascoe) contributing distinct but complementary perspectives. The broader *First Knowledges* series frames this as a dialogue between ancient Indigenous knowledge and modern scientific understanding.

Connect to books about: reconciliation, cross-cultural collaboration, two-way learning, Indigenous rights, Australian history.

Country : Future fire, future farming

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