Pre-European Indigenous Australia
Posted: Sun 15 Dec, 2013 11:13 pmI feel fortunate to have had quite an exposure to Walpari peoples and through this have some sort of appreciation of their traditional skills and beliefs but a recent film and a book really have greatly opened my mind.
The film was the ABC doco "The First Footprints” and especially its footage of the recently discovered rock paintings in Arnhem Land – the painting of a large cassowary-like bird thought extinct for 40,000 years and the incredible footage of myriad paintings in a hand carved shelter and what I can only think of as Australia’s Sistine Chapel and that I found hard to view without feeling emotional. We have since bought copies of the DVD as presents for overseas friends who we know would be interested and for ourselves.
The book is the multi award winning “The biggest estate on Earth” by Bill Gammage which gives the extensive evidence of how indigenous fire culture shaped the vegetation of the land. Gammage is a professional historian and his reference base for his thesis is comprehensive and huge. It is a controversial topic in parts perhaps and it surprises me that such a book wasn’t written by a botanist/vegetation ecologist but his references are mainly historical writings and paintings. You only have to experience the near impenetrable scrub on Kangaroo Island (once occupied by aborigines but not over the last 10,000 years at least) compared with the mainland’s historic ‘park like’ earlier landscapes to see the truth behind Gammage’s writing. This book will be one that remains relevant for decades to come.
The film was the ABC doco "The First Footprints” and especially its footage of the recently discovered rock paintings in Arnhem Land – the painting of a large cassowary-like bird thought extinct for 40,000 years and the incredible footage of myriad paintings in a hand carved shelter and what I can only think of as Australia’s Sistine Chapel and that I found hard to view without feeling emotional. We have since bought copies of the DVD as presents for overseas friends who we know would be interested and for ourselves.
The book is the multi award winning “The biggest estate on Earth” by Bill Gammage which gives the extensive evidence of how indigenous fire culture shaped the vegetation of the land. Gammage is a professional historian and his reference base for his thesis is comprehensive and huge. It is a controversial topic in parts perhaps and it surprises me that such a book wasn’t written by a botanist/vegetation ecologist but his references are mainly historical writings and paintings. You only have to experience the near impenetrable scrub on Kangaroo Island (once occupied by aborigines but not over the last 10,000 years at least) compared with the mainland’s historic ‘park like’ earlier landscapes to see the truth behind Gammage’s writing. This book will be one that remains relevant for decades to come.