Bill Gammage

Bill Gammage was an Australian historian and environmentalist who wrote about the history and ecology of Australia, especially the Aboriginal land management practices. He was an adjunct professor and senior research fellow at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University. He was born in 1942 in Orange, New South Wales, and attended Wagga Wagga High School before studying at the Australian National University. He graduated with a PhD in 1970 with a thesis on the diaries and letters of Australian soldiers in World War I, which became his first book The Broken Years (1974). He was on the faculty of the University of Papua New Guinea and the University of Adelaide before returning to ANU in 1997. He wrote several books on Australian history, such as The Sky Travellers (1998), which won the Queensland Premier's History Book Award, and Narrandera Shire (1986), which won the Manning Clark Bicentennial History Award. He also co-edited Australians 1938 (1987), a volume of the Bicentennial History of Australia. His most influential work was The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (2011), which argued that Aboriginal people managed the land in a systematic and scientific way for thousands of years before European invasion. He used written and visual records from the early colonial period to show how Aboriginal people used fire, plants and animals to create a diverse and productive landscape. The book won several awards, including the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History, the Victorian Prize for Literature, and the Manning Clark House National Cultural Award. He died in 2019 at his home in Canberra at the age of 77. He was a member of the Order of Australia and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences.