Country: Future Fires, Future Farming
by Bill Gammage & Bruce Pascoe
Published by Thames & Hudson Australia - October 2021 - Paperback - 224pp - 20cm x 13cm
The First Knowledges series offers an introduction to Indigenous knowledges in vital areas and their application to the present day and the future. Exploring practices such as architecture and design, land management, botany, astronomy and law, this book series brings together two very different ways of understanding the natural world: one ancient, the other modern. The third book focuses on land and fire management.
For millennia, Indigenous Australians harvested this continent in ways that can offer contemporary environmental and economic solutions.
Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe demonstrate how Aboriginal people cultivated the land through manipulation of water flows, vegetation and firestick practice. Not solely hunters and gatherers, the First Australians also farmed and stored food. They employed complex seasonal fire programs that protected Country and animals alike. In doing so, they avoided the killer fires that we fear today.
Country: Future Fire, Future Farming highlights the consequences of ignoring this deep history and living in unsustainable ways. It details the remarkable agricultural and land-care techniques of First Nations peoples and shows how such practices are needed now more than ever.
'This is essential reading for anyone interested in the well-being and the future of our country.' — Peter Yu Am
'A unique collaboration - subtle, passionate and important.' — Kate Grenville Ao
Bill Gammage is a historian and adjunct professor in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. He is best known as author of the ground-breaking The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War and really important work about Aboriginal landscaping management of Australia The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia.
Bruce Pascoe is a Bunurong man born in Melbourne, and writer of literary fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays and children's literature. He is a professor at the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education & Research at the University of Technology Sydney.
His bestselling book Dark Emu was Book of the Year at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2016, as well as being shortlisted for numerous other awards. He is also the author of Young Dark Emu: A Truer History, published in June 2019.
About the series: Each book is a collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers and editors; the series is edited by Margo Neale, senior Indigenous curator at the National Museum of Australia.
Titles in the series include:
Songlines by Margo Neale & Lynne Kelly (2020)
Design by Alison Page & Paul Memmott (2021)
Country by Bill Gammage & Bruce Pascoe (2021)
Astronomy by Karlie Noon & Krystal De Napoli (2022)
Plants by Zena Cumpston, Michael Fletcher & Lesley Head (2022)
Law by Marcia Langton & Aaron Corn (2023)
Innovation by Ian J McNiven & Lynette Russell (2023)
