6 ideas
Early settlers repeatedly described Australian country as looking like 'a gentleman's park': open grassland, scattered trees, clear edges between forest and pasture. Gammage treats these descriptions as accidental testimony. The colonists were recognizing managed landscapes without knowing it, because parkland does not arise without deliberate, repeated intervention.
Aboriginal land managers used fire to create a repeated set of patterns: grass belts, clearings within forest, open corridors, and thickets kept next to open ground. Each pattern put resources and animals in predictable places. Because grazing animals move to fresh green pick after a burn, burning decided where game would be, and made hunting a matter of planning rather than chance.
Aboriginal people managed land under a shared religious and ecological law, the Dreaming, which made care of country an obligation. This law, not just local practice, produced consistent management principles across very different environments from desert to rainforest. So the whole continent functioned as one estate run on common rules, even though hundreds of separate groups did the work.
Fire was applied in small, patchy burns at different frequencies, intensities and seasons, matched to the plant and animal communities of each place. Frequent cool burns kept grass open, while fire was withheld from fire-sensitive vegetation. The resulting mosaic of burn ages kept fuel low and prevented catastrophic wildfire.
When Aboriginal people were displaced and their burning stopped, the parklands filled with scrub and dense regrowth, and fuel loads rose. Much of what later Australians regard as 'natural bush' is therefore an unmanaged, post-1788 landscape. Its greater exposure to severe bushfire is a result of that loss of management, not a sign of wilderness.
European observers took the absence of ploughs, fences and permanent settlements as proof that the land was not farmed. That judgement shaped the terra nullius idea. Gammage argues that managing plants and animals across whole landscapes, rather than confining them to plots, was a form of farming, one that kept people mobile and kept food abundant and predictable.