It has long been known that most of the early explorers, whether by sea or land, often noticed smoke from Aborigines’ fires: not simple fires, but burnings that might cover the size of one hundred or even one thousand English farms. Most of the fires were lit deliberately. It was at first proposed by newly arrived Europeans that the fires were lit largely or partly to help the Aborigines in hunting kangaroos, emus, wallabies, and other edible game, and especially to encourage young grass to grow in the burned patches after rain fell. Gammage argues instead that the successful hunting of game was usually a secondary aim within the overall plan. He praises the early Victorian squatter E.M. Curr, who in the 1840s became convinced that the Aborigines were not captives but masters of the continent. In essence, they ‘tilled’ the land and ‘cultivated’ the grasslands with fire. Curr’s was a minority view in his day, but a similar argument was increasingly propounded with a display of new evidence by academics from the 1960s onwards. The Tasmanian geographer W.D. Jackson and the Canberra prehistorian Rhys Jones were torchbearers in this movement. More and more evidence was gathered. On this topic, Gammage’s book must be the most comprehensive array of evidence, much of it coming from his own research and travels in the last ten years.

The theme that Aborigines used fire with high intelligence was widely criticised, especially by natural scientists. Some argued that lightning was the busy creator of bushfires in Australia, or that other natural causes shaped the landscape. Towards the end of the book, Gammage has a brief, courteous, and thoughtful debate with these scientists. It is worth reading in its own right. Gammage argues that for thousands of years the Aborigines used fire regularly, and everywhere. No region in Australia was exempt. Tasmania in the course of thousands of years was especially affected by planned burning. In south-west Tasmania, almost uninhabited today, button grass covers about forty-five per cent of the terrain; in Gammage’s view, it was created by persistent burning and certainly not by lightning. As a producer of food for Aborigines, the button grass plains were more useful than rainforest.

Often the Aborigines lit their fires when they assumed that rain was soon about to fall. The rain, of course, would curb the fire and also water the ash-covered ground in which lay the seeds of grasses and bushes and trees. How did Aborigines, living in a diversity of climates, know that rain was about to fall? An Aboriginal man from central Australia, Walter Smith Purula, offered one answer: ‘They watch the white ants – when they start carrying their eggs out of the creek and put them on a high place, then they know it’s going to rain.’ For this dry region Purula explained when to light fires – the time of day and the season of the year – how to control them, or how to escape from a fire that runs away.

The most frequent grass in old-time Australia was kangaroo grass, a sturdy survivor of drought, and its ‘summer tan was Australia’s dominant colour in 1788’. It was burned systematically by Aborigines every one, two, or three years. They burned with discretion, for this perennial grass grew among tubers, bulbs, and other edible foods. In vast areas the kangaroo grass vanished with the coming of Europeans, and Gammage displays two of Streeton’s Heidelberg paintings. If kangaroo grass still prevailed there would not have been a ‘golden summer’.

Gammage offers five generalisations, which some readers might see as slightly too emphatic, about Aborigines’ handling of fire: ‘It was planned: it was precise; it could be repeated hence predicted; it was organised locally’; and it was used so widely that ‘it united Australia’. Understandably in the nineteenth century this extensive use of fire was discouraged in rural Australia, where all kinds of new and valuable assets – flocks of sheep and even their shepherds, shearing sheds, imported cattle, fences, barns, houses, road bridges – would be destroyed if a fire ran beyond control. As the Aborigines had no domesticated plants or animals, were often on the move, and owned few fixed assets, they could employ fire freely and by and large live with the mishaps.

But their rural successors in this land, the Europeans with their flocks and herds, had to control fire more carefully. The result was that fire became less frequent, and often more disastrous when it did occur. Moreover, the mosaic of vegetation which the thousands of years of systematic burning had created was quickly altered. Near the end of his book, Gammage gives a fascinating summary of a lecture given by Alfred W. Howitt, explorer and observer, to the Royal Society of Victoria in 1890. Howitt explained how the decline of Aborigines and of regular fires in Gippsland had given rise to dense forest. He could remember riding over open country there, but in his lifetime the same country had turned into bush. Thick forest now grew in places where none had existed, and a mass of inflammable deadwood littered the floor. When bushfires came – they were now irregular and unplanned – the blaze was terrifying.

The heavy loss of life in Victoria in February 2009 was largely or partly a result of the refusal to learn some of these Aboriginal lessons. Gammage could have hammered this point. He hints at it or makes it quietly. This is only one of his conclusions. His argument is long term. February 2009 is merely a flick of an eyelid in the history of the human race in this land.