Bruce Pascoe - Country: Future Fire, Future Farming

What do you need to know to prosper as a people for at least 65,000 years? The First Knowledges series provides a deeper understanding of the expertise and ingenuity of Indigenous Australians.

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.

Bill Gammage is a historian at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University. His books include The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War and three prize-winning titles Narrandera Shire, The Sky Travellers: Journeys in New Guinea 19381939 and The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia.

Bruce Pascoe is an Aboriginal Australian writer of literary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essays and childrens literature. He is the enterprise professor in Indigenous Agriculture at the University of Melbourne. He is best known for his work Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? which re-examines colonial accounts of Aboriginal people in Australia and cites evidence of pre-colonial agriculture, engineering and building construction by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

This is the third title in the First Knowledges six-book series. The fourth and fifth books in the series will be published in 2022.

Praise for Country

Pascoe and Gammage are the champions and intellectual change leaders in Australias understanding of our deep history and future sustainability. This book takes us further into their explorations, with a narrative supported by compelling evidence and laced with acerbic wit and penetrating insights.

It resonates and is consistent with First Nations storytelling this is essential reading for anyone interested in the wellbeing and future of our country.

Peter Yu AM

A remarkable collaboration between two subtle and passionate thinkers about our precious land.

Kate Grenville AO

A timely and important publication, given the recent debate about this countrys history and the contribution to its understanding by this books co-author, Bruce Pascoe.

It offers two idiosyncratic voices sometimes at odds, other times simpatico and often talking past each other as to what urgently needs to change.

Margo Neales introduction highlights the complexities and opportunities of the current re-examination of Australias past.

Their message is clear: the time has come to reckon with our history ...

Lynette Russell AM

Danielle Gorogo, Flaming Trees, 2020

Flaming Trees, the artwork detail used on the cover of this book and reproduced here in black and white, is one of four paintings that depicts the change in the environment and landscape since the arrival of Europeans in Australia.

Danielle Gorogo is a Clarence Valley First Nations artist living in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales. She is a direct descendant of the Dunghutti, Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung nations. Danielles multifaceted cultural heritage, which includes First Nations Australian, Papua New Guinean, Mori and Micronesian ancestry, is reflected in her art.

COUNTRY

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are advised that this book contains the names of people who have passed away.

The stories in this book are shared with the permission of the original storytellers.

BILL GAMMAGE & BRUCE PASCOE

To Australia

NOTE ON STYLE AND SPELLING

The First Knowledges series seeks to honour the individual voices and stylistic preferences of each books authors. Readers may also note that for different language groups, variant spellings occur for similar words, cultural groups or names.

ON FIRE

The authors invite readers to reflect on the message from the contrasting photographs inside this books covers. Pictured at the front is the cool burning of spinifex by Warlpiri people in the Northern Territorys Tanami Desert. At the back is an image of the Gospers Mountain megafire, burning out of control north-west of Sydney in December 2019. This devastating fire season came to be known as Black Summer.

Margo Neale

Bill Gammage & Bruce Pascoe

Bruce Pascoe

Bruce Pascoe

Bruce Pascoe

Bill Gammage

Bill Gammage

Bill Gammage

Bill Gammage

Bill Gammage

Bill Gammage

Bruce Pascoe

MARGO NEALE, SERIES EDITOR

Country is central to everything Aboriginal: it is a continuum, without beginning or ending. In this worldview, everything is living people, animals, plants, rocks, earth, water, stars, air and all else. There is no division between animate and inanimate.

Country, sometimes referred to as the Dreaming, holds Law and knowledge. We believe deeply that if you care for Country, Country will care for you. This is the essence of Country: Future Fire, Future Farming by Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe.

This is the third book in the First Knowledges series of small-format readers a big title for such compact books. It takes us deep into Country as the previous books did, but differently. This book on caring for Country shows us how to treat and manage Country respectfully in the 21st century, as a matter of urgency for a sustainable future. Nothing could be of more critical contemporary relevance after the fires of 201920 and subsequent flood, plague and pandemic events. Indeed, it offers insights into how we can rescue Country from the destructive practices imported by the colonists who, as Bruce Pascoe notes, went straight to replicating the systems of the lands they had left, as if they had moved next door, not to another hemisphere. Instead of learning from the Aboriginal time-tested style of management, which kept this continent healthy and productive for millennia, the colonists created a world where we lurch from one environmental and climatic disaster to another: fire, flood and drought.

The first book in the series, Songlines: The Power and Promise, establishes the foundational truths about how all knowledge resides in Country, including medicine, engineering, ecology, kinship systems and social mores. Design: Building on Country, the second book, explains the importance of building as an extension of Country and designing spaces as a collaborator, not usurper. It shows how we invest objects made from Country with the spirit of our ancestors. We are now halfway through the First Knowledges series and so well into the discussion part of a bigger national discourse about the expertise of First Peoples.