Bill Gammage's Dymphna Clark Lecture

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2014 Dymphna Clark Lecture with Bill Gammage Tuesday 14 October, 6pm National Library of Australia, Level 4, Conference Room Entry $20/$15 (concession), MCH Members FREE Enquiries 02 6295 1808 or [email protected] Bookings http://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/2014-dymphna-clark-lecture-with-bill- gammage-tickets-13147842551 Bill Gammage presents the 2014 Dymphna Clark Lecture with his talk The Future Makers. This talk sketches how Aboriginal people managed land at the time Europeans arrived (“1788”). They allied with fire and no fire to distribute plants, and used plant distribution to locate animals. This ensured that every species had reserved for it a preferred habitat according to Law, and that resources were abundant, convenient and predictable. The landscape was not natural in 1788, but made into patterns. Similar patterns can be glimpsed elsewhere, notably in north America, even where people were farmers, so the question arises whether Australian patterns might illuminate pre-contact land management elsewhere. Bill Gammage is an adjunct professor in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University (ANU), researching Aboriginal land management at the time of contact (“1788”). He wrote The Broken Years on Australian soldiers in the Great War (1974+), An Australian in the First World War (1976), Narrandera Shire (1986), The Sky Travellers on the 1938-39 Hagen-Sepik Patrol in New Guinea (1998), and The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia (2011). Most of these books have won prizes. He co-edited the Australians 1938 volume of the Bicentennial History of Australia (1988), and three books about Australians in World War 1. He was historical adviser to Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli and to several documentaries. He served the National Museum of Australia for three years as Council member, deputy chair and acting chair. He was made a Freeman of the Shire of Narrandera in 1987, a fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences in 1991, and an AM in 2005. .

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