ANU is letting us know their Professor Bill Gammage from the College of Arts and Social Sciences has won the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature.
Professor Gammage, from the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, also took home the Premier’s Non-Fiction Prize – which includes $25,000 prize money – for his book The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. The book also earned Professor Gammage the $80,000 Prime Minister’s Literary Prize for Australian History in July.
The Biggest Estate on Earth, which incorporates a decade of research, documents Indigenous Australians’ use of fire and water to manage the landscape, dismissing the widely held idea that pre-European Australia was an untamed wilderness.