Trees and woodland, and their products, were of considerable significance to the daily lives of the AngloSaxons. The usefulness of these as a resource was counterbalanced by the threat posed to the human community by the wildness of forests; both natural dangers from wolves and other animals, and the refuge that forests offered to the lawless and dispossessed. The tree and woodland imagery of the vernacular poetry of the period shows how the Anglo-Saxons used both aspects within the texts to develop ideas and concepts that go beyond the physical realities of not only the resources obtained from trees, but also the woodland as a feature of the landscape around them. Analysis of the vocabulary used reveals a differentiation between the application of two of the terms for woodland, holt and weald. As a holt, in the form of metaphorical forests composed of spears, the landscape can protect the human community as well as threaten it. The forest which, practically speaking, is outside the confines of society becomes, by the use of weald in the poetry, a vehicle for conveying the concept of the boundaries of normality.
are not native to Australia (pp. 115–17). But in
recent years the Australian landscape has been
beset by ever-increasing problems. In addition
to the usual fluctuations of climate that made
Dorothea McKellar refer in her national poem
to a land of ‘droughts and flooding rains’, bush
fires have raged more frequently and with a
greater intensity, salination of the land is an everyincreasing
problem (pp. 110–11) and droughts
and floods are occurring more and more often,
partly as a result of climate change (as with bush
fires) and partly as a result of farming practices
(as with salination). This has led people to look at
alternative ways of doing things and how others
have farmed in the past or elsewhere in the world.
One outstanding work in this regard, Back from the
Brink, by Peter Andrews (2006), advocates a new
way of managing the Australian landscape. Now,
to complement that work, comes this magisterial
study, looking at how Australia’s indigenous
inhabitants1 managed this vast and diverse country
so successfully for tens of thousands of years.
This book is essential reading, not just for those
studying the Australian landscape, but as well
for those interested in environmental matters in
general, while it also has implications for studies
of Mesolithic societies of the past.
It is but seldom that a work appears which
fundamentally changes how the general public,
as opposed to the specialists in the field, view
the exploitation of the landscape, but this is such
a book. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution
was built on the work of previous scholars,
such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, but needed his
meticulous examination of all the evidence in
The Origin of Species in order to convince the rest
of the world. Similarly the ideas in this book
have been much discussed by specialists in the
field, but it is Bill Gammage who draws together
evidence from a multitude of sources in a book
for the general public to show that the Australian
indigenous people also systematically managed
their entire landscape in as sophisticated a manner
as that developed in Europe with the Agricultural
RevolutionThe main sources he uses are in fact the
early European commentators, who frequently
recorded the deliberate setting of fires by the local
inhabitants, but completely failed to appreciate
the significance of what they observed. They
were incapable of comprehending that the people
described by Charles Darwin, amongst others