IT WAS as a teenager carting hay in the bush outside Wagga Wagga that Bill Gammage's lifelong curiosity about the Australian landscape emerged. What initially puzzled him was that certain trees were not growing in the soils that he knew best suited them. ''It led me to all sorts of possibilities.''
One of those possibilities turned out to be the crucial role Aboriginal people and their deft use of fire played in shaping the Australian environment, and for the past 12 years Gammage has devoted most of his working life to his much lauded account, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, published a year ago.
Last night Gammage, an adjunct professor at the Australian National University, won Australia's richest literary prize, the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature, part of the Victorian Premier's literary awards, for the book The Age described as ''history of the most readable type … a beautiful and profound piece of writing''. Gammage also won the premier's non-fiction prize, worth $25,000, the same as the other prizes. This year, he also won the PM's $80,000 prize for Australian history.
Gammage told The Age his book's significance lay in the link between the Aboriginal approach to the environment and the Dreaming, and because he had established that approach was applied across the whole country. ''I gave it a spiritual aspect, which scientists aren't into at all. Religious sanction is the most powerful sanction in any society,'' he said. ''That's what kept people at it. They risked their souls if they didn't do it. You can't think of any other imperative. It's hard work, a constant job burning, not burning, deciding what sort of fire. It's a lifetime of learning, which is why we can't do it.
''It was in Tasmania and all over the mainland. While the means of achieving the end might have varied according to the vegetation, the ends were exactly the same.''
Gammage said European settlers could see the benefits of fire to the environment. ''The problem was that they didn't know how to burn. Even the Europeans with the best will in the world who were trying to imitate the Aborigines were setting about destroying it [the environment]. Then when you get the Europeans who have farms [and] … everything that fire will destroy, they changed their regime quickly. You can still see some evidence of Aboriginal fire but basically Australia has been transformed since.''
All the winners except novelist Gillian Mears were at the Regent Theatre to receive their category prizes from the Premier, Ted Baillieu.
Poet John Kinsella said to win a Victorian Premier's prize mattered because ''Melbourne was one of the epicentres of poetry in the world''. He contrasted the awards with the situation in Queensland, where Premier Campbell Newman dumped the equivalent prizes. ''That was an abomination,'' Kinsella said.
Playwright Lally Katz said she was ecstatic to win because, ''in all honesty I was facing financial ruin''. And young-adult writer John Larkin said he had stretched himself as a writer with his winning book.