Using 14 illustrations, this talk describes the vegetation of the Adelaide district at the time of European settlement in 1836. Using a variety of fire and no fire regimes, Aboriginal people deliberately distributed this vegetation in patterns, to ensure that all life flourished, and to make resources abundant, convenient and predictable. The talk offers more detail about Adelaide than my forthcoming book, The biggest estate on Earth. How Aborigines made Australia, but it shows that Adelaide’s patterns were broadly like those everywhere else in Australia.

Bill Gammage is an Adjunct Professor in the Humanities Research Centre, in RSHA.  His research involves studying Aboriginal land management at the time of contact. He grew up in Wagga Wagga and went to Wagga High School, then to the Australian National University. He taught history at the University of Papua  New Guinea (1966, 1972-6), the University of Adelaide (1977-96), and the ANU (1997-2003). He wrote The Broken Years. Australian Soldiers in the Great War (1974+), An Australian in the First World War (1976), Narrandera Shire (1986) which won the ABC/ABA Manning Clark Bicentennial History Award in 1988, and The Sky Travellers. Journeys in New Guinea 1938-39 (1998), which won the inaugural Queensland Premier’s Prize for Non-Fiction in 1999, and that year was short-listed for the NSW Premier’s History Prize. He co-edited the Australians 1938 volume of the Bicentennial History of Australia (1988), and three books about Australian soldiers in World War One. He was historical adviser to Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli and 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.