Gammage wins $100,000 Premier's prize

Professor Bill Gammage has won Australia’s largest literary award, the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature.

The prize is part of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, which were presented by Victorian Premier and Arts Minister, Ted Baillieu, at the Regent Theatre in Melbourne on 16 October.

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.

Melbourne newspaper The Age has described the book as ‘’history of the most readable type … a beautiful and profound piece of writing'’.

Read more about The Biggest Estate on Earth at http://news.anu.edu.au/?p=13571

Watch an interview with Professor Gammage on ANU Channel on YouTube at http://bit.ly/rep_parklife