For over a decade, award winning author and historian Bill Gammage has uncovered a complex system of Aboriginal land management using fire and the life cycles of native plants.
Join Bill Gammage for a fascinating talk and learn about early Europeans accounts of the vegetation between Kangaroo Valley and Pigeon House Mountain, how carefully it was made and managed by First Nation clans and how much European settlers owed to Aboriginal knowledge and guidance.
In the second half of this talk Bill is joined by bagan bariwariganyan: echoes of country curator Jonathan Jones. Together they look at the lessons of the past and discuss how they can set us on the path for a better future, and what we are risking from ignoring First Nations knowledge on land management.
About Bill Gammage
Bill Gammage AM FASSA is an Australian historian, Adjunct Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University (ANU). He is the author of The Broken Years (1974) on the First AIF, Narrandera Shire (1988), The Sky Travellers: Journeys in New Guinea 1938-9 (1998), The Biggest Estate on Earth (2011) and with Bruce Pascoe, First Knowledges Country (2021). The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (2011), has won six prizes, including a Prime Minister’s Literary Prize for Australian History in 2012.
About Jonathan Jones
Jonathan Jones is a member of the Wiradyuri and Kamilaroi peoples of south-east Australia. He first worked with Aunty Julie Freeman and Aunty Cheryl Davison as an emerging artist in 1997, in an exhibition curated by Aboriginal photographer Dr Peter Yanada McKenzie. Jones works across a range of mediums in minimal repeated forms to explore and interrogate cultural and historical relationships and ideas from Indigenous perspectives and traditions. Jones has exhibited both nationally and internationally since the late 1990s, and his work is represented in major public collections throughout Australia.
bagan bariwariganyan: echoes of country
bagan bariwariganyan: echoes of country is a body of works by renowned Gweagal/Wandiwandian storyteller and artist Aunty Julie Freeman, leading Walbunja/Ngarigo artist Aunty Cheryl Davison, and Wiradyuri/Kamilaroi artistJonathan Jones.
The season upholds and maintains Aboriginal values and kinships, featuring an immersive gunyah (home) installation including drawings by the significant Yuin artist Mickey of Ulladulla, a solo exhibition of paintings by Aunty Julie sharing grandmother stories of local plants, animals and weather patterns, and a new installation by Aunty Cheryl Davison, representing the importance of Burrawang seeds, a key traditional food source.
