Fire and hearth: A study of Aboriginal usage and European usurpation in south-western Australia

by Sylvia J Hallam

Originally published by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, this facsimile edition of Professor Sylvia J. Hallam's classic 1975 work, Fire and Hearth, includes a substantial Afterword by the author, and a Preface by Emeritus Professor John Mulvaney. The book has been produced in light of the considerable new interest in the subject of Aboriginal land management before European settlement in Australia. *** "The land the English settled was not as God made it. It was as the Aborigines made it." Such is the challenging claim which opens Sylvia Hallam's majestic pioneer memoir on the interconnections between Aboriginal society, Country and the varied applications of deliberate firing. -- from the Preface by Professor John Mulvaney

Genres: History, Australia, Nonfiction

158 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've now read several books on Aboriginal land management in Australia, and Hallam's stands out for combining breadth and concision. Compared to The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, it is clear, comprehensible and remarkably wide-ranging. Gammage never considers the spiritual side of Aboriginal land management, nor is he particularly good on the archaeological evidence. Hallam is strong on both, as well as drawing effectively on early European accounts of the landscape as Gammage does.

If there was one weakness to the book, it was that Hallam is not a vivid nature writer. This is a difficult problem to overcome in a scientific history, because scientific detail inevitably makes the description less vivid—unless, perhaps you're a professional scientist who can visualise it easily.

Perhaps, though, it is unfair to expect a twentieth-century author to describe eighteenth-century Australia vividly. One terribly sad fact of our history is that it is simultaneously so short and so long. We are keenly aware of how much has been lost in the last 200 years, because there was so much to lose and it was lost so recently. Especially around Perth and the other major cities, few eighteenth-century landscapes remain. Even outside the cities, industrial agriculture, introduced species and the disruption of Aboriginal land management means that eighteenth-century landscapes are still comparatively rare. The average German or Chinese has not witnessed such stark transformations. Their nations have had intensive cereal agriculture and urban life for thousands of years, and the links to the old ways are far more tenuous than in Australia, where the scars of colonisation are visible everywhere.

This was a fine study, and clearly pathbreaking in its time. It is great to see it reissued. Hopefully it finds a new and even more receptive readership today.

[Sheila · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sylvia Hallam's 1975 classic Fire and Hearth is still in print - This is an outstanding work describing the complex sophisticated use of fire and Aboriginal Land Management to enhance grazing and yam planting , strong on spiritual and archaeological aspects as well as referencing early European explorers. One of the many strengths of this book is that it refers specifically to the south west of Western Australia and does not extrapolate these Aboriginal land management practices to the rest of Australia where different but no less sophisticated Aboriginal practices and culture sustained the environment. Aboriginal culture is different in different places and at different times.