It can be difficult for authors to see the light at the end of the tunnel when they're immersed in their work.
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But after a 12-year process of writing and researching his latest book, Canberra-based historian Bill Gammage was happy to wander in the gardens of Manning Clark House yesterday with a cup of tea in hand, accepting congratulations left, right and centre for his latest work.
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His book, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, was yesterday named the winner of the Manning Clark National Cultural Award, offered each year to an individual and a group for outstanding contributions to the quality of Australian cultural life.
An examination of how Aboriginal communities used fire to manage the land over thousands of years before European settlement, Gammage's book is a direct challenge to the early notions of terra nullius, and the perceived aimless wandering of Australia's local inhabitants.
Gammage, who is an adjunct professor at the ANU Research School of Humanities and the Arts, drew on early accounts and artworks, anthropological studies and long-term knowledge of the land to make his case.
He told The Canberra Times earlier this year that he hoped his book would challenge the way concepts of early land management were understood. ''I didn't set out to do this, I set out with a curiosity about what was going on in the landscape, but now I've done it, I hope that it will lead to an understanding that Aborigines were actually managing the land as carefully as we do - differently, but as carefully,'' he said.
''And therefore, all the stuff about terra nullius and about them not owning the land and not deserving to occupy it, it's all nonsense. They were a society just like ours, who were careful with their environment, even more than we are, which is what you'd expect after 60,000 years.''
Also winning the award yesterday in the group category was ABC Television for its recent adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas's novel The Slap.
Award judges described the production as ''emotionally nuanced''.
''The Slap speaks powerfully about Australia as it is now, stripped of romance and stereotypes, and in doing so amplifies an intense and much discussed novel for a broad Australian and international audience,'' they said.
Gammage said yesterday that he had been pleasantly surprised at the interest his book had generated, sending it into its second reprint.
''It's been a very long slog, 12 years at least plus a lifetime of thinking about it,'' he said. ''I didn't really think how it would be received, except that I thought that it was going to challenge a lot of what had been written about Aboriginal people.''
The award places him and the ABC among the likes of Peter Carey, Ken Inglis, Gina Riley and Jane Turner of Kath and Kim fame, Hugh Mackay and several national cultural institutions.