Bill Gammage

Bill Gammage is an adjunct professor in the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University. His most popular books include The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War (1974) and The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (2011), which has won six prizes, including a Prime Minister’s Literary Prize for Australian History in 2012.

Bill Gammage reviews 'Lords of Death' by Suzanne Welborn

September 1982, no. 44 • 01 September 1982

This book is concerned essentially with the impact of the environment upon Europeans in Australia. It sets out to test C.E.W. Bean’s thesis that during the Great War the most effective Australian soldiers came from the bush. It does this in relation to men from Western Australia, arguing that the West was one of the most predominantly bush areas of Australia, and therefore that there, if anywher ... (read more)

Bill Gammage on notions of country (Writing the Australian Landscape keynote)

June–July 2014, no. 362 • 27 May 2014

In Australia, thinking ‘landscape’, ‘country’, and ‘place’ virtually interchangeable is the hallmark of a migrant society. This is obvious because of the skeleton at our feast, the contrast between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ways of seeing land. Both can agree that ‘there’s no place like home’, because ‘place’ here means ‘a place’, a particular place, home. But non-Abo ... (read more)