Fire and Hearth: A Study of Aboriginal Usage and European Usurpation in South-Western Australia

Professor Sylvia J. Hallam FAHA has written a substantial Afterword to accompany this facsimile edition of her classic work from 1975, Fire and Hearth.  Since that time, Australians have developed a deeper appreciation of the role of skilled ecological knowledge integrated with deep spiritual commitment in each Aborignal group’s mastery of land.  Prehistorians have always assumed that pre-farming peoples adapted to environments, whilst only farmers changed environments.  We now know that farmers sowed and pastured over landscapes whose vegetation, fauna and climate had already been moulded by people over millennia, largely through the agency of fire.

This revised edition includes a Preface by John Mulvaney.