Aborigines

Although Church of England clergy arrived with the first fleet and were appointed to manage social policy in Australia, including ongoing settlement via immigration, the Church of England seemed to concentrate less on independently building its own congregations and institutions than the Catholic Church.

In The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (2011), Bill Gammage argues that Aboriginal Australians shaped the continent’s vegetation landscape through firestick farming, a sophisticated practice of deliberate, low-intensity burns to create open, park-like grasslands and resource-rich environments, challenging the notion of a “natural” pre-European landscape [11].