Eric Rolls, author of A Million Wild Acres, has died at the age of 84.
Rolls wrote poetry and non-fiction works for both adults and children across a long career. His best-known work, A Million Wild Acres: 200 Years of Man and an Australian Forest, won "The Age" Book of the Year Award in 1981, and the National Book Council Award for Australian Literature in 1982. According to the Australian Online Bookshop, the book "is the story of men and their passion for land; of occupation and settlement; of destruction and growth. By following the tracks of those pioneers who crossed the Blue Mountains into northern New South Wales, Eric Rolls -- poet, farmer, and self-taught naturalist -- has rewritten the history of European settlement in Australia. He evokes the ruthlessness and determination of the first settlers who worked the land - a land they knew little about."
Rolls was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 1992.
