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Dark Emu
Dark Emu puts forward an argument for a reconsideration of the hunter-gatherer tag for precolonial Aboriginal Australians. The evidence insists that Aboriginal people right across the continent were using domesticated plants, sowing, harvesting, irrigating and storing – behaviours inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag. Gerritsen and Gammage in their latest books support this premise but Pascoe takes this further and challenges the hunter-gatherer tag as a convenient lie. Almost all the evidence comes from the records and diaries of the Australian explorers, impeccable sources.
6 pages, Audible Audio
First published January 1, 2014
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About the author
Bruce Pascoe
46 books322 followersBruce Pascoe was born of Bunurong and Tasmanian Aboriginal heritage in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond and graduated from the University of Melbourne with a Bachelor of Education. He is a member of the Wathaurong Aboriginal Co-operative of southern Victoria and has been the director of the Australian Studies Project for the Commonwealth Schools Commission.
Bruce has had a varied career as a teacher, farmer, fisherman, barman, fencing contractor, lecturer, Aboriginal language researcher, archaeological site worker and editor.
He won the Fellowship of Australian Writers´ Literature Award in 1999 and his novel Fog a Dox (published by Magabala Books in 2012), won the Young Adult category of the 2013 Prime Minister's Literary Awards.
Source: http://brucepascoe.com.au/about/
Bruce has had a varied career as a teacher, farmer, fisherman, barman, fencing contractor, lecturer, Aboriginal language researcher, archaeological site worker and editor.
He won the Fellowship of Australian Writers´ Literature Award in 1999 and his novel Fog a Dox (published by Magabala Books in 2012), won the Young Adult category of the 2013 Prime Minister's Literary Awards.
Source: http://brucepascoe.com.au/about/
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,064 reviews
February 28, 2019
This book ought to be made compulsory reading for every Australian. There is a Ted talk by Bruce Pascoe that covers some of the ground covered here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqgrS...) but this book goes into much more detail.
The standard understanding of Australia prior to white settlement, even in the kindest versions, is that the Australian Aboriginals were trapped in a land without domesticable plants or animals. This meant they had to live the nomadic lives of hunter-gatherers, and it also meant they were very unlikely to be able to develop any other forms of technology - they were effectively trapped in the Stone Age. Sure, they had clever sticks they could throw like the boomerang or to help them throw spears further, like a woomera, but really, all this was very prehistoric. They had no agriculture and no permanent settlements, so, when they came into contact with our much more advanced civilisation, really, the outcome was inevitable.
Of course, this says something particularly disgusting about western civilisation – that we can’t come into contact with a civilisation less developed than our own without completely destroying it – but then, if the last 1000 years or so have taught us anything about white people, surely it is that.
This book provides lots of evidence that the Aboriginal peoples of Australia had much more advanced agriculture and fishing technologies than we have ever given them credit for. That they farmed extensive areas of land, including grains and yams, and that their management of the land proved much more sustainable than anything we have achieved, where they have turned deserts into food bowls, we've done pretty much the exact opposite - as the million or so fish we have just killed over summer in the Darling River shows all too clearly. One of the major arguments of this book is that modern Australia has much to learn from Aboriginal Australia in terms of how to manage our land and waterways. Including the types of crops we should grow.
The line I kept thinking of while reading this was from Paul Simon’s The Boxer: ‘All lies and jests, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest’. A lot of this book is taken from the journals of explorers who had first contact with Aboriginals. Often the explorers only lived because they raided the grain stores of the Aboriginal people’s whose land they were passing through. Sometimes they would describe Aboriginal women bent over picking yams in cultivated fields that stretched for as far as the eye could see – or came across huts that had clearly been there for years and years. And yet the myth of the hunter-gatherer Aboriginal persisted despite the evidence of their eyes.
Of course, this 'confusion' was ‘motivated’. That is, if Aboriginals were hunter-gatherers then they only had a loose connection to the land, certainly nothing like 'ownership'. But if they were farmers, then our dispossession of them might be more difficult to justify. The extensive efforts made by early white settlers to destroy evidence of Aboriginal settlements, farms, houses, and fishing harbours are remarkable and are clearly vandalism on a scale that is hard to comprehend.
This book is something else. I feel embarrassed I never knew any of this stuff. We were certainly never taught anything like this at school. It is possible that Australian Aboriginals were among first farmers in the world. This ought to be something Australians more generally should celebrate, but the fact is that we don’t even know it is the case. Honestly, and particularly if you are Australian, you need to read this.
The standard understanding of Australia prior to white settlement, even in the kindest versions, is that the Australian Aboriginals were trapped in a land without domesticable plants or animals. This meant they had to live the nomadic lives of hunter-gatherers, and it also meant they were very unlikely to be able to develop any other forms of technology - they were effectively trapped in the Stone Age. Sure, they had clever sticks they could throw like the boomerang or to help them throw spears further, like a woomera, but really, all this was very prehistoric. They had no agriculture and no permanent settlements, so, when they came into contact with our much more advanced civilisation, really, the outcome was inevitable.
Of course, this says something particularly disgusting about western civilisation – that we can’t come into contact with a civilisation less developed than our own without completely destroying it – but then, if the last 1000 years or so have taught us anything about white people, surely it is that.
This book provides lots of evidence that the Aboriginal peoples of Australia had much more advanced agriculture and fishing technologies than we have ever given them credit for. That they farmed extensive areas of land, including grains and yams, and that their management of the land proved much more sustainable than anything we have achieved, where they have turned deserts into food bowls, we've done pretty much the exact opposite - as the million or so fish we have just killed over summer in the Darling River shows all too clearly. One of the major arguments of this book is that modern Australia has much to learn from Aboriginal Australia in terms of how to manage our land and waterways. Including the types of crops we should grow.
The line I kept thinking of while reading this was from Paul Simon’s The Boxer: ‘All lies and jests, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest’. A lot of this book is taken from the journals of explorers who had first contact with Aboriginals. Often the explorers only lived because they raided the grain stores of the Aboriginal people’s whose land they were passing through. Sometimes they would describe Aboriginal women bent over picking yams in cultivated fields that stretched for as far as the eye could see – or came across huts that had clearly been there for years and years. And yet the myth of the hunter-gatherer Aboriginal persisted despite the evidence of their eyes.
Of course, this 'confusion' was ‘motivated’. That is, if Aboriginals were hunter-gatherers then they only had a loose connection to the land, certainly nothing like 'ownership'. But if they were farmers, then our dispossession of them might be more difficult to justify. The extensive efforts made by early white settlers to destroy evidence of Aboriginal settlements, farms, houses, and fishing harbours are remarkable and are clearly vandalism on a scale that is hard to comprehend.
This book is something else. I feel embarrassed I never knew any of this stuff. We were certainly never taught anything like this at school. It is possible that Australian Aboriginals were among first farmers in the world. This ought to be something Australians more generally should celebrate, but the fact is that we don’t even know it is the case. Honestly, and particularly if you are Australian, you need to read this.
December 29, 2019
Check your conspiracy theories! A free cut-out-and-keep guide
Quickly read the following stories. For each one, decide whether you believe version A or version B.
_____________________
The Shoah
Version A: Between 1941 and 1945, the Nazi German government systematically arrested, interned and murdered about six million Jews.
Version B: Reports of the so-called "Holocaust" were greatly exaggerated by the international Jewry in order to further their Zionist aims. The so-called "death camps" had no gas chambers, and less than 200,000 Jews were actually killed.
_____________________
The moon landings
Version A: During the 1960s, the US inaugurated and pursued an ambitious program of manned space exploration, which at its height accounted for about 3% of the country's GDP and employed over 100,000 people. It achieved its aim of allowing several people to travel to the Moon and back.
Version B: The so-called "Moon landings" never happened, and the so-called "Apollo program" was an elaborate fraud carried out for propaganda reasons. Claimed documentary footage was actually faked in secret Hollywood studios.
_____________________
9/11
Version A: On September 11 2001, nineteen mostly Saudi men performed a coordinated hijacking of four commercial airplanes. Two of the planes were crashed into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon. A total of nearly three thousand people were killed.
Version B: 9/11 was a US government black operation. Explosives were planted ahead of time at the targets, in order to make the damage much more severe and in particular to bring down the Twin Towers.
_____________________
Australian aboriginal history
Version A: Until European invaders arrived in the late 18th century, Australia was the home of a peaceful society which had over a period of tens of thousands of years developed sustainable methods for living in the dry and relatively infertile climate. These people had permanent settlements of, in some cases, up to a thousand inhabitants, and well-developed agriculture and aquaculture. The invaders systematically concealed evidence of a genocide practiced against the original inhabitants of Australia, and also of the original Australians' level of civilisation, in order to increase the plausibility of their own claim to ownership. However, abundant evidence of the real course of events is available in the writings of many early European explorers.
Version B: A campaign of disinformation is being waged by unscrupulous people claiming Aboriginal descent. They misquote or falsify historical accounts to give the impression that their ancestors were more advanced than was actually the case and had a reasonable claim to own their territories, in the hope of extracting concessions from the Australian government.
_____________________
Well, it is of course difficult to be sure that you're making the right choice between A and B. For what it's worth, my late grandmother visited her family's home town in Poland after World War II, talked to people there, and reported that every single one of her Jewish relatives appeared to have been killed; I worked for NASA between 1999 and 2006, and got to know several people personally who said they had worked on the Apollo project; and a researcher colleague I've been meeting from time to time at conferences since the early 90s told me they saw the hijacked plane hit the Pentagon with their own eyes. I don't have any first-hand evidence about what happened to the original inhabitants of Australia. But if I had to bet, I'd say that the testimony reproduced in this book was mostly reliable, and it supports version A.
Quickly read the following stories. For each one, decide whether you believe version A or version B.
_____________________
The Shoah
Version A: Between 1941 and 1945, the Nazi German government systematically arrested, interned and murdered about six million Jews.
Version B: Reports of the so-called "Holocaust" were greatly exaggerated by the international Jewry in order to further their Zionist aims. The so-called "death camps" had no gas chambers, and less than 200,000 Jews were actually killed.
_____________________
The moon landings
Version A: During the 1960s, the US inaugurated and pursued an ambitious program of manned space exploration, which at its height accounted for about 3% of the country's GDP and employed over 100,000 people. It achieved its aim of allowing several people to travel to the Moon and back.
Version B: The so-called "Moon landings" never happened, and the so-called "Apollo program" was an elaborate fraud carried out for propaganda reasons. Claimed documentary footage was actually faked in secret Hollywood studios.
_____________________
9/11
Version A: On September 11 2001, nineteen mostly Saudi men performed a coordinated hijacking of four commercial airplanes. Two of the planes were crashed into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon. A total of nearly three thousand people were killed.
Version B: 9/11 was a US government black operation. Explosives were planted ahead of time at the targets, in order to make the damage much more severe and in particular to bring down the Twin Towers.
_____________________
Australian aboriginal history
Version A: Until European invaders arrived in the late 18th century, Australia was the home of a peaceful society which had over a period of tens of thousands of years developed sustainable methods for living in the dry and relatively infertile climate. These people had permanent settlements of, in some cases, up to a thousand inhabitants, and well-developed agriculture and aquaculture. The invaders systematically concealed evidence of a genocide practiced against the original inhabitants of Australia, and also of the original Australians' level of civilisation, in order to increase the plausibility of their own claim to ownership. However, abundant evidence of the real course of events is available in the writings of many early European explorers.
Version B: A campaign of disinformation is being waged by unscrupulous people claiming Aboriginal descent. They misquote or falsify historical accounts to give the impression that their ancestors were more advanced than was actually the case and had a reasonable claim to own their territories, in the hope of extracting concessions from the Australian government.
_____________________
Well, it is of course difficult to be sure that you're making the right choice between A and B. For what it's worth, my late grandmother visited her family's home town in Poland after World War II, talked to people there, and reported that every single one of her Jewish relatives appeared to have been killed; I worked for NASA between 1999 and 2006, and got to know several people personally who said they had worked on the Apollo project; and a researcher colleague I've been meeting from time to time at conferences since the early 90s told me they saw the hijacked plane hit the Pentagon with their own eyes. I don't have any first-hand evidence about what happened to the original inhabitants of Australia. But if I had to bet, I'd say that the testimony reproduced in this book was mostly reliable, and it supports version A.
November 26, 2023
"The belief that Aboriginal people were 'mere' hunter-gatherers has been used as a political tool to justify dispossession." - Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu.
I feel like everyone, especially all Australians should read this book.
I enjoyed this easy-to-read non-fiction by Professor Bruce Pascoe. It helped me gain a deeper understanding of the ongoing conversation about Indigenous rights and see the incredible and complex history of Australia's First Nations people that often gets overlooked and overshadowed. Honestly, why is this stuff not taught widely in schools? I am kinda flabbergasted that so much of Australia’s incredible history of the world’s oldest continuing civilisation gets glossed over and what’s fed to children, or was at least to me when I was in school, was full of European-centred ideas and biases.
Much of history is written by the victors, and in Australia's case, it was written by invaders of Australia, with a strong argument that it may've been knowingly done to discredit Australia's original owners so that the government could rationalise their theft of the country/continent.
Pascoe does a fantastic job with detailed research, making a strong case for how advanced Indigenous people were as sustainable agriculturalists. As I looked into evidence from early explorers and got into their stories, the book not only busted myths but also made me profoundly appreciate how ingenious and clever Indigenous practices were way before “settlers” showed up. An eye-opening and essential read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of Australia’s past and present.
Note: I do acknowledge there is an academic rebuttal to Dark Emu which I have yet to read. Regardless, it still stands that Pascoe’s work is a successful challenge to the way Australia once understood Indigenous people and cultures.
I feel like everyone, especially all Australians should read this book.
I enjoyed this easy-to-read non-fiction by Professor Bruce Pascoe. It helped me gain a deeper understanding of the ongoing conversation about Indigenous rights and see the incredible and complex history of Australia's First Nations people that often gets overlooked and overshadowed. Honestly, why is this stuff not taught widely in schools? I am kinda flabbergasted that so much of Australia’s incredible history of the world’s oldest continuing civilisation gets glossed over and what’s fed to children, or was at least to me when I was in school, was full of European-centred ideas and biases.
Much of history is written by the victors, and in Australia's case, it was written by invaders of Australia, with a strong argument that it may've been knowingly done to discredit Australia's original owners so that the government could rationalise their theft of the country/continent.
Pascoe does a fantastic job with detailed research, making a strong case for how advanced Indigenous people were as sustainable agriculturalists. As I looked into evidence from early explorers and got into their stories, the book not only busted myths but also made me profoundly appreciate how ingenious and clever Indigenous practices were way before “settlers” showed up. An eye-opening and essential read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of Australia’s past and present.
Note: I do acknowledge there is an academic rebuttal to Dark Emu which I have yet to read. Regardless, it still stands that Pascoe’s work is a successful challenge to the way Australia once understood Indigenous people and cultures.
February 6, 2024
5★
“Imagine you are riding beside the explorer and surveyor Major Thomas Mitchell (1792-1855). He’s an educated and sensitive man and would have been great company, if a little eccentric.”
I’ll say! Pascoe has written often about Aboriginal history, but this is the first book of his I’ve read. He has included extensive references to original diaries and papers as well as to research. There are several photos, but the ones I’ve included here are from other sources.
I’ve read some of this information in Bill Gammage's The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, and I am still gob-smacked that mainstream history hasn’t yet seriously amended its description of the Aboriginal culture of “colonial” times as nomadic and stone-age.
To compound the insult, colonists who ran across structures of some kind decided they were evidence of earlier European settlement, which meant they were just “repossessing” what was rightfully theirs. But diaries and reports of the first explorers show clearly that the local indigenous people were well established across the continent.
“Mitchell also records his astonishment at the size of the villages. He noticed:
‘. . . some huts...being circular; and made of straight rods meeting at an upright pole in the centre; the outside had first been covered with bark and grass, and the entirety coated over with clay. The fires appeared to have been made nearly in the centre; and a hole at the top had been left as a chimney.’
He counts the houses and estimates a population of over one thousand. He’s disappointed that nobody’s home, it’s obvious they have only just left and the evidence is everywhere that they have used the place for a very long time.
One of Mitchell’s party comments that the building were, ‘of very large dimensions, one capable of containing at least 40 persons and of very superior construction.’”
Sketch by Owen Stanley on HMS Rattlesnake c. 1848
[An example not from Pascoe's book]
Just imagine someone moving into your house as Mitchell did during his travels, saying the building was quite comfortable, while you go and hide in the bushes. Unthinkable.
There are also well-documented tales of local Aboriginal people stepping in to save injured and starving explorers who think they are charting unknown territory. To be fair, it was unknown . . . to them.
But the Aboriginal people across the continent knew the country well and how to look after these lost souls. They also knew each other and traded and shared their songlines, which are a complex system of stories, history, maps, wayfinding, such that there were people from one area who could describe how to find something in an area they’d never visited. I’m not sure many people today could describe such a journey without resorting to technology or at least recording details in writing.
The first book I remember reading about Australian history was called something like Cooper’s Creek, about the Dig Tree and the shambles that was the Burke and Wills expedition. With them was Charlie King, who was rescued by the local Aboriginal people and stayed with them long enough to father a child. I’m still not sure what book it was, but it sparked my interest enough to want to migrate, and I did.
This book I enjoyed for the information about the harvesting and storage of crops, the wells, the dams, the building - all the hallmarks of a settled civilisation. The people had settled everywhere, even the arid deserts thought to be empty, yet they were dismissed as vermin to be hunted to extinction. Unforgiveable.
The drawing made by the junior artist Petit, first appeared in 1807 in Peron, Lesueur and Petit's Atlas [Also not from Pascoe's book]
This is an informative, infuriating, slim book of a history that deserves to be spread LOUDLY far and wide. The Bangarra Dance Company, an Indigenous dance company, put on a production of Dark Emu when I originally wrote my review.
Anyone interested in following up to see more photos might like to visit: http://nationalunitygovernment.org/co...
For a 2018 discussion of the subject, see 'The Conversation'. This isn’t going to go away.
https://theconversation.com/friday-es...
A 2019 discussion about the book and a new kids' version out soon!
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2...
“Imagine you are riding beside the explorer and surveyor Major Thomas Mitchell (1792-1855). He’s an educated and sensitive man and would have been great company, if a little eccentric.”
I’ll say! Pascoe has written often about Aboriginal history, but this is the first book of his I’ve read. He has included extensive references to original diaries and papers as well as to research. There are several photos, but the ones I’ve included here are from other sources.
I’ve read some of this information in Bill Gammage's The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, and I am still gob-smacked that mainstream history hasn’t yet seriously amended its description of the Aboriginal culture of “colonial” times as nomadic and stone-age.
To compound the insult, colonists who ran across structures of some kind decided they were evidence of earlier European settlement, which meant they were just “repossessing” what was rightfully theirs. But diaries and reports of the first explorers show clearly that the local indigenous people were well established across the continent.
“Mitchell also records his astonishment at the size of the villages. He noticed:
‘. . . some huts...being circular; and made of straight rods meeting at an upright pole in the centre; the outside had first been covered with bark and grass, and the entirety coated over with clay. The fires appeared to have been made nearly in the centre; and a hole at the top had been left as a chimney.’
He counts the houses and estimates a population of over one thousand. He’s disappointed that nobody’s home, it’s obvious they have only just left and the evidence is everywhere that they have used the place for a very long time.
One of Mitchell’s party comments that the building were, ‘of very large dimensions, one capable of containing at least 40 persons and of very superior construction.’”
Sketch by Owen Stanley on HMS Rattlesnake c. 1848
[An example not from Pascoe's book]
Just imagine someone moving into your house as Mitchell did during his travels, saying the building was quite comfortable, while you go and hide in the bushes. Unthinkable.
There are also well-documented tales of local Aboriginal people stepping in to save injured and starving explorers who think they are charting unknown territory. To be fair, it was unknown . . . to them.
But the Aboriginal people across the continent knew the country well and how to look after these lost souls. They also knew each other and traded and shared their songlines, which are a complex system of stories, history, maps, wayfinding, such that there were people from one area who could describe how to find something in an area they’d never visited. I’m not sure many people today could describe such a journey without resorting to technology or at least recording details in writing.
The first book I remember reading about Australian history was called something like Cooper’s Creek, about the Dig Tree and the shambles that was the Burke and Wills expedition. With them was Charlie King, who was rescued by the local Aboriginal people and stayed with them long enough to father a child. I’m still not sure what book it was, but it sparked my interest enough to want to migrate, and I did.
This book I enjoyed for the information about the harvesting and storage of crops, the wells, the dams, the building - all the hallmarks of a settled civilisation. The people had settled everywhere, even the arid deserts thought to be empty, yet they were dismissed as vermin to be hunted to extinction. Unforgiveable.
The drawing made by the junior artist Petit, first appeared in 1807 in Peron, Lesueur and Petit's Atlas [Also not from Pascoe's book]
This is an informative, infuriating, slim book of a history that deserves to be spread LOUDLY far and wide. The Bangarra Dance Company, an Indigenous dance company, put on a production of Dark Emu when I originally wrote my review.
Anyone interested in following up to see more photos might like to visit: http://nationalunitygovernment.org/co...
For a 2018 discussion of the subject, see 'The Conversation'. This isn’t going to go away.
https://theconversation.com/friday-es...
A 2019 discussion about the book and a new kids' version out soon!
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2...
June 8, 2020
Pascoe tries to paint Aborigines as some kind of rustic, pastoral race, ignoring overwhelming amounts of evidence (found in the journals of explorers like Sturt) that they actually invented differential calculus, built gothic cathedrals full of esoteric symbolism (Europeans simply ripped these off), and even had the first intergalactic civilisation, before evil white supremacists like Pascoe conspired to cover up the full, awe-inspiring scale of their achievements.
November 13, 2019
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. There is no proof of Pascoe's claims in this book.
Much worse, with minor effort at checking his claims I was able to immediately prove that he had entirely misrepresented the diaries of the explorers he had quoted. These range widely. The most egregious examples I noted were:
1. Misrepresenting a report of wild grasses growing along a creek for nine miles and evidence of hunter-gathering to be nine miles of harvested agricultural land.
2. Stating that an explorer said there were permanent settlements of around 1,000 people when he actually reported 'native huts'.
So serious is this misrepresentation that, in the academic sphere, it would be regarded as academically fraudulent. Fortunately, this untrained alternative history aficionado is not an academic.
This work is one of fiction or "sci-fi alternative history". I am a historian, that's what my PhD is in.
This is not history.
I give it one star as I cannot give it zero (let alone a negative rating). But my rating is zero stars.
It is one of the very few books so bad that I stopped reading it before the end, and discarded it.
Recommend it by recategorised as "science fiction alternative history".
Much worse, with minor effort at checking his claims I was able to immediately prove that he had entirely misrepresented the diaries of the explorers he had quoted. These range widely. The most egregious examples I noted were:
1. Misrepresenting a report of wild grasses growing along a creek for nine miles and evidence of hunter-gathering to be nine miles of harvested agricultural land.
2. Stating that an explorer said there were permanent settlements of around 1,000 people when he actually reported 'native huts'.
So serious is this misrepresentation that, in the academic sphere, it would be regarded as academically fraudulent. Fortunately, this untrained alternative history aficionado is not an academic.
This work is one of fiction or "sci-fi alternative history". I am a historian, that's what my PhD is in.
This is not history.
I give it one star as I cannot give it zero (let alone a negative rating). But my rating is zero stars.
It is one of the very few books so bad that I stopped reading it before the end, and discarded it.
Recommend it by recategorised as "science fiction alternative history".
October 6, 2021
I have been looking for a copy of this book for a long while now, and was lucky enough to be gifted a voucher recently, so I bit the bullet and bought it new (rare for me).
First published in 2014, (and reprinted a lot!) then revised in 2018, I have a copy of the slightly longer revised edition.
This is a fascinating book, with extensive references and bibliography which clearly spells out all Pascoe's source material.
The quick overview is (not Pascoe's words), that history is written by the victors - or in this case - the colonists. For as long as Australian history has been written, the Aboriginals have been described as Stone-aged man depicted as subsistence hunters, who live is temporary shelters. Pascoe uses the original colonists and explorer's diaries which describe what they found as they moved through remote parts of Australia. Pascoe has organised his evidence into chapters titled Agriculture; Aquaculture; Population and Housing; Storage and Preservation; Fire; The Heavens, language and Law; The Australian Agricultural Revolution; Accepting history and Creating the Future.
I found much of what Pascoe has set out in this book compelling, although I do think he brought all his best work at the beginning, and it faded out towards the end. Pascoe has a very fair point that Western civilisation makes the criteria against which cultures are assessed. Australia's colonial history was brutal, and land was taken at will, converted to grazing land and it's inhabitants effectively chased away. It suits the colonists narrative that the Aboriginal were fully nomadic, had no ties to the land, had no organised tribal structure - it makes it so much easier to justify the occupation of these lands. This all makes sense.
The various descriptions of agriculture, land management, waterways management, periodic controlled burning of undergrowth and building of structures is very compelling - extensive quotations from multiple and varied sources. A large part of Pascoe's narrative is that the history writers were selective in the information they used, and the specific wording used was all tailored to justify the way the Aboriginals were treated.
So far so good, but I have a few concerns with this book, which I will briefly outline below.
1 - I have concerns that Pascoe could be guilty of what he accuses history writers of - careful section of quotations from source material. What I mean here, is if historians took only the parts of writing which described aboriginals as stone-aged, is Pascoe taking only the quotations that suit his own narrative?
2 - I worry that Pascoe overplays his assertions. For example, I have no doubts about elaborate fish and eel traps, waterway and well management and construction of dams. Even the management of fishstocks - traps which allow smaller fish to pass through, capturing only mature fish. However I was less convinced with the evidence of cultivating fish and breeding to complete the 'aquaculture' component.
3 -Pan-Continent Government - the back of the book claims that it is demonstrated that the Aboriginals had organised this. The detail, however, is that there was no evidence of violent change - to me this doesn't appear to be the same thing. Cooperation and organisation between adjacent tribes sharing lands etc - yes, but I am not sure I was convinced on a pan-continent government.
5 - Gavin Menzies. Pascoe almost had me convinced until he resorted to referencing Menzies and his 1421 book. Now there is a book to be skeptical about - amateur historian with lots of ideas and a lack of evidence.
For me the agricultural section was the most interesting. The symbiotic relationship between the Aboriginals and the land was clearly demonstrated - the scale of some of the agricultural claims I think would need further verification. And there is no doubt that some of the traditional Aboriginal foods are now becoming popular - you only need to casually view Australian Masterchef to see that has developed even further since this book was published.
So overall, I found this incredibly interesting, and while I have not rushed off to do my own research and check sources as Pascoe's detractors recommend, I am no historian, and I read for entertainment, so I probably won't, although I happily read explorers tales so will know what to keep and eye out for!
4 stars.
First published in 2014, (and reprinted a lot!) then revised in 2018, I have a copy of the slightly longer revised edition.
This is a fascinating book, with extensive references and bibliography which clearly spells out all Pascoe's source material.
The quick overview is (not Pascoe's words), that history is written by the victors - or in this case - the colonists. For as long as Australian history has been written, the Aboriginals have been described as Stone-aged man depicted as subsistence hunters, who live is temporary shelters. Pascoe uses the original colonists and explorer's diaries which describe what they found as they moved through remote parts of Australia. Pascoe has organised his evidence into chapters titled Agriculture; Aquaculture; Population and Housing; Storage and Preservation; Fire; The Heavens, language and Law; The Australian Agricultural Revolution; Accepting history and Creating the Future.
I found much of what Pascoe has set out in this book compelling, although I do think he brought all his best work at the beginning, and it faded out towards the end. Pascoe has a very fair point that Western civilisation makes the criteria against which cultures are assessed. Australia's colonial history was brutal, and land was taken at will, converted to grazing land and it's inhabitants effectively chased away. It suits the colonists narrative that the Aboriginal were fully nomadic, had no ties to the land, had no organised tribal structure - it makes it so much easier to justify the occupation of these lands. This all makes sense.
The various descriptions of agriculture, land management, waterways management, periodic controlled burning of undergrowth and building of structures is very compelling - extensive quotations from multiple and varied sources. A large part of Pascoe's narrative is that the history writers were selective in the information they used, and the specific wording used was all tailored to justify the way the Aboriginals were treated.
So far so good, but I have a few concerns with this book, which I will briefly outline below.
1 - I have concerns that Pascoe could be guilty of what he accuses history writers of - careful section of quotations from source material. What I mean here, is if historians took only the parts of writing which described aboriginals as stone-aged, is Pascoe taking only the quotations that suit his own narrative?
2 - I worry that Pascoe overplays his assertions. For example, I have no doubts about elaborate fish and eel traps, waterway and well management and construction of dams. Even the management of fishstocks - traps which allow smaller fish to pass through, capturing only mature fish. However I was less convinced with the evidence of cultivating fish and breeding to complete the 'aquaculture' component.
3 -Pan-Continent Government - the back of the book claims that it is demonstrated that the Aboriginals had organised this. The detail, however, is that there was no evidence of violent change - to me this doesn't appear to be the same thing. Cooperation and organisation between adjacent tribes sharing lands etc - yes, but I am not sure I was convinced on a pan-continent government.
5 - Gavin Menzies. Pascoe almost had me convinced until he resorted to referencing Menzies and his 1421 book. Now there is a book to be skeptical about - amateur historian with lots of ideas and a lack of evidence.
For me the agricultural section was the most interesting. The symbiotic relationship between the Aboriginals and the land was clearly demonstrated - the scale of some of the agricultural claims I think would need further verification. And there is no doubt that some of the traditional Aboriginal foods are now becoming popular - you only need to casually view Australian Masterchef to see that has developed even further since this book was published.
So overall, I found this incredibly interesting, and while I have not rushed off to do my own research and check sources as Pascoe's detractors recommend, I am no historian, and I read for entertainment, so I probably won't, although I happily read explorers tales so will know what to keep and eye out for!
4 stars.
November 23, 2019
People, why are you all signing up to Pascoe's fantasy? If you truly want to know what the early explorers observed, go to Project Gutenberg. There you'll find many copies of early explorers journals. After downloading them and thoroughly reading the eyewitness accounts, come back here and write a knowledgeable review based the real evidence of those early explorers, not Pascoe's fabrications and wishful thinking.
Read
April 20, 2024"...
White man came took everything
We carry in our hearts the true country
And that cannot be stolen
We follow in the steps of our ancestry
And that cannot be broken ..."
Midnight Oil - Dead Heart
It may be standing on a bit shaky grounds where "academic research" is concerned, but a sad and thought-provoking read with a strong message.
Or maybe it's not a message, but a Desperate Shout.
Because what Pascoe wants is recognition for Aboriginal People. Recognition and the acknowledgement of belonging.
Originally published in 2014, after the 2023 referendum in Australia, that shout and hope is even more valid, though seems out of reach.
My very first book on the history of Aboriginals, an audiobook at that, and after some contemplation, I decided to leave it without rating.
When I started reading this book, I was unaware of the controversy and cultural wars it provoked when published in 2014. It was only after finishing listening to it this morning that I did some reading on the book's aftermath, so I was an unbiased listener in more ways than one (apart from some very basic facts from the POV of European Colonialism, I had been mostly ignorant of Aboriginal history, so thank you Karen for bringing this book to my attention as well as some others).
As a "bystander" from a far-away Hungary, I found this book very interesting and sad, despite Pascoe's dry and toneless narration. What he presented overall, I found very credible: the Aboriginals cultivating the lands in harmony of what could and could not be sustained and also the sustainability of the hunting and gathering the way they did it. This all seemed plausible and Pascoe knows his flora and fauna so well - it was all fascinating.
And of course I don't for a minute doubt the destruction the European settlers with their entitlement, patronising and inherent belief in their own Ubermenschlichkeit brought to the land and how they claimed and took everything they could: devastating the balance and harmony of indigenous flora and fauna they brought along and murdering people who stood in their way.
However, they way Pascoe presented his case of Aboriginal practices of agriculture and building, trying to prove that these had predated colonisers became strained after a time. I started to realise that his "facts" were supported by questionable or weak evidence and the further I got into the book, the more obscure they became.
Also he kept repeating that how the archeologic/historical thinking of Western civilisation on the development of societies is irrelevant for the Aboriginals, but then the question arises why he tried to prove how "sophisticated" Aboriginal culture was according to those same Western standards. It was confusing and kind of defeated his purpose in a way.
Because IT DOES NOT MATTER whether the Aboriginals were agriculturalists or hunter-gatherers. Australia was their land and it got taken away.
After finishing, here are my concluding thoughts.
- I need to and want to do some further reading on this issue, so once again: thank you Karen for recommending Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers?: The Dark Emu Debate.
- I am glad that I read this book and I think that Pascoe that it was a good thing that he wrote it because it offered people a totally different lens and narrative from that of the European settlers and may have started some necessary soul-searching.
- I think Pascoe's intentions are unquestionable and it is obvious and natural that he deeply and honestly believes in what he has written. While I absolutely understand his motives (see my intro above), this book is hardly what I'd call proper, convincing academic research and he deteriorated into cherry-picking facts that supported his theories while ignoring others that were contradictory to his cause or dismissing them with some vague explanations.
So, need to know and read more, which is always a good thing.
White man came took everything
We carry in our hearts the true country
And that cannot be stolen
We follow in the steps of our ancestry
And that cannot be broken ..."
Midnight Oil - Dead Heart
It may be standing on a bit shaky grounds where "academic research" is concerned, but a sad and thought-provoking read with a strong message.
Or maybe it's not a message, but a Desperate Shout.
Because what Pascoe wants is recognition for Aboriginal People. Recognition and the acknowledgement of belonging.
Originally published in 2014, after the 2023 referendum in Australia, that shout and hope is even more valid, though seems out of reach.
My very first book on the history of Aboriginals, an audiobook at that, and after some contemplation, I decided to leave it without rating.
When I started reading this book, I was unaware of the controversy and cultural wars it provoked when published in 2014. It was only after finishing listening to it this morning that I did some reading on the book's aftermath, so I was an unbiased listener in more ways than one (apart from some very basic facts from the POV of European Colonialism, I had been mostly ignorant of Aboriginal history, so thank you Karen for bringing this book to my attention as well as some others).
As a "bystander" from a far-away Hungary, I found this book very interesting and sad, despite Pascoe's dry and toneless narration. What he presented overall, I found very credible: the Aboriginals cultivating the lands in harmony of what could and could not be sustained and also the sustainability of the hunting and gathering the way they did it. This all seemed plausible and Pascoe knows his flora and fauna so well - it was all fascinating.
And of course I don't for a minute doubt the destruction the European settlers with their entitlement, patronising and inherent belief in their own Ubermenschlichkeit brought to the land and how they claimed and took everything they could: devastating the balance and harmony of indigenous flora and fauna they brought along and murdering people who stood in their way.
However, they way Pascoe presented his case of Aboriginal practices of agriculture and building, trying to prove that these had predated colonisers became strained after a time. I started to realise that his "facts" were supported by questionable or weak evidence and the further I got into the book, the more obscure they became.
Also he kept repeating that how the archeologic/historical thinking of Western civilisation on the development of societies is irrelevant for the Aboriginals, but then the question arises why he tried to prove how "sophisticated" Aboriginal culture was according to those same Western standards. It was confusing and kind of defeated his purpose in a way.
Because IT DOES NOT MATTER whether the Aboriginals were agriculturalists or hunter-gatherers. Australia was their land and it got taken away.
After finishing, here are my concluding thoughts.
- I need to and want to do some further reading on this issue, so once again: thank you Karen for recommending Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers?: The Dark Emu Debate.
- I am glad that I read this book and I think that Pascoe that it was a good thing that he wrote it because it offered people a totally different lens and narrative from that of the European settlers and may have started some necessary soul-searching.
- I think Pascoe's intentions are unquestionable and it is obvious and natural that he deeply and honestly believes in what he has written. While I absolutely understand his motives (see my intro above), this book is hardly what I'd call proper, convincing academic research and he deteriorated into cherry-picking facts that supported his theories while ignoring others that were contradictory to his cause or dismissing them with some vague explanations.
So, need to know and read more, which is always a good thing.
November 4, 2023
There are books about controversial subjects, and then there are books that become controversies themselves. Dark Emu is one of those. Bruce Pascoe's book is an impassioned argument that Aboriginal Australians were not just nomadic hunter-gatherers, as received wisdom would have it, but rather had developed sophisticated systems of land management, settlement building, technology and proto-agriculture. For a lot of people, this was revelatory; it was deeply upsetting for a lot of others, and not just the racists – many Aboriginal groups were very attached to their hunter-gatherer image, and had no desire to come from a long line of millet farmers. The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies, but Pascoe's Aboriginality was legally challenged, he separated from his wife, and he's unwittingly found himself at the forefront of a weird culture war that's still smouldering away ten years later.
I personally found most of his evidence convincing, although sometimes he does lean a bit too hard on foundations that aren't strong enough to take it. Some overcompensation is, though, I think understandable in the circumstances. He starts with a close reading of the journals of early explorers, who often observed, in passing, evidence of Aboriginal society without really taking much interest in it: as he points out, most of them were not there
It's particularly interesting to consider how much of inland Australia was once fertile and productive. We're so used to thinking of it as a vast, barren desert that I was startled to see evidence that – under Aboriginal management – parts of it were very different when Europeans first arrived. The loss of local traditions of rotation and fire management, and the arrival of vast herds of non-native animals (cows and sheep), seem to have changed the landscape in many areas beyond recognition: ‘the destruction of both grasslands and villages was swift’, and ‘what had been productive agricultural land became scrub within a decade’.
Lurking behind Pascoe's arguments is the spectre of when and why a civilisation is deemed to be ‘sophisticated’. It's a freighted value-judgement, since in Australia the genocide of Aboriginals is often waved away with the vague implication that, well, they weren't very advanced anyway, and so while it's all very sad, it's really in some sense to be expected. As Pascoe points out, the argument is heavily slanted in our favour.
Still, Pascoe's wish to make the case on more conventional grounds (agriculture, building, technology etc.) occasionally sees him overreach. The idea that ancient Aboriginal communities were making flour (the evidence for which is good) is used to support the idea that they had discovered baking 15,000 years before the Egyptians (the evidence for which is non-existent); similarly, he gives a bit too much credence to tentative theories and folktales that there were Aboriginals in Australia 120,000 years ago, despite genetic and archaeological evidence both suggesting the continent was only colonised 50,000 years ago.
There are also good practical suggestions for the future. A better study of Aboriginal crops would, Pascoe argues, be a good model for how Australia could use and market its native grains, which would save money as well as carbon emissions. The same goes for using its native fauna, like kangaroos, for meat, rather than foreign animals which are not well suited to the landscape. To me this stuff seemed eminently sensible, and I think Pascoe has a point when he comments drily: ‘Schoolchildren are taught that witchetty grubs were a major food source, almost as if there is a deliberate attempt by educationalists to emphasise the gross and primitive.’
I was a bit irritated that this revised edition still contains a few grammatical solecisms (‘Examination of Aboriginal tool kits show…’), which sometimes make his arguments appear less stringent than they deserve to. But in general this is a fascinating, indeed mind-expanding book, which upends so much of what is taken for granted in discussions of Australia, its people, and its history.
I personally found most of his evidence convincing, although sometimes he does lean a bit too hard on foundations that aren't strong enough to take it. Some overcompensation is, though, I think understandable in the circumstances. He starts with a close reading of the journals of early explorers, who often observed, in passing, evidence of Aboriginal society without really taking much interest in it: as he points out, most of them were not there
to marvel at a new civilisation; they were there to replace it. Most were simply describing a landscape from which settlers could profit. Few bothered with the evidence of the existing economy, because they knew it was about to be subsumed.
It's particularly interesting to consider how much of inland Australia was once fertile and productive. We're so used to thinking of it as a vast, barren desert that I was startled to see evidence that – under Aboriginal management – parts of it were very different when Europeans first arrived. The loss of local traditions of rotation and fire management, and the arrival of vast herds of non-native animals (cows and sheep), seem to have changed the landscape in many areas beyond recognition: ‘the destruction of both grasslands and villages was swift’, and ‘what had been productive agricultural land became scrub within a decade’.
Lurking behind Pascoe's arguments is the spectre of when and why a civilisation is deemed to be ‘sophisticated’. It's a freighted value-judgement, since in Australia the genocide of Aboriginals is often waved away with the vague implication that, well, they weren't very advanced anyway, and so while it's all very sad, it's really in some sense to be expected. As Pascoe points out, the argument is heavily slanted in our favour.
If the test of sophistication were whether or not all were fed regardless of rank, or whether all contributed to the spiritual and cultural health of the civilisation, Aboriginal Australia might have a much higher rank than some of the nations considered the hallmark of human evolution.
Still, Pascoe's wish to make the case on more conventional grounds (agriculture, building, technology etc.) occasionally sees him overreach. The idea that ancient Aboriginal communities were making flour (the evidence for which is good) is used to support the idea that they had discovered baking 15,000 years before the Egyptians (the evidence for which is non-existent); similarly, he gives a bit too much credence to tentative theories and folktales that there were Aboriginals in Australia 120,000 years ago, despite genetic and archaeological evidence both suggesting the continent was only colonised 50,000 years ago.
There are also good practical suggestions for the future. A better study of Aboriginal crops would, Pascoe argues, be a good model for how Australia could use and market its native grains, which would save money as well as carbon emissions. The same goes for using its native fauna, like kangaroos, for meat, rather than foreign animals which are not well suited to the landscape. To me this stuff seemed eminently sensible, and I think Pascoe has a point when he comments drily: ‘Schoolchildren are taught that witchetty grubs were a major food source, almost as if there is a deliberate attempt by educationalists to emphasise the gross and primitive.’
I was a bit irritated that this revised edition still contains a few grammatical solecisms (‘Examination of Aboriginal tool kits show…’), which sometimes make his arguments appear less stringent than they deserve to. But in general this is a fascinating, indeed mind-expanding book, which upends so much of what is taken for granted in discussions of Australia, its people, and its history.
January 23, 2018
The book is persuasive rather than informative, and at times inaccurate. For example Bruce puts a photo of a Meriam Island House (Torres Strait) in his section on Arnhem Land 'dome houses'. He also quotes from Mitchell, Sturt, and Dawson very selectively, leaving out all the parts that contradict his argument. Read these primary sources and you get a different picture to the one Bruce paints. His mention of stone houses is exaggerated, because the location he discusses (lake Condah) while certainly containing Aboriginal structure, also has the remains of European structures according to some archaeologists (eg. Sharon Lane). He says fish traps are aquaculture which is just silly. It's good that Bruce draws attention to the fact that Aboriginal people managed the land (not farmed) in a sustainable manner, and cared for the environment as opposed to the capitalist system which destroys the environment. This book will be accepted by most of the public who normally just believe nice stories rather than true stories. My advice if you are genuinely interested in the truth on this subject is to read the primary sources Bruce uses, but also to read the multitude of other sources on Aboriginal culture, bush food & land management practices; many written by Aboriginal people living traditionally today.
August 11, 2014
When world-famous Australian rapper Iggy Azalea was asked on a US radio show about Aboriginal people in her country, she replied: "The thing about Aboriginal people is they don't believe in living in enclosed structures, houses... They all want to live under the stars because that's their culture, even now... The government build houses and the Aboriginal people trash them and take the beds outside cos they don't believe in houses and they want to live under the stars." Perhaps the rapper - who later became the first artist since the Beatles 50 years ago to hold the top two spots on the American Billboard Hot 100 chart with their first hits - should read this book. Prolific Aboriginal author Bruce Pascoe's "Dark Emu" extensively documents not only pre-colonial Aboriginal housing, but also engineering, fishing and farming methods. Here are some quotes that jumped out at me:
Many northern Australian museums display long, knife-like implements, which usually bear legends such as 'of unknown use' when in fact they are juan knives - long sharp blades of stone with fur-covered handles, which the explorer Gregory described the Aboriginal people using to cut down the grain.
As one of Australia's most senior archaeologists confided to me after struggling to gain official interest in her excavation of a sophisticated village site in the Murray River region, it is easier for Australian archaeologists to get research grants overseas than for undertaking new areas of research in Australia.
[Quoting explorer Charles Sturt:] [I]n walking along one came to a village consisting of nineteen huts... Troughs and stones for grinding seed were lying about... The fact of there being so large a well at this point... assured us that this distant part of the interior... was not without inhabitants.
[M]ost of the tool workshops associated with these constructions, as well as the constructions themselves, still do not appear on the archaeological register of Aboriginal Affairs Victoria.
King, on the doomed Burke and Wills expedition, found a storage of grain in an Aboriginal house, which he estimated at four tons.
[T]he mounds proved to be gigantic ovens for the cooking of the compung rush.
Norman Tindale... estimated the milling techniques to be around 18,000 years old, an age which, if it is true, re-writes the history of world agriculture.
We are at the beginning - not the end - of understanding pre-colonial history...
After studying Aboriginal yields from yam daisies it is easy to imagine a potato farmer turning over part of his farm to yam, thus avoiding the need to use fertiliser and herbicides.
Latz says that, 'the nutritional value of the seeds from the desert species is equal to or better than that of the cultivated grains'.
Dargin included some wonderful drawings and photographs from the early contact period and these are crucial to our understanding of the hydrology given that more recent photographs show a system compromised by channels for steamboats, levelled areas for regattas, fords and roads.
Rupert Gerritsen's important work was similarly bound and, for want of Australian interest, had to be published in London. Both his work and Dargin's are indicative of Australia's nonchalance to important considerations of Aboriginal culture.
Some Lake Condah fishery sites were seriously damaged after John Howard, Australian Prime Minister at the time, panicked farmers into believing they'd all be ruined by Native Title claims.
The reluctance to credit engineered fisheries to colonised peoples, and thus underrate their sovereignty of the land, is not peculiar to Australia.
[I]f they were houses, and if the channels were a fishing system, then around 10,000 people lived a more or less sedentary life in this town.
The Victorian Archaeological Survey seemed to be restricted by their own assumptions of Aboriginal development in the same way that so many pokers and prodders of Aboriginal culture seem not to have read the explorers' diaries. If they had, surely they would have gone further than the study of the kangaroo spear and the digging stick in their analysis of Aboriginal economies.
... Sturt's description of the evening whirring of hundreds of mills grinding grain into flour.
[W]e have all but ignored ethnographic evidence of Aboriginal engineering.
Aboriginals are now seen as poachers simply because the shellfish is so enormously valuable. When it was 'mutton fish' they were allowed to harvest as much as they wanted. Today they are gaoled for pursuing their traditional harvest.
The early history of Australia is crowded with references to Aboriginal watercraft and fishing techniques. Yet Australians remain strangely impervious to that knowledge and the Aboriginal economy in general.
[T]he observations of the first explorers and settlers provides an enormous body of material.
The reason I have provided so many examples, however, is to emphasise the depth of the available material and the desperate need for a revision of our history.
Collecting such a welter of evidence might seem a tedious excess to some readers but reference to Aboriginal housing is so remote from the Australian consciousness that, on reading of one or two examples, people might be encouraged to see them as aberrations.
Permanent housing was a feature of the Aboriginal economy and marked the movement towards agricultural reliance.
Sturt was doing it tough among the savages alright. New house, roast duck and cake!
Several villages were located near Birdsville, south-west Queensland, where today the remoteness and inhospitable nature of the land is mythologised as the desolate Outback. Many Australians find it hard to imagine the area as a once productive and healthy environment for large numbers of Aboriginal people.
On seeing houses built to accommodate forty people in groups of fifty or more both explorers resort to words like huts or hovels to describe buildings which in rural Ireland would have been called croft houses.
People here were not clinging on to survival in the desert; they were thriving and engaged in a rich and joyful life.
Mitchell is sensitive to the quality of the houses but insensitive to his occupation of someone else's residence. He occupied empty houses on many occasions and liberties of this kind were likely to have ruptured the relationship between white and black more severely than any action other than physical attack.
Gerritsen comments: The suppression, or discouragement of public disclosure of permanent settlements and more sedentary existence may have been yet another factor contributing to a distortion in historical information abut relevant groups and hence modern understandings... The suspicion is that there was intent to discredit evidence of permanent settlements because of the implications this may have had for the morality and legality of the colonial dispossession.
On the Darling River, explorers saw similar towns to those seen by Sturt and Mitchell and estimated the population of each to be no less than a thousand. Peter Dargin estimated the population of the region as 3,000 but the journals of Sturt, Mitchell and others reveal that they passed many such populous villages. These figures strongly contradict both current and past assumptions of a sparsely populated pre-colonial land.
At Mallacoota in 1842 Joseph Lingard met two Aboriginal men and, 'made bold to go into their retreat, which I found to be like a house inside'.
[Robinson] reported that the walls and rooves of the beehive, or kraal, type were so substantial that they were strong enough 'for a man on horseback to ride over'. One wonders how that observation was proven and what the owners of the house might have thought of the experiment.
The underestimation of Indigenous achievement was a deliberate tactic of British colonialism.
Burial within cemeteries is another of the indicators of sedentism recognised by archaeologists and abundant examples are provided in explorers' journals.
The importance of examining this material is to dissuade a common Australian perception that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people built nothing more complex than a piece of bark leaning on a stick.
While we continue to think of Aboriginal people having no construction skills it is easier to dismiss Aboriginal attachment to land.
Mitchell hit upon the impediment that inhibits control burns in the Australian landscape today. Farm fences.
The only yam plants to be found today are on railway verges and other lands fenced off from livestock and where no superphosphate has been used.
Daryl Tonkin, long-term resident of the country near Drouin in West Gippsland, remembers the catastrophic fires of 1939, which he attributed to the increasing reluctance of the Europeans to burn and the habit of leaving the heads of felled trees unburnt.
[Edward Curr:] '[T]he blackfellow was constantly setting fire to the grass and trees... he tilled his land and cultivated his pasture with fire'.
[Tim Flannery:] As the term firestick farming suggests, the Aboriginal use of fire resembled agriculture in some ways: it yielded certain crops at certain times, suppressed weeds and was carefully contolled...
[G]rassland production has been used as a lure to kangaroos and emus but, primarily, to keep stock away from deliberate plantings of grain and tuber crops.
The existence of infrastructure, houses, fences, outbuildings and power lines complicates the adoption of a similar method but does not prevent it. We just have to think differently about the country.
The belief that Aboriginal people were 'mere' hunter-gatherers has been used as a political tool to justify dispossession.
If we look at the evidence presented to us by the explorers and explain to our children that Aboriginal people did build houses, did build dams, did sow, irrigate and till the land, did alter the course of rivers, did sew their clothes and did construct a system of pan-continental government that generated peace and prosperity, then it is likely we will admire and love our land all the more.
[T]he skills employed to bring about the longest lasting pan-continental stability the world has known must be investigated because they might become Australia's greatest export.
Of all the systems humans have devised to manage their lives on earth Aboriginal government looks most like the democratic model.
Aboriginal people did not 'advance' like Europeans but it is also true the idea to pour boiling oil on enemies seems not to have occurred to anyone in Australia.
[Linguist Terry] Crowley admits that Australian languages are probably 40,000 to 60,000 years old, but even at 10,000 years they would be older than most other world languages.
Schoolchildren are taught that witchetty grubs were a major food source almost as if there is a deliberate attempt by educationalists to emphasise the gross and primitive. Imagine, instead, re-educating the nation and utilising the two major crops of Australia: yams (as well as other root vegetables) and grains.
A 100g sample of Microseris lanceolata tubers would provide 3-4 times the energy level of a 100g potato.
Human survival on a healthy planet is not a soft liberal pipe dream; it is sound global management and the deepest of religious impulses.
Encouraging full participation of Aboriginal people is not a simple task of handing out fluorescent vests to work in a billionaire's mine but requires a conversation with Aboriginal people about the future of the country.
Accepting the best white man is the final stage in the colonisation of Australia.
Many northern Australian museums display long, knife-like implements, which usually bear legends such as 'of unknown use' when in fact they are juan knives - long sharp blades of stone with fur-covered handles, which the explorer Gregory described the Aboriginal people using to cut down the grain.
As one of Australia's most senior archaeologists confided to me after struggling to gain official interest in her excavation of a sophisticated village site in the Murray River region, it is easier for Australian archaeologists to get research grants overseas than for undertaking new areas of research in Australia.
[Quoting explorer Charles Sturt:] [I]n walking along one came to a village consisting of nineteen huts... Troughs and stones for grinding seed were lying about... The fact of there being so large a well at this point... assured us that this distant part of the interior... was not without inhabitants.
[M]ost of the tool workshops associated with these constructions, as well as the constructions themselves, still do not appear on the archaeological register of Aboriginal Affairs Victoria.
King, on the doomed Burke and Wills expedition, found a storage of grain in an Aboriginal house, which he estimated at four tons.
[T]he mounds proved to be gigantic ovens for the cooking of the compung rush.
Norman Tindale... estimated the milling techniques to be around 18,000 years old, an age which, if it is true, re-writes the history of world agriculture.
We are at the beginning - not the end - of understanding pre-colonial history...
After studying Aboriginal yields from yam daisies it is easy to imagine a potato farmer turning over part of his farm to yam, thus avoiding the need to use fertiliser and herbicides.
Latz says that, 'the nutritional value of the seeds from the desert species is equal to or better than that of the cultivated grains'.
Dargin included some wonderful drawings and photographs from the early contact period and these are crucial to our understanding of the hydrology given that more recent photographs show a system compromised by channels for steamboats, levelled areas for regattas, fords and roads.
Rupert Gerritsen's important work was similarly bound and, for want of Australian interest, had to be published in London. Both his work and Dargin's are indicative of Australia's nonchalance to important considerations of Aboriginal culture.
Some Lake Condah fishery sites were seriously damaged after John Howard, Australian Prime Minister at the time, panicked farmers into believing they'd all be ruined by Native Title claims.
The reluctance to credit engineered fisheries to colonised peoples, and thus underrate their sovereignty of the land, is not peculiar to Australia.
[I]f they were houses, and if the channels were a fishing system, then around 10,000 people lived a more or less sedentary life in this town.
The Victorian Archaeological Survey seemed to be restricted by their own assumptions of Aboriginal development in the same way that so many pokers and prodders of Aboriginal culture seem not to have read the explorers' diaries. If they had, surely they would have gone further than the study of the kangaroo spear and the digging stick in their analysis of Aboriginal economies.
... Sturt's description of the evening whirring of hundreds of mills grinding grain into flour.
[W]e have all but ignored ethnographic evidence of Aboriginal engineering.
Aboriginals are now seen as poachers simply because the shellfish is so enormously valuable. When it was 'mutton fish' they were allowed to harvest as much as they wanted. Today they are gaoled for pursuing their traditional harvest.
The early history of Australia is crowded with references to Aboriginal watercraft and fishing techniques. Yet Australians remain strangely impervious to that knowledge and the Aboriginal economy in general.
[T]he observations of the first explorers and settlers provides an enormous body of material.
The reason I have provided so many examples, however, is to emphasise the depth of the available material and the desperate need for a revision of our history.
Collecting such a welter of evidence might seem a tedious excess to some readers but reference to Aboriginal housing is so remote from the Australian consciousness that, on reading of one or two examples, people might be encouraged to see them as aberrations.
Permanent housing was a feature of the Aboriginal economy and marked the movement towards agricultural reliance.
Sturt was doing it tough among the savages alright. New house, roast duck and cake!
Several villages were located near Birdsville, south-west Queensland, where today the remoteness and inhospitable nature of the land is mythologised as the desolate Outback. Many Australians find it hard to imagine the area as a once productive and healthy environment for large numbers of Aboriginal people.
On seeing houses built to accommodate forty people in groups of fifty or more both explorers resort to words like huts or hovels to describe buildings which in rural Ireland would have been called croft houses.
People here were not clinging on to survival in the desert; they were thriving and engaged in a rich and joyful life.
Mitchell is sensitive to the quality of the houses but insensitive to his occupation of someone else's residence. He occupied empty houses on many occasions and liberties of this kind were likely to have ruptured the relationship between white and black more severely than any action other than physical attack.
Gerritsen comments: The suppression, or discouragement of public disclosure of permanent settlements and more sedentary existence may have been yet another factor contributing to a distortion in historical information abut relevant groups and hence modern understandings... The suspicion is that there was intent to discredit evidence of permanent settlements because of the implications this may have had for the morality and legality of the colonial dispossession.
On the Darling River, explorers saw similar towns to those seen by Sturt and Mitchell and estimated the population of each to be no less than a thousand. Peter Dargin estimated the population of the region as 3,000 but the journals of Sturt, Mitchell and others reveal that they passed many such populous villages. These figures strongly contradict both current and past assumptions of a sparsely populated pre-colonial land.
At Mallacoota in 1842 Joseph Lingard met two Aboriginal men and, 'made bold to go into their retreat, which I found to be like a house inside'.
[Robinson] reported that the walls and rooves of the beehive, or kraal, type were so substantial that they were strong enough 'for a man on horseback to ride over'. One wonders how that observation was proven and what the owners of the house might have thought of the experiment.
The underestimation of Indigenous achievement was a deliberate tactic of British colonialism.
Burial within cemeteries is another of the indicators of sedentism recognised by archaeologists and abundant examples are provided in explorers' journals.
The importance of examining this material is to dissuade a common Australian perception that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people built nothing more complex than a piece of bark leaning on a stick.
While we continue to think of Aboriginal people having no construction skills it is easier to dismiss Aboriginal attachment to land.
Mitchell hit upon the impediment that inhibits control burns in the Australian landscape today. Farm fences.
The only yam plants to be found today are on railway verges and other lands fenced off from livestock and where no superphosphate has been used.
Daryl Tonkin, long-term resident of the country near Drouin in West Gippsland, remembers the catastrophic fires of 1939, which he attributed to the increasing reluctance of the Europeans to burn and the habit of leaving the heads of felled trees unburnt.
[Edward Curr:] '[T]he blackfellow was constantly setting fire to the grass and trees... he tilled his land and cultivated his pasture with fire'.
[Tim Flannery:] As the term firestick farming suggests, the Aboriginal use of fire resembled agriculture in some ways: it yielded certain crops at certain times, suppressed weeds and was carefully contolled...
[G]rassland production has been used as a lure to kangaroos and emus but, primarily, to keep stock away from deliberate plantings of grain and tuber crops.
The existence of infrastructure, houses, fences, outbuildings and power lines complicates the adoption of a similar method but does not prevent it. We just have to think differently about the country.
The belief that Aboriginal people were 'mere' hunter-gatherers has been used as a political tool to justify dispossession.
If we look at the evidence presented to us by the explorers and explain to our children that Aboriginal people did build houses, did build dams, did sow, irrigate and till the land, did alter the course of rivers, did sew their clothes and did construct a system of pan-continental government that generated peace and prosperity, then it is likely we will admire and love our land all the more.
[T]he skills employed to bring about the longest lasting pan-continental stability the world has known must be investigated because they might become Australia's greatest export.
Of all the systems humans have devised to manage their lives on earth Aboriginal government looks most like the democratic model.
Aboriginal people did not 'advance' like Europeans but it is also true the idea to pour boiling oil on enemies seems not to have occurred to anyone in Australia.
[Linguist Terry] Crowley admits that Australian languages are probably 40,000 to 60,000 years old, but even at 10,000 years they would be older than most other world languages.
Schoolchildren are taught that witchetty grubs were a major food source almost as if there is a deliberate attempt by educationalists to emphasise the gross and primitive. Imagine, instead, re-educating the nation and utilising the two major crops of Australia: yams (as well as other root vegetables) and grains.
A 100g sample of Microseris lanceolata tubers would provide 3-4 times the energy level of a 100g potato.
Human survival on a healthy planet is not a soft liberal pipe dream; it is sound global management and the deepest of religious impulses.
Encouraging full participation of Aboriginal people is not a simple task of handing out fluorescent vests to work in a billionaire's mine but requires a conversation with Aboriginal people about the future of the country.
Accepting the best white man is the final stage in the colonisation of Australia.
December 19, 2023
It's pretty telling that this examination of the true Aboriginal impact on the Australian continent was only written 9 years ago. Most of the literature and teaching in schools even then, backed the idea that white people had discovered Australia and made it a great country, while the Aboriginals had basically been gatherer hunters and had no true culture or impact on the land. Even today some prominent politicians, notably John Howard and Tony Abbot, still claim that Australia has been improved by European settlement and the destruction of its Aboriginal roots.
Bruce Pascoe addresses much of the faulty and incomplete history of this land. He talks here in this short history of the many amazing accomplishments of the original settlers over the past 40,000+ years, from agricultural and land management, fish and dam building and the construction of some amazing buildings. Important reading that I'm sorry I'm only reading now. Library ebook, four stars.
Bruce Pascoe addresses much of the faulty and incomplete history of this land. He talks here in this short history of the many amazing accomplishments of the original settlers over the past 40,000+ years, from agricultural and land management, fish and dam building and the construction of some amazing buildings. Important reading that I'm sorry I'm only reading now. Library ebook, four stars.
September 6, 2020
Update 06/09/20: Increased rating from 3 to 3.5. I had some concerns about the historical accuracy of this text due to some controversy regarding a lack of primary and verifiable sources. I have since come across statements from a number of respected individuals who have thrown their support behind the work and also discovered that a lot of the pushback against it is likely political.
3.5 ⭐
‘Dark Emu’ is Bruce Pascoe’s impassioned plea for further research into the history of Australia’s indigenous people pre-colonisation and closer analysis of evidence that would suggest a much higher level of sophistication than we are currently taught to believe is true. He suggests that letters and journal entries attributed to the first explorers from 1770 onwards prove this. The explorers marvelled at the capabilities of the first people with regards to construction, agriculture, aquaculture and the peaceful nature of the civilisation that they observed. Only, these signs of sophisticated culture and permanent attachment to the land were covered up with malicious intent.
“The suspicion is that there was intent to discredit evidence of permanent settlements [,agriculture, aquaculture and methods of storage] because of the implications this may have had for the morality and legality of the colonial dispossession.”
“The insistence on using the hunter-gatherer label is prejudicial to the rights of aboriginal people to land.”
We have since, conveniently, labelled the first people of our nation as mere hunter-gathers and “the prevailing orthodoxy [is] hunter-gatherers were considered capable of only the most tentative claims to land ownership”. Pascoe rejects this label and pushes for further research.
In this cause, I completely support Bruce. I think further research based on the suggestions set out in this book could only be a good thing for our country. To be able to acknowledge and celebrate great achievements of the original owners of our land, the oldest civilisation on Earth, would be a source of great pride and I would be a huge supporter of taxpayer-funded research into this area.
So, why the 3 stars? Well, it gets a little murky. I was looking up a bit of info on this book when I was only 20-30 pages through and found that there is a bit of controversy regarding a lack of primary and verifiable sources to back up some of his more outlandish claims and a misuse of the quotes held within the explorer’s journals. In many instances, readers have highlighted stark inconsistencies regarding what appears in his claims and what is outlined in the respective primary source. Some have gone as far to say that the ABC have blindly backed and lauded the book, ignoring any discrepancies in order to push a liberal agenda. For the record, I find the claim ridiculous!
I tried to push these concerns to the back of my mind so I could create my own opinion, as well as possible, after completing the book but I would be lying if I said it didn’t affect my reading of the text. Instead of marvelling at the revelations within, I was constantly questioning what I was reading and proceeded with a suspicious mind. Perhaps that’s the way we should always read historical texts, with a healthy dose of scepticism. That said, if I’m going to read fiction, I’d prefer to be clear on that fact going into it.
I have neither the time nor the ability, to accurately fact-check every work of non-fiction that I read. That said, my opinion is that there is definitely some truth to Pascoe’s claims. There are just far too many instances in which explorers made comments contrary to what we have been taught about the ‘purely’ hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the aboriginals and the benefits of covering up the ruthless slaughter and dispossession of land from a highly sophisticated society are immeasurable. As are the examples of Europeans doing the exact same thing throughout the rest of the world. I would love the examples of indigenous ingenuity and sophistication given in this text to be proven factual and would strongly encourage further research into this area.
“Settlers and explorers were united in their assumption of superiority and entitlement. The hoofs of the horses and the tramp of their feet never paused, despite their knowledge that they were displacing a sophisticated society with a complex economy.”
3.5 ⭐
‘Dark Emu’ is Bruce Pascoe’s impassioned plea for further research into the history of Australia’s indigenous people pre-colonisation and closer analysis of evidence that would suggest a much higher level of sophistication than we are currently taught to believe is true. He suggests that letters and journal entries attributed to the first explorers from 1770 onwards prove this. The explorers marvelled at the capabilities of the first people with regards to construction, agriculture, aquaculture and the peaceful nature of the civilisation that they observed. Only, these signs of sophisticated culture and permanent attachment to the land were covered up with malicious intent.
“The suspicion is that there was intent to discredit evidence of permanent settlements [,agriculture, aquaculture and methods of storage] because of the implications this may have had for the morality and legality of the colonial dispossession.”
“The insistence on using the hunter-gatherer label is prejudicial to the rights of aboriginal people to land.”
We have since, conveniently, labelled the first people of our nation as mere hunter-gathers and “the prevailing orthodoxy [is] hunter-gatherers were considered capable of only the most tentative claims to land ownership”. Pascoe rejects this label and pushes for further research.
In this cause, I completely support Bruce. I think further research based on the suggestions set out in this book could only be a good thing for our country. To be able to acknowledge and celebrate great achievements of the original owners of our land, the oldest civilisation on Earth, would be a source of great pride and I would be a huge supporter of taxpayer-funded research into this area.
So, why the 3 stars? Well, it gets a little murky. I was looking up a bit of info on this book when I was only 20-30 pages through and found that there is a bit of controversy regarding a lack of primary and verifiable sources to back up some of his more outlandish claims and a misuse of the quotes held within the explorer’s journals. In many instances, readers have highlighted stark inconsistencies regarding what appears in his claims and what is outlined in the respective primary source. Some have gone as far to say that the ABC have blindly backed and lauded the book, ignoring any discrepancies in order to push a liberal agenda. For the record, I find the claim ridiculous!
I tried to push these concerns to the back of my mind so I could create my own opinion, as well as possible, after completing the book but I would be lying if I said it didn’t affect my reading of the text. Instead of marvelling at the revelations within, I was constantly questioning what I was reading and proceeded with a suspicious mind. Perhaps that’s the way we should always read historical texts, with a healthy dose of scepticism. That said, if I’m going to read fiction, I’d prefer to be clear on that fact going into it.
I have neither the time nor the ability, to accurately fact-check every work of non-fiction that I read. That said, my opinion is that there is definitely some truth to Pascoe’s claims. There are just far too many instances in which explorers made comments contrary to what we have been taught about the ‘purely’ hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the aboriginals and the benefits of covering up the ruthless slaughter and dispossession of land from a highly sophisticated society are immeasurable. As are the examples of Europeans doing the exact same thing throughout the rest of the world. I would love the examples of indigenous ingenuity and sophistication given in this text to be proven factual and would strongly encourage further research into this area.
“Settlers and explorers were united in their assumption of superiority and entitlement. The hoofs of the horses and the tramp of their feet never paused, despite their knowledge that they were displacing a sophisticated society with a complex economy.”
March 27, 2019
This book proves that there is a need for a more comprehensive coverage of this subject of Aboriginal Australians and their pre colonial agriculture. At 156 pages of text far too short so therefore not as in depth as I would have thought possible.
None the less fascinating. Recommended.
None the less fascinating. Recommended.
October 21, 2019
While only 1/3 the way through the book I've seen enough to let me know that Pascoe has failed to come to grips with the material he is working with.
Some examples: Quotes frequently don't match up with the sources. Important claims often have no source given for them, or the source is unavailable and Pascoe won't give a quote. There is no critical engagement with his material: There is no attempt to question or contextualise his historical sources - Pascoe treats them literally and as though they were addressed to an early 21st century audience. Pascoe also fails at times to present his material faithfully: historical events are sometimes compressed as though they were the same event, and in at least one case he presents an order of events in the wrong order. The Tindale map is only 'after Tindale' not an accurate reproduction of the Tindale map. I'm not convinced that he has provided a clear example of domestication (which he says is needed for agriculture) in his discussion of domestication. Even if his weak analysis of a google search in the Acknowledgements doesn't worry you, it doesn't take long for a curious reader to soon lose faith in Pascoe's research skills.
Gerritson's 'Australia and the Origins of Agriculture' is uncritically accepted and Pascoe doesn't address the criticisms of this work. This is important because the binary hunter-gatherer/agriculturalist distinction that he and Pascoe rely upon is one that has pretty much been abandoned by researchers. The reader is left then with the spectacle of Pascoe left not so much arguing against a eurocentric or colonialist model of economic development, but defending it and saying 'we've been put on the wrong side.' (He hasn't as yet stated where the real hunter-gatherers are.) Pascoe has to defend the economics of the colonisers (it seems at times as an a-historical universal) because one of the points of the book is to argue that if Aboriginal agriculture can be proved then claims of intellectual property over native food plants can be made. Pascoe trades the specificity of (Aboriginal) culture for economic development. It's a bargain I don't think everyone would be willing to make.
Some examples: Quotes frequently don't match up with the sources. Important claims often have no source given for them, or the source is unavailable and Pascoe won't give a quote. There is no critical engagement with his material: There is no attempt to question or contextualise his historical sources - Pascoe treats them literally and as though they were addressed to an early 21st century audience. Pascoe also fails at times to present his material faithfully: historical events are sometimes compressed as though they were the same event, and in at least one case he presents an order of events in the wrong order. The Tindale map is only 'after Tindale' not an accurate reproduction of the Tindale map. I'm not convinced that he has provided a clear example of domestication (which he says is needed for agriculture) in his discussion of domestication. Even if his weak analysis of a google search in the Acknowledgements doesn't worry you, it doesn't take long for a curious reader to soon lose faith in Pascoe's research skills.
Gerritson's 'Australia and the Origins of Agriculture' is uncritically accepted and Pascoe doesn't address the criticisms of this work. This is important because the binary hunter-gatherer/agriculturalist distinction that he and Pascoe rely upon is one that has pretty much been abandoned by researchers. The reader is left then with the spectacle of Pascoe left not so much arguing against a eurocentric or colonialist model of economic development, but defending it and saying 'we've been put on the wrong side.' (He hasn't as yet stated where the real hunter-gatherers are.) Pascoe has to defend the economics of the colonisers (it seems at times as an a-historical universal) because one of the points of the book is to argue that if Aboriginal agriculture can be proved then claims of intellectual property over native food plants can be made. Pascoe trades the specificity of (Aboriginal) culture for economic development. It's a bargain I don't think everyone would be willing to make.
Read
February 18, 2020I debated for a long time on whether or not I should properly review this. I didn’t really feel like I could adequately review a book of non-fiction being that most of my reading is based in fiction. But this work explores a lot of really important issues about Aboriginal culture and land pre-colonisation and I think it’s really important that people are at least aware that this knowledge exists and is publicly available.
In saying that however, 1) I haven’t rated it and, 2) it’s going to be fairly short. Both because of aforementioned inexperience in non-fiction, but also because I don’t think it’s particularly fair to rate a non-fiction work. Me rating it isn’t exactly going to change the fact that it’s all true.
Anyway, I found this book to be a very, very interesting read. It’s amazing how humans can fool themselves into believing their own preconceived notions. Reading this simultaneously amazed and disgusted me just for the fact that people were and still are so arrogant.
I think that at the end of the day, this book made me reconsider my own bias of Indigenous culture, and reflect on what I was taught in school about the colonisation of Australia. Which mainly seems to be that Aboriginal people ‘needed’ the civilised culture westerners forced offered them. In fact, it seems to me that Aboriginal people seemed to be doing just fine on their own before we came along.
Overall, I think this was a really important book. And if you can go in with an open mind, I think you’ll be very surprised.
In saying that however, 1) I haven’t rated it and, 2) it’s going to be fairly short. Both because of aforementioned inexperience in non-fiction, but also because I don’t think it’s particularly fair to rate a non-fiction work. Me rating it isn’t exactly going to change the fact that it’s all true.
Anyway, I found this book to be a very, very interesting read. It’s amazing how humans can fool themselves into believing their own preconceived notions. Reading this simultaneously amazed and disgusted me just for the fact that people were and still are so arrogant.
I think that at the end of the day, this book made me reconsider my own bias of Indigenous culture, and reflect on what I was taught in school about the colonisation of Australia. Which mainly seems to be that Aboriginal people ‘needed’ the civilised culture westerners forced offered them. In fact, it seems to me that Aboriginal people seemed to be doing just fine on their own before we came along.
Overall, I think this was a really important book. And if you can go in with an open mind, I think you’ll be very surprised.
November 8, 2020
A very interesting exploration of the narratives around Aboriginal Australian's that cast them as a hunter-gatherer culture. I think this is more persuasive than necessarily informative (though of course, Pascoe cites his evidence) but in some sections, I thought Pascoe could have explored more in-depth. I felt sometimes the content moved on too quickly from each point being made (this is a very short book). That said, I think this was still excellently written and certainly interesting and definitely a book all Australian's should read. I particularly enjoyed how Pascoe linked the colonial effort to delegitimise the Indigenous claim to Australian land ownership with the persistent belief and that Indigenous people did not and could not have ever managed the land driven by a deliberate erasure of evidence of just that
March 11, 2021
Few books have the explosive power to blast the lumbering train of widely accepted history off its tracks.
Dark Emu is one of those books.
Australians have long believed a number of convenient myths about the indigenous inhabitants of our nation, stories that have both consciously and unconsciously justified the theft of an entire continent from the people who had lived up on it for tens of millennia.
The accepted story is that Australian Aboriginals were hunter-gatherers. Nomads. They had no permanent dwellings or technology to speak of. No farming. No pottery. None of the Western indicators of civilization (which so conveniently match the development path of western society) were present, and the peoples of this great land weren't 'using' the continent in the sense that the British settlers wanted to. From this view, Australia was wasted on it's original inhabitants, and colonization was partly justified by the improvements and 'civilization' that colonists brought with them to the eventual benefit of the 'primitive' people they encountered here.
Of course, like most history that is written by the victors, this is a self-serving story that justifies and obscures outright murder, theft and cultural destruction. Furthermore, as Pascoe shows in Dark Emu it deliberately ignored or downplayed indigenous systems of agriculture, land management, technology and even evidence of permanent dwellings.
In recent years the role that Indigenous people played in the very shaping of Australia, through their widespread and careful use of fire, has become better understood and respected. Pascoe's book however, goes far beyond fire stick agriculture, and upturns many of the assumptions I and other Australian's hold about or first peoples.
As a result, Pascoe's book is somewhat of a shock. He recounts how early explorers came across Indigenous villages, Indigenous grain stores, Indigenous croplands, carefully engineered large-scale eel-trapping systems and more, all of which have disappeared or been erased from the accepted histories of colonization. Each of these fascinating aspects of Indigenous life were witnessed by European arrivals, people who expected to find primitives, and instead found evidence of carefully organised and considered systems for managing the land and feeding people.
Various native crops such as the yam daisy were widely cultivated, crops that could have commercial viability now due to their drought resistant properties and high calorific content. Even native grains were grown for the making of bread, grains that were replaced with introduce crops such as wheat, which are no-where near as suited to the Australian environment.
I personally studied university level history for four years, and came across little discussion of these examples of Aboriginal civilization. Throughout Dark Emu I found myself regularly wondering how it is that so many examples of indigenous achievement have been ignored. I can only assume that such truths were inconvenient for the early settlers and their later supporters in building their narrative of plucky pioneers taming a wild land.
This is an important work. It has been widely read and discussed across Australia, and has had a substantial impact on discourse around Indigenous issues. It's success can partly be gauged by the outrage it has generated from Australia's right wing trollumnists. Andrew Bolt (Brits, think an aged and less charismatic Piers Morgan, Americans, think a bargain basement Tucker Carlson) in particular has waged a one-man jihad against this book, and has pursued a rather ugly public questioning of Bruce Pascoe's indigenous heritage. I expect this is due to Bolt and his ilk feeling threatened by Pascoe's findings.
Overall Dark Emu is an interesting read. Pascoe's writing style is one I find a tad unengaging at times, but his scholarship and passion for his subject make this a must-read for any Australian interested in the history of our nation.
The myth of the civilized English arriving in Australia to find a land empty but for a few wandering, childlike indigenous folks who weren't putting the land to much use was already staggering under a rain of refutations. Pascoe's book is a spear to the heart of that already weak fable.
Four roasted yam daisies out of five.
Dark Emu is one of those books.
Australians have long believed a number of convenient myths about the indigenous inhabitants of our nation, stories that have both consciously and unconsciously justified the theft of an entire continent from the people who had lived up on it for tens of millennia.
The accepted story is that Australian Aboriginals were hunter-gatherers. Nomads. They had no permanent dwellings or technology to speak of. No farming. No pottery. None of the Western indicators of civilization (which so conveniently match the development path of western society) were present, and the peoples of this great land weren't 'using' the continent in the sense that the British settlers wanted to. From this view, Australia was wasted on it's original inhabitants, and colonization was partly justified by the improvements and 'civilization' that colonists brought with them to the eventual benefit of the 'primitive' people they encountered here.
Of course, like most history that is written by the victors, this is a self-serving story that justifies and obscures outright murder, theft and cultural destruction. Furthermore, as Pascoe shows in Dark Emu it deliberately ignored or downplayed indigenous systems of agriculture, land management, technology and even evidence of permanent dwellings.
In recent years the role that Indigenous people played in the very shaping of Australia, through their widespread and careful use of fire, has become better understood and respected. Pascoe's book however, goes far beyond fire stick agriculture, and upturns many of the assumptions I and other Australian's hold about or first peoples.
As a result, Pascoe's book is somewhat of a shock. He recounts how early explorers came across Indigenous villages, Indigenous grain stores, Indigenous croplands, carefully engineered large-scale eel-trapping systems and more, all of which have disappeared or been erased from the accepted histories of colonization. Each of these fascinating aspects of Indigenous life were witnessed by European arrivals, people who expected to find primitives, and instead found evidence of carefully organised and considered systems for managing the land and feeding people.
Various native crops such as the yam daisy were widely cultivated, crops that could have commercial viability now due to their drought resistant properties and high calorific content. Even native grains were grown for the making of bread, grains that were replaced with introduce crops such as wheat, which are no-where near as suited to the Australian environment.
I personally studied university level history for four years, and came across little discussion of these examples of Aboriginal civilization. Throughout Dark Emu I found myself regularly wondering how it is that so many examples of indigenous achievement have been ignored. I can only assume that such truths were inconvenient for the early settlers and their later supporters in building their narrative of plucky pioneers taming a wild land.
This is an important work. It has been widely read and discussed across Australia, and has had a substantial impact on discourse around Indigenous issues. It's success can partly be gauged by the outrage it has generated from Australia's right wing trollumnists. Andrew Bolt (Brits, think an aged and less charismatic Piers Morgan, Americans, think a bargain basement Tucker Carlson) in particular has waged a one-man jihad against this book, and has pursued a rather ugly public questioning of Bruce Pascoe's indigenous heritage. I expect this is due to Bolt and his ilk feeling threatened by Pascoe's findings.
Overall Dark Emu is an interesting read. Pascoe's writing style is one I find a tad unengaging at times, but his scholarship and passion for his subject make this a must-read for any Australian interested in the history of our nation.
The myth of the civilized English arriving in Australia to find a land empty but for a few wandering, childlike indigenous folks who weren't putting the land to much use was already staggering under a rain of refutations. Pascoe's book is a spear to the heart of that already weak fable.
Four roasted yam daisies out of five.
June 4, 2019
4.5★s
Dark Emu: aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture is a non-fiction book by lecturer, researcher and award-winning author, Bruce Pascoe. Pascoe is of Bunurong and Tasmanian Aboriginal heritage. In this book, he tries to convey a wealth of information about Australia’s indigenous population before white settlement with which many readers will be unfamiliar.
Contrary to previously accepted belief that the Australian aboriginals were hunter-gatherers, Pascoe details evidence of agriculture, of engineering and of game management. Much of the evidence comes from the journals and diaries of early explorers and settlers. They were often amazed at the sophistication, extent and beauty of aboriginal architecture and constructions, including stone houses, dams, weirs, sluices and fish traps. That all this was known but never officially acknowledged, nor taught in schools, is a sad indictment on the greed of early settlers and government seeking to rationalise their theft.
The aboriginals maintained permanent fisheries and were experienced in aquaculture: the Brewarrina fish traps are possibly the oldest known human construction. It’s perhaps the ultimate irony that at the time of first settlement, abalone were referred to as mutton fish and deemed only suitable for the blacks, but now that Asian markets increase demand, they are prosecuted for harvesting this traditional food source.
They milled flour from disease-resistant, drought-tolerant native grains and rices, stores of which were then pilfered by settlers. The indigenous crops and methods produced yields that astonished western observers who then proceeded to ignore the long-held knowledge of the race and introduced their own unsuitable crops and methods to deplete the soils.
Pascoe discusses what is meant by civilisation, maintaining that a race which builds permanent structures, engages in vegetation management by cooperative controlled burning, sows crops and stores the excess yield, produces elaborate clothing such as cloaks, shoes, skirts and hats, such a race cannot be called primitive.
He also suggests that farming emu and kangaroo, and planting native grains, tubers and rice would be more suited to the Australian climate as these are indigenous to the land, thus likely drought-proof and sustainable. Niche markets for innovative farmers would be guaranteed.
Today’s nations could learn much from the pre-settlement Australians who led a peaceable existence through co-operation and sharing of resources and culture instead of conflict and conquest for sovereignty over land and resources.
This audio version is read by the author, and while it is easy enough to listen to, it is perhaps not the best medium for conveying detailed information, or for recalling more than a few points. An eye-opening book that is a must-read for all Australians.
Dark Emu: aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture is a non-fiction book by lecturer, researcher and award-winning author, Bruce Pascoe. Pascoe is of Bunurong and Tasmanian Aboriginal heritage. In this book, he tries to convey a wealth of information about Australia’s indigenous population before white settlement with which many readers will be unfamiliar.
Contrary to previously accepted belief that the Australian aboriginals were hunter-gatherers, Pascoe details evidence of agriculture, of engineering and of game management. Much of the evidence comes from the journals and diaries of early explorers and settlers. They were often amazed at the sophistication, extent and beauty of aboriginal architecture and constructions, including stone houses, dams, weirs, sluices and fish traps. That all this was known but never officially acknowledged, nor taught in schools, is a sad indictment on the greed of early settlers and government seeking to rationalise their theft.
The aboriginals maintained permanent fisheries and were experienced in aquaculture: the Brewarrina fish traps are possibly the oldest known human construction. It’s perhaps the ultimate irony that at the time of first settlement, abalone were referred to as mutton fish and deemed only suitable for the blacks, but now that Asian markets increase demand, they are prosecuted for harvesting this traditional food source.
They milled flour from disease-resistant, drought-tolerant native grains and rices, stores of which were then pilfered by settlers. The indigenous crops and methods produced yields that astonished western observers who then proceeded to ignore the long-held knowledge of the race and introduced their own unsuitable crops and methods to deplete the soils.
Pascoe discusses what is meant by civilisation, maintaining that a race which builds permanent structures, engages in vegetation management by cooperative controlled burning, sows crops and stores the excess yield, produces elaborate clothing such as cloaks, shoes, skirts and hats, such a race cannot be called primitive.
He also suggests that farming emu and kangaroo, and planting native grains, tubers and rice would be more suited to the Australian climate as these are indigenous to the land, thus likely drought-proof and sustainable. Niche markets for innovative farmers would be guaranteed.
Today’s nations could learn much from the pre-settlement Australians who led a peaceable existence through co-operation and sharing of resources and culture instead of conflict and conquest for sovereignty over land and resources.
This audio version is read by the author, and while it is easy enough to listen to, it is perhaps not the best medium for conveying detailed information, or for recalling more than a few points. An eye-opening book that is a must-read for all Australians.
June 11, 2020
A few things of the many things I didn't like about Dark Emu.
1) Pascoe starts from the false premise that hunter-gatherers didn't/don't thresh wild grass seeds or dig for tubers or live in fairly settled communities close to their fish traps, close to their main sources of food. When humans start threshing seed they start influencing the process natural selection - for instance, seeds that cling to the stem and seeds with thick outer shells that are harder to grind or digest tend not to be eaten. Similarly, when humans dig for tubers that loosens the soil and the next generation of tubers grow bigger. Since you're online now, check a few obvious online references and you'll find (no surprise here) that hunter-gatherer societies commonly had SOME domesticated crops and SOME domesticated animals. The transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies is a smooth one.
2) One reason Pascoe wants to convince us that pre-invasion Aborigines were "more" than "mere" hunter-gatherers is he thinks it undermines the self-esteem of Aborigines now, in 2020. This, to my mind, mirrors white supremacist bogans' arguments that "we" (and therefore "I") are superior to "them" because "we" invented wheels/ steam engines/ laptop computers.
3) Bruce Pascoe/ Dark Emu, page 30:
"The science of baking developed alongside the seed harvests. Richard Fullagar, at the Australian Museum, and Judith Field, at the University of New South Wales, found grindstones at Cuddie Springs, near Walgett, in western New South Wales, which had been used to grind seeds more than 30,000 years ago. This makes these people the world's oldest bakers by almost 15,000 years, as the Egyptians, the next earliest, didn't bake until 17,000 BC. Other peoples ground tubers to extract starch, but it seems that Aboriginal people were the first to discover the alchemy of baking bread from the flour of grass seeds."
Bruce Pascoe/ Dark Emu, page 31:
"The explorer Hamilton Hume, in frank conversation with Robinson, said that he had been on the exploration parties of Captain Charles Sturt (1795-1869), and that, 'on the Darling the Natives gather grain from the wild oats (a round grain) and grind it between two stones and make a paste and eat it, the same is done by the Natives to the northward'."
You notice the main problem here? In the first passage, Pascoe mentions grindstones (and nothing else, not ashes or other evidence) as indicating that Aborigines were the world's first bakers. In the second passage, he quotes a colonial source indicating Aborigines MAY have been the world's first tahini makers.
And I don't know where that "alchemy of baking bread" stuff comes from. Presumably the first steps towards breadmaking were making something resembling dampers or chappatis, with no leavening agents.
I've checked Richard Fullagar's writings and he doesn't seem to have come to the same conclusion as Pascoe. His employer's website says "starch grains were found on 30,000 year old grinding stones from three Palaeolithic sites across Europe: Bilancino II in Italy, Kostenki 16 in Russia, and Pavlov VI in the Czech Republic". Basing your cultural reputation on a claim that you're the world's oldest bakers by almost 15,000 years" seemed a bit daft even before I read the Australian Museum website. Now it seems dishonest.
4) Pascoe says Beth Gott has "scotched" (his word) the "myth" that Tasmanian Aborigines had lost the ability to make fire. I've read Beth Gott's paper on the subject. It's very good and its subtitle "Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence", makes it clear that her conclusion is a cautious one that maybe a small number of Tasmanian individuals COULD create fire when conditions weren't too damp. "Scotched"? I don't think so.
5) Pacoe lavishes praise upon Gavin Menzies, a writer the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto dismissed as "either a charlatan or a cretin". Pascoe says Menzies is an authority on how white people (everyone else in multicultural Australia is off the hook) have refused to acknowledge and/or actively hidden evidence of non-white achievement. It's tempting to say that only a charlatan or a cretin could ignore the abundance of evidence that Europeans from Marco Polo onwards were fascinated and sometimes, in some respects, overawed by the cultural achievements of China and India, of Ancient Egypt and Japan.
6) Last point, though there are many more things I COULD say: on page 222 of my edition Pascoe reproduces a photo taken in the mid-19th century of Big Johnnie Cabonne, Angus McMillan, and Jemmy Gebber. The white man is sitting forward of the two black men, his legs together while they manspread. If you can read anything from the photo it's that neither of the black men care very much about sharing their bench space with McMillan. The faces of all three men are expressionless, which was likely partly due to the slow speed of glass plate cameras and partly due to the aesthetic convention of photographing people with straight faces. What does Pascoe read from the photo? "[Gebber] stares into the camera with a look of absolute fear," [Cabonne] stares with miserable resignation". I've shown this photo to more than 20 people now and not one of them has read it in the same way as Pascoe.
Dark Emu shouldn't have won prizes. It shouldn't be a bestseller. It certainly shouldn't be a set text taught in an uncritical way.
1) Pascoe starts from the false premise that hunter-gatherers didn't/don't thresh wild grass seeds or dig for tubers or live in fairly settled communities close to their fish traps, close to their main sources of food. When humans start threshing seed they start influencing the process natural selection - for instance, seeds that cling to the stem and seeds with thick outer shells that are harder to grind or digest tend not to be eaten. Similarly, when humans dig for tubers that loosens the soil and the next generation of tubers grow bigger. Since you're online now, check a few obvious online references and you'll find (no surprise here) that hunter-gatherer societies commonly had SOME domesticated crops and SOME domesticated animals. The transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies is a smooth one.
2) One reason Pascoe wants to convince us that pre-invasion Aborigines were "more" than "mere" hunter-gatherers is he thinks it undermines the self-esteem of Aborigines now, in 2020. This, to my mind, mirrors white supremacist bogans' arguments that "we" (and therefore "I") are superior to "them" because "we" invented wheels/ steam engines/ laptop computers.
3) Bruce Pascoe/ Dark Emu, page 30:
"The science of baking developed alongside the seed harvests. Richard Fullagar, at the Australian Museum, and Judith Field, at the University of New South Wales, found grindstones at Cuddie Springs, near Walgett, in western New South Wales, which had been used to grind seeds more than 30,000 years ago. This makes these people the world's oldest bakers by almost 15,000 years, as the Egyptians, the next earliest, didn't bake until 17,000 BC. Other peoples ground tubers to extract starch, but it seems that Aboriginal people were the first to discover the alchemy of baking bread from the flour of grass seeds."
Bruce Pascoe/ Dark Emu, page 31:
"The explorer Hamilton Hume, in frank conversation with Robinson, said that he had been on the exploration parties of Captain Charles Sturt (1795-1869), and that, 'on the Darling the Natives gather grain from the wild oats (a round grain) and grind it between two stones and make a paste and eat it, the same is done by the Natives to the northward'."
You notice the main problem here? In the first passage, Pascoe mentions grindstones (and nothing else, not ashes or other evidence) as indicating that Aborigines were the world's first bakers. In the second passage, he quotes a colonial source indicating Aborigines MAY have been the world's first tahini makers.
And I don't know where that "alchemy of baking bread" stuff comes from. Presumably the first steps towards breadmaking were making something resembling dampers or chappatis, with no leavening agents.
I've checked Richard Fullagar's writings and he doesn't seem to have come to the same conclusion as Pascoe. His employer's website says "starch grains were found on 30,000 year old grinding stones from three Palaeolithic sites across Europe: Bilancino II in Italy, Kostenki 16 in Russia, and Pavlov VI in the Czech Republic". Basing your cultural reputation on a claim that you're the world's oldest bakers by almost 15,000 years" seemed a bit daft even before I read the Australian Museum website. Now it seems dishonest.
4) Pascoe says Beth Gott has "scotched" (his word) the "myth" that Tasmanian Aborigines had lost the ability to make fire. I've read Beth Gott's paper on the subject. It's very good and its subtitle "Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence", makes it clear that her conclusion is a cautious one that maybe a small number of Tasmanian individuals COULD create fire when conditions weren't too damp. "Scotched"? I don't think so.
5) Pacoe lavishes praise upon Gavin Menzies, a writer the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto dismissed as "either a charlatan or a cretin". Pascoe says Menzies is an authority on how white people (everyone else in multicultural Australia is off the hook) have refused to acknowledge and/or actively hidden evidence of non-white achievement. It's tempting to say that only a charlatan or a cretin could ignore the abundance of evidence that Europeans from Marco Polo onwards were fascinated and sometimes, in some respects, overawed by the cultural achievements of China and India, of Ancient Egypt and Japan.
6) Last point, though there are many more things I COULD say: on page 222 of my edition Pascoe reproduces a photo taken in the mid-19th century of Big Johnnie Cabonne, Angus McMillan, and Jemmy Gebber. The white man is sitting forward of the two black men, his legs together while they manspread. If you can read anything from the photo it's that neither of the black men care very much about sharing their bench space with McMillan. The faces of all three men are expressionless, which was likely partly due to the slow speed of glass plate cameras and partly due to the aesthetic convention of photographing people with straight faces. What does Pascoe read from the photo? "[Gebber] stares into the camera with a look of absolute fear," [Cabonne] stares with miserable resignation". I've shown this photo to more than 20 people now and not one of them has read it in the same way as Pascoe.
Dark Emu shouldn't have won prizes. It shouldn't be a bestseller. It certainly shouldn't be a set text taught in an uncritical way.
January 2, 2019
This should be required reading. And all the money needed to do the further research suggested in this book should be given over now. Read it.
March 21, 2020
The diaries and journals of early Australian explorers and settlers tell a different story of Aboriginal settlement than the later historians and especially contemporary conservatives and politicians. That is, the land was managed for hunting, fishing, agriculture. Some newcomers described the landscape as a kind of park, not unlike the managed estates of English gentry, open fields, woods and farms. Those diaries therefore tell us that the premise of Australia's settlement, ie, the rights of British acquisition is based on a falseness - that the land was unoccupied or 'terra nullis'. No treaty was ever negotiated with any peoples already here - anyone who has seen John Batman's treaty knows that copperplate script was not taught to the wurrunjeri people in schools. And hence, the legitimacy of ownership in Australia is still contested, except by the courts and legislature which seems pretty ok with it all. Australians don't much like complexity when it comes to land ownership. We like our myths, we like our settled history. Dark emu takes us to the documents that cause us to be unstable, if we bother to read.
For a deeper look into the subject, The Biggest Estate on Earth by Bill Gammage is worth reading
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
For a deeper look into the subject, The Biggest Estate on Earth by Bill Gammage is worth reading
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
January 10, 2019
I can't take seriously a book which draws its content from selectively edited accounts of early white settlers. There are no accounts from Aboriginal people past and present about their lifestyle or culture in this book. The author provides no physical evidence that the culture he describes even existed when Europeans set foot on this country.
Really disappointing.
Really disappointing.
September 8, 2021
an absolute MUST READ.
"It seems improbable that a country can continue to hide from the actuality of its history in order to validate the fact that having said sorry, we refuse to say thanks."
"It seems improbable that a country can continue to hide from the actuality of its history in order to validate the fact that having said sorry, we refuse to say thanks."
February 7, 2017
This Christmas I visited a friend who gave me two precious things: a copy of Bruce Pascoe’s book Dark Emu and an envelope of seeds from the daisy yam, Microsceris lanceolata, known as “murnong" in the Boonwurrung language.
Dark Emu begins by challenging the received historical wisdom about Australian Aboriginal peoples which says that they were hunter-gatherers who lived opportunistically in a kind of harsh subsistence at the hands of nature. Pascoe argues that this description suited early settlers who wanted to see indigenous people as passive and childlike; unable to take responsibility for the land on which they wandered and undeserving of its possession.
By contrast, Pascoe shows a very different indigenous relationship to land and nature. Working systematically through early white accounts of contact with Aboriginal people and their land, Pascoe shows how accomplished Aboriginals were as farmers.
The daisy yam is a case in point. This highly nutritious tuber grew prolifically across much of southern Australia and was common in the areas south of Melbourne where I grew up. It is now rare. Within a few short years of white settlement in the mid 19th century, sheep had almost completely wiped it out.
It’s easy to take this history at face value and conclude that it was an unfortunate but relatively inconsequential side effect of agricultural development which caused the demise of the daisy yam. What this surface analysis hides is a much more complex understanding of the farming practices of Aboriginal people. When white settlers arrived, they saw an environment which they often described as “park-like”. Early descriptions I have read of the Mornington Peninsula talk about its open grasslands reminiscent of an English park. As a kid on weekend hikes battling my way through the thick scrub of the Otway Ranges, I remember being amazed to recall the stories of an elderly neighbour who had grown up in the area. He talked about the descriptions of the early bushmen who described the area as open and grassed, shaded by the enormous eucalypts that now were just stumps amid a younger generation of regrowth.
Pascoe shows that it wasn’t just sheep and logging that changed the environment but a loss of indigenous farming practices. Aboriginal people systematically burned and managed the environment to produce food sources when and where they needed them. The daisy yam requires a loose, friable soil and the harvesting practices supported regrowth and soil conservation in a form of sustainable agriculture which modern Australian farmers are only beginning to understand. Sheep ate the yams, but what was far more destructive was their trampling of the earth which prevented regrowth. Within a few years, parklands were replaced with compacted soils which encouraged erosion and supported far fewer animals - including sheep. Indigenous populations collapsed and their complex management of the land ended.
This story alone would make Dark Emu a compelling and important book to read but Pascoe’s analysis goes further:
"Some say the idea that the world trajectory is driven by conquest followed by innovation and intensification is satisfying to the Western mind because of our psychological dependence on our imperialist history. But if we give consideration to the idea that change can be generated by the spirit and through that to political action, then the stability of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture might be more readily explained. (p.136)"
In the later part of the book, Pascoe explores visions and versions of what it means to live well. Against the history of Western imperialism, Pascoe contrasts at least 40,000 years of carefully evolved environmental understandings deeply embedded in the cultural practices of Indigenous Australians. As the world looks forward to a more sustainable future through aspirations like the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Dark Emu is a timely contribution to alternative views of history and a reminder that much of the knowledge we need may already exist.
I have passed my seeds on to a colleague who will grow them with students at UWCSEA as part of a project to support natural diversity. I’m not hopeful that these temperate climate seeds will grow in the tropics of Singapore, but I hope to do my best to nurture the story they represent.
Dark Emu begins by challenging the received historical wisdom about Australian Aboriginal peoples which says that they were hunter-gatherers who lived opportunistically in a kind of harsh subsistence at the hands of nature. Pascoe argues that this description suited early settlers who wanted to see indigenous people as passive and childlike; unable to take responsibility for the land on which they wandered and undeserving of its possession.
By contrast, Pascoe shows a very different indigenous relationship to land and nature. Working systematically through early white accounts of contact with Aboriginal people and their land, Pascoe shows how accomplished Aboriginals were as farmers.
The daisy yam is a case in point. This highly nutritious tuber grew prolifically across much of southern Australia and was common in the areas south of Melbourne where I grew up. It is now rare. Within a few short years of white settlement in the mid 19th century, sheep had almost completely wiped it out.
It’s easy to take this history at face value and conclude that it was an unfortunate but relatively inconsequential side effect of agricultural development which caused the demise of the daisy yam. What this surface analysis hides is a much more complex understanding of the farming practices of Aboriginal people. When white settlers arrived, they saw an environment which they often described as “park-like”. Early descriptions I have read of the Mornington Peninsula talk about its open grasslands reminiscent of an English park. As a kid on weekend hikes battling my way through the thick scrub of the Otway Ranges, I remember being amazed to recall the stories of an elderly neighbour who had grown up in the area. He talked about the descriptions of the early bushmen who described the area as open and grassed, shaded by the enormous eucalypts that now were just stumps amid a younger generation of regrowth.
Pascoe shows that it wasn’t just sheep and logging that changed the environment but a loss of indigenous farming practices. Aboriginal people systematically burned and managed the environment to produce food sources when and where they needed them. The daisy yam requires a loose, friable soil and the harvesting practices supported regrowth and soil conservation in a form of sustainable agriculture which modern Australian farmers are only beginning to understand. Sheep ate the yams, but what was far more destructive was their trampling of the earth which prevented regrowth. Within a few years, parklands were replaced with compacted soils which encouraged erosion and supported far fewer animals - including sheep. Indigenous populations collapsed and their complex management of the land ended.
This story alone would make Dark Emu a compelling and important book to read but Pascoe’s analysis goes further:
"Some say the idea that the world trajectory is driven by conquest followed by innovation and intensification is satisfying to the Western mind because of our psychological dependence on our imperialist history. But if we give consideration to the idea that change can be generated by the spirit and through that to political action, then the stability of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture might be more readily explained. (p.136)"
In the later part of the book, Pascoe explores visions and versions of what it means to live well. Against the history of Western imperialism, Pascoe contrasts at least 40,000 years of carefully evolved environmental understandings deeply embedded in the cultural practices of Indigenous Australians. As the world looks forward to a more sustainable future through aspirations like the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Dark Emu is a timely contribution to alternative views of history and a reminder that much of the knowledge we need may already exist.
I have passed my seeds on to a colleague who will grow them with students at UWCSEA as part of a project to support natural diversity. I’m not hopeful that these temperate climate seeds will grow in the tropics of Singapore, but I hope to do my best to nurture the story they represent.
February 10, 2017
This beautifully researched survey of Australian indigenous agriculture is jam-packed with fascinating information about some very sophisticated land management, infrastructure-building and primary production practices. Pascoe's innovative approach combines archaeological evidence from contemporary fieldwork with meticulously researched archival accounts of the earliest white colonisers, whose observations of the local peoples they encountered reveal much more now than they did to 18th- and 19th-century white society.
The book is divided into sections that cover particular themes or ideas – land boundaries, housing, fisheries, religious practices, animal husbandry, and so on. it's striking and innovative to be making the claims Pascoe does for indigenous cultures: that they were just as recognisable as 'civilisations' as the European cultures of the same or earlier periods, and in many ways were more advanced. It's exciting to think how we can advance and broaden our contemporary use of land by tapping these ancient knowledges of how to enrich and harvest them. And it's shameful to see how white colonists have stupidly dismantled successful land use practices just because they failed to recognise their significance.
But I wish that Pascoe, or a firm-handed editor, had found a less dry and scholarly structure to present this really interesting material. There was some repetition in the writing that perhaps could have been avoided if another structure had been used. And at times the book felt like hard work to read. I'm glad, though, that mine seems to be a minority view – Dark Emu has found a broad audience and sold out quite a few print runs since its original publication.
The book is divided into sections that cover particular themes or ideas – land boundaries, housing, fisheries, religious practices, animal husbandry, and so on. it's striking and innovative to be making the claims Pascoe does for indigenous cultures: that they were just as recognisable as 'civilisations' as the European cultures of the same or earlier periods, and in many ways were more advanced. It's exciting to think how we can advance and broaden our contemporary use of land by tapping these ancient knowledges of how to enrich and harvest them. And it's shameful to see how white colonists have stupidly dismantled successful land use practices just because they failed to recognise their significance.
But I wish that Pascoe, or a firm-handed editor, had found a less dry and scholarly structure to present this really interesting material. There was some repetition in the writing that perhaps could have been avoided if another structure had been used. And at times the book felt like hard work to read. I'm glad, though, that mine seems to be a minority view – Dark Emu has found a broad audience and sold out quite a few print runs since its original publication.
August 11, 2021
This book is racist. Not in the blatant, Andrew Bolt xenophobic way, but in a deeper more insidious sense. The argument of the book is that the first Australian's weren't hunter gatherers "wandering from plant to plant, kangaroo to kangaroo, in hapless opportunism," but instead were proto-agriculturalists.
What is nefarious about this is that it suggests that the value of their civilization was based on its progress and development. But why is this so important? Because the very idea of progress is charged with a colonial energy. Colonialism was justified in bringing the 'advancements' of western civilization to the 'primitive' (a word that appears frequently in the book) natives.
When Pascoe explores First Australian cultivation of the yam daisy, his first instinct is to graft this ancient practice on to todays agri-business; "Our aim is for one, or a group, of the young local Aboriginal people to turn the results of this investigation into a profitable industry." When traditional vegetables and fruits and their cultivation, aquaculture, or land management are mentioned they are only valorised through their applicability to todays capitalist economy.
First Australians culture has no need to be measured against the dubious yardstick of western culture. It is valuable in its own right, it needs no external justification of valorisation.
The dreaming was not mentioned in this book. Perhaps he is leaving that for his sequel, where the dreamtime is revealed to be the perfect addition to social media, ushering in a new wave of dreamtime ICT entrepreneurship.
What is nefarious about this is that it suggests that the value of their civilization was based on its progress and development. But why is this so important? Because the very idea of progress is charged with a colonial energy. Colonialism was justified in bringing the 'advancements' of western civilization to the 'primitive' (a word that appears frequently in the book) natives.
When Pascoe explores First Australian cultivation of the yam daisy, his first instinct is to graft this ancient practice on to todays agri-business; "Our aim is for one, or a group, of the young local Aboriginal people to turn the results of this investigation into a profitable industry." When traditional vegetables and fruits and their cultivation, aquaculture, or land management are mentioned they are only valorised through their applicability to todays capitalist economy.
First Australians culture has no need to be measured against the dubious yardstick of western culture. It is valuable in its own right, it needs no external justification of valorisation.
The dreaming was not mentioned in this book. Perhaps he is leaving that for his sequel, where the dreamtime is revealed to be the perfect addition to social media, ushering in a new wave of dreamtime ICT entrepreneurship.
November 6, 2019
I don’t claim to know a lot about Aboriginal history—I’d say I know the very basics. The extent of my high school education was essentially ‘we screwed up, but we said sorry!’. Now that I’m a good few years out of school, I’ve been working on changing that which is what led me to pick up this book.
And boy, was it an eye-opening read!
I never thought that I’d be interested in a book about agriculture, but this was surprisingly engaging. It should absolutely be required reading. In fact, I believe that it might actually be for a few schools around where I live. Maybe the fact I was on my library’s waitlist for the ebook for three month says that people are starting to take notice. I really hope that’s true.
Please pick this up. Buy it for everyone you know. Make your library buy copies.
Finally, the story about the killer whales and their relationships with the Yuin was incredible. I mean sure, whale-hunting? That makes me sad. But the connection between these whales and people? That is just so beyond anything I’ve ever heard before.
And boy, was it an eye-opening read!
I never thought that I’d be interested in a book about agriculture, but this was surprisingly engaging. It should absolutely be required reading. In fact, I believe that it might actually be for a few schools around where I live. Maybe the fact I was on my library’s waitlist for the ebook for three month says that people are starting to take notice. I really hope that’s true.
Please pick this up. Buy it for everyone you know. Make your library buy copies.
Finally, the story about the killer whales and their relationships with the Yuin was incredible. I mean sure, whale-hunting? That makes me sad. But the connection between these whales and people? That is just so beyond anything I’ve ever heard before.
September 24, 2018
An amazing journey, well-written and researched.
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