• This post replaces and updates my original (2023) introduction to Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu in The European colonisation of Australia on this blog, and a series of comments and additions which followed it there.
Dark Emu
As I said in 2023, it has gradually become apparent that the Australian history we learned in school fifty years ago obscured much of the truth about the early years of European settlement. Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2014) is a key work in our rethinking of that narrative.
I knew about the book for some years before I finally found the time and courage to read it. I had avoided it because I really didn’t want to read yet another account of white injustice and brutality, but I needn’t have worried: the book is not confronting in that way but is primarily about pre-contact indigenous communities and their food.