• 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.
Tom Griffiths at insidestory.org.au has this to say about Dark Emu:
What is novel about Pascoe’s work — and also surprisingly old-fashioned — is his explicit, analytical emphasis on the idea of agriculture. Aboriginal peoples, he argues, were farmers and bakers, the world’s first; they accumulated surpluses and lived in villages; they gathered seeds and harvested crops. Pascoe is consciously using the proud words the invaders used about themselves, words that justified dispossession — farming, villages, crops — and here he finds them in colonial descriptions of the original inhabitants of Australia, who he is keen to show were not “mere hunter-gatherers.” This is meant to be provocative and it is. …
He places Dark Emu in the context of the ongoing academic revision of our history by “scholars such as Norman Tindale, Harry Allen, John Blay, Beth Gott, Jeannette Hope, Tim Allen, Rupert Gerritsen, Bill Gammage, Rhys Jones, Jim Bowler, Tim Flannery, Ian McNiven, Dick Kimber, Peter Latz, Deborah Rose, Harry Lourandos, Lynette Russell, Paul Memmott and Eric Rolls.” I encourage everyone to read the essay as well as the book.
Regarding the book’s importance, van Loon, Coate and Weber had this to say on The Conversation –
Our analysis identified an extraordinary degree of public debate generated by the book – in part because it soon provoked another chapter in the “Australian History Wars”.
Social commentator Andrew Bolt, for example, published several columns on Dark Emu in the Herald Sun during 2018-19. He drew heavily on an anonymous website, Dark Emu Exposed, which purports to “expose” and “debunk” what it asserts are the book’s many myths, exaggerations and “fabrications”.
Interestingly, Russell Marks links the extraordinary sales success of Dark Emu in 2019 directly to the increase in public debate fuelled by Bolt.
– which leads us to Farmers or Hunter-gatherers, Peter Sutton and Kerry Walshe’s 2021 book rebutting Dark Emu.
Farmers or Hunter Gatherers?
One of my readers encouraged me to read Farmers or Hunter Gatherers – the Dark Emu Debate. “Their argument is essentially that all the evidence points to Aboriginal culture being a sophisticated and highly skilled hunter gatherer economy,” she said, “and that Bruce Pascoe’s insistence that they were mere agriculturalists actually undermines the value, importance and skill of hunter gatherer economies.”
That’s pretty much what the publisher’s blurb says, too, but this review is more equivocal. Griffiths (in the essay quoted above) had reservations, too:
But I think it’s a mistake to treat the concept of agriculture as a timeless, stable, universal and preordained template, to apply a European hierarchical metaphor, an imperial measure of civilisation, to societies that defy imported classifications. One of the great insights delivered by that half-century of scholarship is that Aboriginal societies produced a civilisation quite unlike any other, one uniquely adapted to Australian elements and ecosystems.
The more you know, the more complicated the picture looks. Anthropologists, archaeologists and historians are, however, converging on a more nuanced view of the ways indigenous people used the land:
Farmers versus foragers is a huge oversimplification of what was a mosaic of food production. After all, Australian landscapes differ markedly, from tropical rainforest to snowy mountains to arid spinifex country. For many Aboriginal people, the terms “farming” and “hunter-gatherer” do not capture the realities of 60 millennia of food production.
In our new research published in the Archaeology of Food and Foodways, we argue that to better understand millennia-old systems, archaeologists must engage deeply with fields such as plant genetics, ethnobotany, archaeobotany and bioarchaeology as well as listening more carefully to the views of Aboriginal people.
– from Farmers or foragers? Pre-colonial Aboriginal food production was hardly that simple
(Similar grinding stones are displayed in the ranger station of Bladensburg National Park near Winton.)
Young Dark Emu
Young Dark Emu – a truer history by Bruce Pascoe was published by Magabala Books in 2019. I have yet to see it but Sue Osborne says in Independent Education, a professional magazine for teachers, that it is “not a ‘dumbed down’ version of Dark Emu, it is a different book intentionally written for a younger audience but drawing on the same evidence.”
Black Duck
Black Duck – a year at Yumburra by Bruce Pascoe with Lyn Harwood (2024) is an anecdotal diary of a year on an East Gippsland farm set up by Pascoe and others to produce indigenous foods.
Farming, fishing and family take up a lot of space. Trips around Australia to speak at writer’s festivals, indigenous lore meetings and the like take up almost as much; and they are interspersed with wildlife observations. It’s a gentle, hopeful book from a bloke in his 70s who would like to slow down a bit but is still deeply involved with indigenous issues, and a good introduction to the rest of his work.
Van Loon has a lot more to say about it, all of it positive, on The Conversation.