Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture

By Bruce Pascoe

History has portrayed Australia’s First Peoples, the Aboriginals, as hunter-gatherers who lived on an empty, uncultivated land. History is wrong.

In this seminal book, Bruce Pascoe uncovers evidence that long before the arrival of white men, Aboriginal people across the continent were building dams and wells; planting, irrigating, and harvesting seeds, and then preserving the surplus and storing it in houses, sheds, or secure vessels; and creating elaborate cemeteries and manipulating the landscape. All of these behaviours were inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag, which turns out to have been a convenient lie that worked to justify dispossession.

Using compelling evidence from the records and diaries of early Australian explorers and colonists, he reveals that Aboriginal systems of food production and land management have been blatantly understated in modern retellings of early Aboriginal history, and that a new look at Australia’s past is required — for the benefit of us all.

Dark Emu, a bestseller in Australia, won both the Book of the Year Award and the Indigenous Writer’s Prize in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: May 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781925548662

Bruce Pascoe

Bruce Pascoe is a Bunurong, Yuin and Tasmanian Aboriginal writer of literary fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays and children's literature. He is the enterprise professor in Indigenous Agriculture at the University of Melbourne. He is best known for his work Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture (Magabala Books 2014)

Book preview

Baiame, the creator Spirit Emu, left the earth after its creation to reside as a dark shape in the Milky Way. The emu is inextricably linked with the wide grasslands of Australia, the landscape managed by Aboriginals. The fate of the emu, people, and grain are locked in step because, for Aboriginal people, the economy and the spirit are inseparable. Europeans stare at the stars, but Aboriginal people also see the spaces in between where the Spirit Emu resides.

DARK EMU

Dark Emu won both the Book of the Year Award and the Indigenous Writer’s Prize in the 2016 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.

Bruce Pascoe, who has been writing for many years, is currently working on two films for ABC TV and a novel. He lives at Gipsy Point, Victoria, and has a Bunurong, Tasmanian, and Yuin heritage.

Photograph courtesy Kim Batterham

Scribe Publications UK Ltd

2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

First published in Australia by Magabala Books Aboriginal Corporation 2014

First published by Scribe 2018

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Text copyright © Bruce Pascoe 2018

Photographs and images copyright © individual owners

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

9781911344780 (UK edition)

9781947534087 (US edition)

9781925548662 (e-book)

A CiP entry for this title is available from the British Library.

scribepublications.co.uk

scribepublications.com

To the Australians

Contents

Introduction

1. Agriculture

2. Aquaculture

3. Population and Housing

4. Storage and Preservation

5. Fire

6. The Heavens, Language, and the Law

7. An Australian Agricultural Revolution

8. Accepting History and Creating the Future

Acknowledgements

Picture credits

Bibliography

Notes

Introduction

After my book on our colonial frontier battles, Convincing Ground, was published in Australia in 2007, I was inundated with more than 200 letters and emails — many of them from fourth-generation farmers and Aboriginal people. Farmers sent me their great grandparents’ letters and documents about the frontier war, and Aboriginal people sent new information on many of those same battles.

I already had a pile of information collected from research conducted too late to make it into Convincing Ground, and, after following the leads from correspondents, I discovered much more.

I began to see a consistent thread running through the material: not only that the frontier war had been misrepresented in what we had been taught in school, but also that the economy and culture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had been grossly undervalued.

I knew that if I were to use all the new material in another book, I would have to begin from the sources upon which Australia’s idea of history is based: the journals and diaries of explorers and colonists.

These journals revealed a much more complicated Aboriginal economy than the primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyle we had been told was the simple lot of Australia’s First People. Hunter-gatherer societies forage and hunt for food, and do not employ agricultural methods or build permanent dwellings; they are nomadic. But as I read these early journals, I came across repeated references to people building dams and wells; planting, irrigating, and harvesting seed; preserving the surplus and storing it in houses, sheds, or secure vessels; and creating elaborate cemeteries and manipulating the landscape — none of which fitted the definition of a hunter-gatherer. Could it be that the accepted view of Indigenous Australians simply wandering from plant to plant, kangaroo to kangaroo, in hapless opportunism, was incorrect?

It is exciting to revisit the words of the first Europeans to ‘witness’ the pre-colonial Aboriginal economy. In Dark Emu, my aim is to give rise to the possibility of an alternative view of pre-colonial Aboriginal society. In reviewing the industry and ingenuity applied to food production over millennia, we have a chance to catch a glimpse of Australia as Aboriginals saw it.

Many readers of the explorers’ journals see the hardships they endured, and are enthralled by their finds of grassy plains, bountiful rivers, and sites where great towns could be built; but by adjusting our perspective by only a few degrees, we see a vastly different world through the same window.

The first colonists had their minds wrought by ideas of race and destiny; by the rumours heard as children of the great British Empire. They were immersed in these stories as infants, and later while marching in to school to ‘Men of Harlech’, standing to attention for ‘God Save the King’, and poring breathlessly over the stories of Horatio Nelson, the Christian Crusaders, King Arthur, Oliver Cromwell, and, of course, Captain James Cook.

Europe was convinced that its superiority in science, economy, and religion directed its destiny. In particular, the British believed that their successes in industry accorded their colonial ambition a natural authority, and that it was their duty to spread their version of civilisation and the word of God to heathens. In return, they would capture the wealth of the colonised lands.

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was still to come, but the basis of it, the gradual ascent from beast to civilised man, dominated the psychology of Europe at the time. The first British visitors sailed to Australia contemplating what they were about to find, and innate superiority was the prism through which their new world was seen.

When Darwin’s theory was put forward, it gave comfort to those who believed it was their right and duty to occupy the ‘empty’ land. As anthropologist Tony Barta commented:

The basis of that view was historical: it held that the advance of civilization was a triumphal progress, morally justifiable and probably inevitable. When Darwin lent his great gifts and influence to making the disappearance of peoples ‘natural’ as well as historical, his theory … could serve as an ideological cover for policies abhorrent to his humanitarian and humanist principles. Darwin’s fateful confusion of natural history and human history would be exploited fatally by others. ¹

Under the influence of these cultural certainties, how would it have been possible for the colonists not to believe that Englishmen were on the steepest ascent of human endeavour? How would it have been possible for them not to believe that the world was their entitlement, and their possession of it ordained by their God?

To understand how the Europeans’ assumptions selectively filtered the information brought to them by the early explorers is to see how we came to have the history of the country we accept today. Linda Tuwahi Smith provides an analysis of imperialism, which reveals that it is more than an economic and military exercise; it’s an act of ideology, the blatant confidence to see ‘others’ as tools for the will of the European. ²

It is clear from the journals of the explorers that few were in Australia 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.

Skewed views and misconceptions

The following story serves as a good example of the power of these assumptions and the need for colonists to legitimise their presence in the colonial field.

The Beveridge family had prospered on the colonial plains around Melbourne to the degree that a district was named after them. Once their wealth was consolidated, they decided to send a son, Peter, and his friend, James Kirby, to an area of the Murray River that had never seen European occupation.

The young men drove 1,000 head of cattle from the outskirts of Melbourne to the Murray River in 1843. They came across some natives, and Beveridge wrote in his diary:

[M]any of them had green boughs in their hands, and after ‘yabber yabber’ they began swinging the boughs over and round their heads, and shouting ‘Cum-a-thunga, cum-a-thunga.’ We of course did not know what their meaning was by these antics, but we guessed that by it they meant we were welcome to their land, and we made them understand that we were highly pleased at their antics and quite delighted at the words ‘cum-a-thunga’.nWhen they saw we were so much pleased at their conduct, three or four of them jumped into the water, and swam across and gave us a lot more ‘cum-a-thunga,’ so much so that they almost made themselves hoarse with shouting ‘cum-a-thunga’. ³

You would have had to work hard to convince yourself, or the governor, that Aboriginal people were delighted to give away their land.

In subsequent days, the two young colonials observed substantial weirs built all through the river system, and speculated about who might have built them. As they were the first Europeans in the area, they conceded that they were probably built by the ‘blacks’.

Later, they witnessed the people fishing with canoes, lines, and nets. The purpose of the weirs gradually became clear. They were made by damming the stream behind large earthen platforms into which channels were let, in order to direct fish as required. On one particular day, Kirby noticed a man by one of these weirs. He wrote:

[A] black would sit near the opening and just behind him a tough stick about ten feet long was stuck in the ground with the thick end down. To the thin end of this rod was attached a line with a noose at the other end; a wooden peg was fixed under the water at the opening in the fence to which this noose was caught, and when the fish made a dart to go through the opening he was caught by the gills, his force undid the loop from the peg, and the spring of the stick threw the fish over the head of the black, who would then in a most lazy manner reach back his hand, undo the fish, and set the loop again around the peg. ⁴

How did Kirby interpret this activity? After describing the operation in such detail, and appearing to approve of its efficiency, he wrote, ‘I have often heard of the indolence of the blacks and soon came to the conclusion after watching a blackfellow catch fish in such a lazy way, that what I had heard was perfectly true.’ ⁵

Kirby’s preconceptions of what he was going to find on this frontier are so powerful that he skews his detailed observations to that prejudice. The activity he witnessed was, in fact, a piece of ingenious engineering.

Peter Beveridge wrote a book about his experiences with Aboriginal people, in which he displayed all of his and Kirby’s prejudices. ⁶ Despite the fact that his work is crucial to what we know of the Wati Wati clan, and that his list of words is one of the most significant, he can’t disguise his contempt. He refers to the old women as hags, continually refers to the Wati Wati as savages, and appears to have completely ignored the moiety and totemic system of their society.

Modern histories of the area claim that Peter’s brother, Andrew, was killed by the Wati Wati after a dispute about blacks killing Beveridge’s sheep, but Kirby’s description of the event offers a startling insight into the real motivation.

Heavily armed warriors advanced on the station and ignored all other Europeans until they found Andrew Beveridge, the man who they claimed had been violating women. He was isolated and speared, and his body symbolically daubed with ochre. ⁷

The problems at the Beveridge property, Tyntynder, followed a very familiar colonial pattern: initial acceptance followed by increasing suspicion and anger as the Europeans refused to allow the people to make use of their ancestral lands.

Kirby relates incidents of the war with relish, but always cloaks the killings in euphemism:

The blacks ran into the lake, but the shore shelved in so far that it was not deep enough for them to swim or dive, they thus became very good targets for us. A lot of these fellows never came near the hut again, nor did they attempt to kill a man or beast, no! they were very peaceable after this … Sir Robert [a Wati Wati man], for instance, never killed anyone after this, he also may have died. ⁸

Kirby’s emphatic words hint at a ghoulish glee.

His narrative continues: ‘It was open war now. If they caught us unguarded they would kill us, and we in return would (if we caught them) help ourselves.’ ⁹ The language Kirby uses may be euphemistic, but the meaning is unequivocal. Tyntynder was at war with the Wati Wati, despite the fact that at this stage of the settlement only one European had been killed by Aboriginals, and that was for molesting women.

When Kirby and Beveridge chose to interpret the Wati Wati shouts of ‘cum-a-thunga’ as an invitation to take their land, it set in train all the violence, bitterness, and hardship typical of the colonial frontier. It was a land contest, and neither side would withdraw from the battle.

In the dictionary he wrote in his retirement at French Island, Peter Beveridge does not give a definition of the first Aboriginal words he heard, but an examination of other studies, and discussions with linguists of the Wati Wati and the neighbouring Wemba Wemba language, reveal a phrase, ‘cum.mar.ca.ta.ca’, recorded by the Aboriginal Protector, George Augustus Robinson, one of the few who recorded language and cultural information. Its probable meaning is ‘Get up and go away.’ It’s an exclamation given great force, as Beveridge admits, and it is improbable that it represents an invitation to take the land.

There is also a strong possibility that within the phrase heard by Beveridge is the word ‘karmer’, meaning a long reed spear, combined and added to the strongly intensive verb affix, ‘ungga’, and further combined with the plural first-person pronoun, we, ‘angurr’. Thus, ‘karmer ungga’ translates as ‘We will spear you.’

In any case, Beveridge chose not to include in his dictionary the first phrase of Wati Wati addressed to him. Perhaps he was not keen to remember it, having since learned the true meaning.

Kirby and Beveridge weren’t just pulling their own legs; they were pulling ours in an effort to disguise the means by which they took possession of a land. Their determination to seize the land had blinded them to the use the Wati Wati were making of it. In denying the existence of the economy, they were denying the right of the people to their land, and fabricating the excuse that is at the heart of Australia’s claim to legitimacy today.

Eric Rolls, in his epic A Million Wild Acres, described the desecration by sheep of the grasslands in the Hunter–Pillaga region. Rolls was a passionate man of the land who documented the misuse of soils and water by Australian farmers. He noticed that dispossession of Aboriginal people and destruction of their villages was followed by an equally rapid deterioration in the soil, the foundation of the pre-contact economy.

Farmers noticed the alarming drop in productivity over a mere handful of years as sheep ate out the croplands and compacted the light soils. ‘In Australia thousands of years of grass and soil changed in a few years. The spongy soil grew hard, the run-off accelerated and different grasses dominated.’ ¹⁰

The fertility encouraged by careful husbandry of the soil was destroyed in just a few seasons. The lush yam pastures of Victoria disappeared as soon as sheep grazed upon them, as the dentition of sheep allowed them to eat growth right to the ground, destroying the basal leaves.

The English pastoralists weren’t to know that the fertility they extolled on first entering the country was the result of careful management, and cultural myopia ensured that even as the nature of the country changed, they would never blame their own form of agriculture for that devastation.

At the height of its productivity, Australia supported large populations, and, even after plagues of introduced smallpox and warfare had

Reviews for Dark Emu

[therebelprince · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A rather important, worthwhile read for all Australians. "Dark Emu" is one of several recent books (another being the comprehensive "The Greatest Estate on Earth" - a superior and more objective read, if I'm honest) seeking to shatter the many misconceptions about the way Aboriginal Australians lived before their land was taken over by the white man.

"Arguing over whether the Aboriginal economy was a hunter-gatherer system or one of burgeoning agriculture is not the central issue. The crucial point is that we have never discussed it as a nation. The belief that Aboriginal people were 'mere' hunter gatherers has been used as a political tool to justify disposession."

Pascoe outlines the anthropological, geographical, and anecdotal evidence for Aboriginal farming, trapping, house-building, clothing, fire-burning, and other interesting practices. This book is not academic, in that it primarily lists a variety of examples and claims without citing many sources, but, as Pascoe notes, this is an area where there remains great prejudice and ignorance today. The information I was taught as factual when I was a child portrays a fairly simplistic view of the Aboriginal tribes, and it's truly fascinating to gain an insight into the rich culture that existed in the country long before the white man. Pascoe sees the best possible answers, of course, and his ideology can be frustrating when it replaces more even-keeled thought. But perhaps this is better seen as a work of passionate non-fiction rather than academia. Australia has a long way to go before equality is achieved, and recognition of this sort can only help.

[robfwalter · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

As I read Dark Emu, I felt that it was an important book, but also in many ways a frustrating one. It's important because it overthrows much of the disinformation about pre-invasion Aboriginal Australian society that is given to Australians all the way from primary school to adulthood. We were told that Indigenous people were hunter-gatherers, but in fact in many places they farmed; we were told that they were nomads, but in fact in many places they were sedentary, or moved only rarely; we were told that they lived in primitive humpies, but in fact they built large, secure shelters that required skill to build and were part of their social fabric. All of this is tremendously important because it changes how we think of the invasion of Australia and Australian Indigenous cultures as they exist today. It's also important because, as Pascoe eloquently points out, if we allow it to, Aboriginal knowledge can help us learn how to live in in Australia today without degrading our environment. But that won't happen if we try to only access the technical knowledge. We need to understand the way Aboriginal societies made decisions, co-existed and thought in order to understand the kind of sustainability they achieved.

The frustration comes from two sources, one of which is no fault of the author's. Although Pascoe has found many interesting accounts of early contact, there is just so much that we don't and can't know. As part of the attempted genocide of Australia's first peoples there was a policy of diminishing and erasing Aboriginal achievements and culture. Much of what was erased can never be recovered, both the technical knowledge and the cultural and spiritual. This loss haunts the book, so that much of Pascoe's commentary is necessarily partial or speculative.

The latter frustration just comes from the fact that this book is not all it could be. Ideally, this should be a tour de force, a magnum opus. Consider the coherence and scope of a book like Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. Regardless of what you think about it's premises or its conclusions, it hangs together and puts together a forceful argument that is entertaining to read. Dark Emu is instead partial, somewhat repetitive and occasional awkwardly written. Pascoe talks only a little about the fact that the popular image of pre-invasion indigenous societies is in fact an image of post-invasion communities massively diminished by land theft, violence and disease. On that last point, there is nothing, or almost nothing, in the book, whereas it would have been interesting to learn whether it was true that many communities were essentially post-plague before they were even invaded.

Of course this second frustration is a harsh one. Jared Diamond was able to make Guns, Germs and Steel a magnum opus because he had the tenure and detachment to write it at leisure. Pascoe is amid the wreckage of a war that continues to be fought, sifting through evidence that has been destroyed at every opportunity.

So I was certainly able to get over my frustration in order to find the powerful arguments and evidence in this book both moving and challenging to my world view. I'll finish with two quotes which summarise the challenging notions that I'll take away from this book:
"Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were on the same cognitive trajectory as the rest of the human family, albeit in a different stream and a unique channel in that stream."

"It seems improbably 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." [I interepret this as our refusal to say thanks for their custodianship of the land we now live in]

[lcl999 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An incredibly important book. Not only does it refute the simplistic view of Australian aboriginies as hunter-gatherers, it reveals their sophisticated agriculture, housing, fisheries etc. But more important is that this 60,000 civilization had a mindset, a philosophy, which preserved the land and its peoples in productive peace over that period.

[booktsunami · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Bruce seems to be pretty much a man with a mission. And that mission is to redeem the image of the Australian Aboriginals as primitive hunter gatherers and have them recognised as farmers, agriculturalists, architects and creators of elaborate engineering works. Well he half convinces me. The issue is that he seems to go overboard. He cites Bill Gammage (author of "The biggest estate on earth") a lot. And I make the same comment about Bill Gammage...that they both take SOME evidence and generalise it, and, to my mind anyway, both of them over-claim on the basis of the evidence.
Apparently a new book has just been published which is a scholarly review of Pascoe's book and it makes some of these points. For example, when I read Pascoe's book and an account of Sturt seeing a sophisticated village of some seventy huts (p78) on the Darling River....I had assumed that it was an active, occupied village....but apparently, Bruce has been a little selective about what he quotes and leaves out the fact that the village was unoccupied and looked like it had been that way for some time. OK this is a minor criticism but it worries me that Bruce might have done similar things elsewhere and slanted his reporting and maybe cherry picked his data. Because there seem to be innumerable contemporary reports of Aboriginals being hunter gathers but relatively few about them cultivating or planting seed.
I spent a lot of my holidays around Dayleys Point on the central coast of NSW and there were significant middens there accumulated over thousands of years I guess. On the sandstone shelf above those caves with middens there were carvings of fish, sharks and, (I think) people though no plants. But the location would not have been all that great for cultivation or farming and with the abundance of shellfish and actual fish in the waters alongside, I suspect there would be very little incentive to make life difficult and to go out planting kangaroo grass or yams. (Though Kangaroo grass does grow around that area ...so might have been harvested).
I was fascinated by the stories told by many of the explorers about large stocks of grain being found; of yams being cultivated, and of mitchell grass being harvested. (It must have been hard work because the seeds are so small). So I think Bruce is onto something here. Clearly there were places that were on the cusp of agriculture. And there were places, like Brewarrina, where fish traps had been built. But maybe he overstates the engineering skills involved. I have many recollections as a kid camping by rivers with rocky bottoms and lots of water worn stones, and damming up the water ...just to make a deeper swimming hole; and making some races to capture fish. (I would have been about 11 years old with no instruction from adults etc....it was just play to us. But if your life depended on catching fish (maybe as at Brewarrina) then I guess things might have become more sophisticated). So yes, there were fish traps ...and maybe they have been there for a long while but I'm not sure they should be "talked-up" as marvels of modern engineering.
I was also fascinated by the reports of stone houses. (Well, the bases were stone and apparently the upper structure was of bark.). I was unaware of this development around Victoria. Though was it widespread throughout Australia? He quotes Basedow in 1925 writing about stone slabs on beams ..used for roofing in South Australia (though that's 135 years after European settlement so there could be an element of copying) and states (without evidence) that buildings in the Kimberley were built with large slabs of stone. However, from what I know, the practice of building substantial structures with stone was not widespread...and even the explorers (such as Mitchell and Sturt) that he quotes extensively, mainly describe bark dwellings.
So I come away from Bruce's book slightly mystified. Yes, it does seem that there were elements of the start of Agriculture and there were some permanent dwellings, and there were places where mildly complex fish traps had been built; And certainly, there were some fairly sophisticated articles made from fibre (nets, containers, etc). But the evidence appears to be a bit sparse that these innovations were universal.
Of course the whole issue is terribly muddled by the impact of smallpox on the indigenous population. It spread faster than the colonialists and clearly disrupted the social structures and caused a massive decline in the population, and presumably to practices such as farming or building. Pascoe draws attention to this. He rightly draws attention to the fact that aboriginal structures were burned and stones used for fences. (A bit like what happened to the Aztecs with their temple stones being repurposed to build churches). He rightly draws attention to the fact that there was evidence of large buildings used by large numbers of people and the people were no longer present in obvious numbers.
So, as I said above, Bruce has half convinced me. I would be more convinced if he had appeared to be more objective and not "over-claim". That's a pity, because I think he's raised some really important issues here. I guess, he felt that it was better to make a big bold claim and have impact than a more modest, less impactful claim. I am also impressed by the variety of sources he has rescued from archives and libraries. A pity that (as cited above) he seems to have been a bit selective in how he quotes the original reports.
He writes well and it's an interesting and easy read. I give it four stars.

[philipjhunt · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Stunning attempt to revise every white colonial descendant's taken-for-granted assumptions about indigenous Australia. And probably, not before time. Whether you are persuaded or not, this book needs to be read. And considered.

[brakketh-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent and accessible discussion of the evidence behind a non-nomadic lifestyle for the Aboriginal people prior to British colonisation.

[stillatim · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a great endeavor, the kind of book most Australians should try to read; even if you don't want to take all of the polemic to heart, it's good to know the facts that are presented.

On the other hand, holy mother of God is this a terrible book, in the sense that it is rambling, repetitive, and seemingly was never edited at all by anyone. Some paragraphs feel like they were thrown in at random, just because that paragraph had been written. Other paragraphs display exactly the kind of wanton stupidity that a book like this is meant to combat, except that the stupidity is about something else, and so is, I guess, not worth combating?

"The financial crash of 2008 and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 occurred because the Christian morality of most participants had been excluded from their business dealings. In the case of the oil spill, it highlighted the dominion that Christians believe they hold over the earth."

That's right: the oil spill was caused by the absence of Christian morality among oil barons, as well as the presence of Christian morality among oil barons. Disappointing, because a good version of this would be so good.

[zeborah · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I'd been meaning to read this for a long time and thought I knew the general gist of it, but it's 1000% more so. It outlines an overwhelming number of lavishly referenced examples of fields of grain or yam crops, wells and dams, fish weirs and kangaroo battues, hunting alliances with killer whales and dolphins, mosaic fires relying on predictable changes in wind direction, and more. The sheer extent of agriculture, aquaculture, soil management, storage of excess harvests, permanent settlements, and social systems so stable that they could maintain all the above sustainably over tens of thousands of years - and the extent to which European settler simultaneously admired and denied the results of all this, and simultaneously used and destroyed its fruits - leads inexorably to the conclusion embodied in a word never written in the text: genocide.

But while the author's feelings about the destruction of the culture and of even the memory of it are very clear, he ends on the optimistic note that if [we] settlers can move beyond "saying sorry" to "saying thanks" we could then take the next step to equality - perhaps "insufficient to account for the loss of the land, but in our current predicament it is not a bad place to start". By acknowledging and reviving traditional practices of managing the land, Australia could revert from the desert it's unjustly famous for, back to the rich, productive farmland that first met the European colonists.

[jayeless-698797 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book has been depicted as a huge bombshell of a work, upturning everything "we" thought we knew about Aboriginal societies before invasion. With this in mind, I found this book kind of disappointing, because having studied a mere single unit of Aboriginal history at university… this book was not a bombshell in the slightest. "Well duh, Jess," you might say, "this book was supposed to be a bombshell to THE AVERAGE AUSTRALIAN, not to people who are already relatively well-educated on the matter." (Not that a single unit is that much education.) On that, OK OK you might have a point… but then who is this book really for? If you're remotely interested in Australian history, you probably already know the main points of this book… and if you're not interested you'd never read this anyway. Is it for people who are interested but never really got around to starting to learn? I don't know.

At any rate, once I realised the marketing for this book was way overblown, I was able to appreciate it for what it was. Pascoe's main contention is that pre-contact Aboriginal societies were not hunter-gathers, but cultivated the land and waterways in sophisticated ways like agriculturalists, and built permanent villages to live in. In general I think this is pretty well-known, but the book has a ton of specific examples and details that are not all so well-known. For me, that was probably the most illuminating part of the book: learning the different species of grains, yams and suchlike that Aboriginal people used to cultivate, and how could these be cultivated again today as more climate-appropriate alternatives to wheat, rice, barley, etc. (not replacing the Eurasian crops wholesale, just as an alternative, and particularly in more marginal farmland like western NSW that used to grow these native crops perfectly well). Pascoe has something of a side argument about wanting rural Aboriginal people to be able to create collectives to grow these native crops, taking advantage of the popularity of "whole foods" to find an affluent market. This all seems pretty fair and intriguing to me.

He also talks in great detail (the entirety of chapter three) about the design of Aboriginal villages and the architecture of their houses in different parts of the country. Most of these structures have not survived, and while Pascoe doesn't really spell it out in this book, this is because British settlers purposely destroyed those settlements so as to destroy the evidence they weren't simply settling "terra nullius". Basically, international law in the late eighteenth century outlined three circumstances in which you were allowed to annex new land: by agreement (like the Louisiana Purchase), by fair conquest (as affirmed by a peace treaty afterwards), or if it was uninhabited ("terra nullius"). The Brits twisted this latter argument, claiming inhabited land was technically uninhabited if the inhabitants were just wandering over it and not laying roots down (like by cultivating the land or building villages). Once it became apparent to the invaders that Aboriginal people were ABSOLUTELY cultivating the land and living in villages, they decided to burn everything down to hide the evidence. Obviously there still is evidence (including evidence of settlers putting it in writing about all the Aboriginal houses they'd destroyed…), but if you were wondering why there are one-star reviews acting like it's laughable that Aboriginal people ever had houses, that's why.

Another important part of this book, of course, is the discussion of how Aboriginal societies were sustainable in a way that capitalism (built on the false premise of eternal growth) can never be. People cultivated the land collectively, were careful not to make radical changes that could have bad consequences for people elsewhere (like downstream) or in future generations, and even made sure to do things like hunt male animals instead of female ones, to have the most minimal impact on animal species' viability. They practised terraced agriculture, cultivated the sweeping grasslands (full of food crops, actually) that the Europeans thought were there just by the grace of nature, used nets that could be swiftly taken down once full to catch only the amount of fish they truly needed… and of course they conducted planned burns in a vastly more sophisticated way than our modern authorities do. They did not believe in private land ownership the way that capitalism holds sacred; they understood themselves to be custodians of the land, there to ensure it would remain in good condition for the next generation. Considering we live in a world where climate change, deforestation, excessive waste, unsustainable mining, depletion/destruction of lakes and waterways, and so on are all gigantic issues, it's certainly worth reminding ourselves that the world doesn't have to be run this way.

What confused me somewhat, though, is that Pascoe seemed afraid to take this argument right through to its rightful conclusion: that capitalism itself, as imposed on Australia by the British and persisted with ever since, is the problem. He even tries to argue that empowering Aboriginal people to return to these practices would pose "no risk" to the economy… when the thing is that of course forcing major corporations to stop destroying the environment for the sake of short-term profit would "pose a risk to the economy" (in that those corporations would cease to be profitable), but this is A GOOD THING, because these practices are insane! Dumping capitalism and returning to more traditional Aboriginal ways of viewing property and sustainability is absolutely what we need to do, so why chicken out of saying that and try to be like, "Well… maybe some Aboriginal-run farming collectives will fix things?" In and of themselves they will not fix things, man. We need to look bigger.

But look, this is really a pop anthropology book rather than a political argument, so my criticisms of its conclusion shouldn't be taken as a big deal. Overall, if you don't know that much about Aboriginal societies pre-1788 this is a good place to start. If you do know a bit, then you'll probably still get something out of it, but don't expect it to be earth-shattering. By raising expectations excessively I think the marketing did this book a bit of a disservice, but it's still good and easy to read. Worth it if you have the interest.

[miaculpa-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Growing up in Australia in the 1970s and 80s, there were a grand total of three mentions of Aboriginal people in the curriculum; when I was five we got to colour in a picture of an Aboriginal man, a book told us that a European explorer on the Murray got some spears chucked at him and another book told us that all the Kaurna people, the traditional owners of Adelaide, had all died out. Imagine my confusion when I later met Kaurna elders.

This all vaguely ties into "Dark Emu" as European Australians have done such a bang up job erasing the achievements of pre-contact Indigenous Australia that we have no idea of many ways Australia leads the world; the oldest human built structure in the world, the first parliament, the first farmers, the first builders (to name a few examples). Pascoe provides very readable evidence that Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders were far more advanced than we have given them credit for. Check it out.

[keylawk · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The author writes with gentle compassion as witness to the remaining archeology and as a reader of the early journals, accounts, and diaries of the first European explorers and "settlers" of Australia. The myths of a "primitive" and empty continent are annihilated.

Bruce Pascoe, an Australian of Bunurong, Tasmanian and Yuin heritage, quotes from the first person accounts, and then contrasts the representations which followed about the level of aboriginal development. The truth about the advanced Agriculture, Aquaculture, Housing, use of Fire, and the understandings of Language and Law, is re-exposed. Dated stonework and physical evidence demonstrates that Australia is the site of the earliest sailing, seasonal navigation, irrigation, planting, use of battue nets and fishing weirs, so far discovered.

The yam culture supported a relatively large population in which the ugliness of war was almost unknown. Linguistically, it is obvious that weapons and tools are loaded with "moral and spiritual obligation and significance". [193] The idea of conquest as inevitable "progress" is challenged--viewing the European colonials seizure of a continent and reducing it to mono-cultures, war, and overpopulation, in historical context with a careful examination of outcomes. Sustainability requires more than "touchy-feely wise blackfellow versus the destructive imperialist whitefellow" but a value on conservative economic practices and the evolution of the species. [195] The author succeeds in explaining progress using a model of "change generated by the spirit" applied to political action. The interconnected economic system in operation could be considered "jigsaw mutualism", in that individuals had rights and responsibilities for its parts, and were motivated to add to, rather than detract from, each other and the "epic integrity of the land". [199]

This book clears away the myths and reestablishes the facts. Quoting Bill Stanner, "The worst imperialisms are those of preconceptions." [200] The author reports that the contemporary scientists are looking at the Aboriginal food products. Two major crops domesticated by Aboriginal people are native yams and grains. These may be perfect plants for dryland farms where European grains and sheep have been abandoned. After tens of thousands of years of sustainability, the recent introduction of superphosphates, herbicides and drenches required for European grains have leached and salinated vast regions, all just in the last century. It is exciting to read that the early explorers who ate the native food found it to be the best they had ever indulged--Mitchell's light and sweet bread and panicum. [214 ff]. The gist of this work is that the recovery of slaughtered and altered elements in history--the advanced people, and their crops, irrigation, and fisheries--"may hold the keys to future prosperity". [224] One can only share these concrete models which point to the glorious hope : "Human survival on a healthy planet is not a soft liberal pipe dream; it is sound global management, and the deepest of religious impulses". [226] Pascoe has ignited the journey.

[mbmackay · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a fascinating book. Pascoe quotes journals of early European travellers and explorers to show how successful was the aboriginal food production system prior to the disruption and devastation of European settlement.
Pascoe is not an academic and the book is not prefect, but the premise posed is well argued, and the sources available for review. I found his points to be compellingly made.
- he cites reports of food stores (plundered by the explorers who reported them!) that were way beyond what modern Australians have come to expect from the era - grain stores left for later use of 50 - 60 kgs, up to tonnes left in some places.
- population densities far higher than one would expect from the received stories of a hard-scrabble existence prior to European settlement
- complex and durable housing - quite different from the gunyahs and hovels usually reported
- technology for managing water and fish trapping are real eye openers.
The conclusion is that it suited the settlers to have a narrative that downplayed the success and complexity of pre-settlement aboriginal life as part justification as their land was taken for European exploitation.
Perhaps the best vignette of the book is the description of a sophisticated fish capturing set-up involving a sluice in a river through which fish passed and were able to be selectively caught in a loop on a sprung piece of wood and thrown onto the river bank by a fisherman lying on top of the contraption. This was described by the reporter as confirming the indolence of the Aboriginal race! If the same device had been a European invention, one would expect a slightly different response.