Dark Emu

Paperback, 277 pages

Published Jan. 5, 2018 by Magabala Books.

ISBN:: 978-1-921248-01-6

(1 review)

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.

2 editions

Adam reviewed Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe

4 stars

Bruce Pascoe manages to show how the 'hunter gatherer' tag that has become attached to Aboriginal culture at the time of invasion, was not only factually untrue, but was a story that served to justify the colonisers' dispossession of the land.

Pascoe revisits the diaries and other record made by early colonists and explorers and pieces together their observations of crop cultivation and irrigation, food storage and house building, among many other practices considered marks of advanced society by European anthropological standards.

I am also ashamed to admit that my knowledge of most of these sophisticated agriculture, aquaculture and land management techniques was woefully shallow, having, I suppose, been misled by the colonisers' narrative that plays down or refuses to acknowledge Aboriginal Australians' tens of thousands of years expertise in land management and food cultivation - traditions that should be celebrated and learned from rather than willfully overlooked as they …

Bruce Pascoe manages to show how the 'hunter gatherer' tag that has become attached to Aboriginal culture at the time of invasion, was not only factually untrue, but was a story that served to justify the colonisers' dispossession of the land.

Pascoe revisits the diaries and other record made by early colonists and explorers and pieces together their observations of crop cultivation and irrigation, food storage and house building, among many other practices considered marks of advanced society by European anthropological standards.

I am also ashamed to admit that my knowledge of most of these sophisticated agriculture, aquaculture and land management techniques was woefully shallow, having, I suppose, been misled by the colonisers' narrative that plays down or refuses to acknowledge Aboriginal Australians' tens of thousands of years expertise in land management and food cultivation - traditions that should be celebrated and learned from rather than willfully overlooked as they have been for the past two hundred or so years since this land was stolen.

Dark Emu has left me looking at the landscape of the continent I live on in a different way and eager to learn more about the agricultural tradition of its traditional owners.