Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? shows almost no interest in popular knowledge or public sentiment. His modest aim, he said, “is to give rise to a possibility of an alternative view of precolonial Australia.” The public recognised this message as a valuable corrective to public and political misconceptions. Pascoe is challenging popular beliefs about Aborigines. (Keryn Walshe’s archaeology is less relevant here.) The anthropologist’s irritated corrections of some careless referencing and reckless claims made in a popular, non-academic text ignore Pascoe’s themes, arguments and intentions.ĭark Emu is not about whether Aborigines were agriculturalists or hunter-gatherers, but about how they were seen by explorers, settlers and other observers. I want to show that the detailed, disparaging interpretation of Dark Emu in Peter Sutton’s chapters in Farmers or Hunter-gatherers is seriously misleading. Is the implication that we need no longer be concerned about their subsequent history? But that history, as created by the settlers, is the major topic of Bruce Pascoe’s book. Many seem to have accepted that Pascoe has been proven to be quite wrong, particularly with the publication of Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe’s book Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate, which assured us that Aborigines were hunter-gatherers and had no ambitions to become farmers. It is as if the overwhelming popularity of Pascoe and his message have disturbed comfortable convictions about Australian history shared across a wide segment of Australian society. doesn't contest hunter gatherer labels either, whereas that is at the centre of my argument.Criticisms of the book Dark Emu and its author, Bruce Pascoe, continue to appear, and to become more puzzling. Almost all the evidence in Dark Emu comes from the records and diaries of the Australian explorers, impeccable sources.īruce's comments on his book compared to Gammage's: 'My book is about food production, housing construction and clothing, whereas Gammage was interested in the appearance of the country at contact. 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. 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. essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what Australia once was, or what it might yet be if we heed the lessons of long and sophisticated human occupation.' - Judges for 2016 NSW Premier's Literary Awardsĭark Emu puts forward an argument for a reconsideration of the hunter-gatherer tag for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians. 'Dark Emu injects a profound authenticity into the conversation about how we Australians understand our continent.

Dark emu author