I enjoyed reading Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu — drawing on Australia’s early explorer diaries to portray Australia’s Aborigines as living in “villages” of huts and practising agriculture and aquaculture — but with some caveats. I found myself constantly adjusting what he was depicting with what I already knew to be true so that I came away not with a totally new understanding but a revised one. I could not accept on the basis of the argument he presented that Aborigines practised democracy or that they lived as settled farmers. I have heard and seen too much from “primary sources” to dismiss the notion that they were also hunters and gatherers. Besides, I found myself wondering, why is it so important to stress agriculture as an indicator of civilizational advance? Sure, agriculture was important in our tradition, but is it really a universal marker of progress? Progress towards what? I have been fascinated with the Aboriginal concepts of the Dreaming or the Dreamtime. Even in Dark Emu one reads little reminders that technologies practised by Aborigines were performed with a cultic or Dreamtime mythological association or impulse.
Now a new volume has been released that I think will restore some balance to Dark Emu‘s image of the First Australians. Others have commended Pascoe for popularizing views of Aborigines that have long been known among specialists and experts. It would be a mistake, however, to replace the hunter-gatherer view with a settler-farmer construct. So we now have Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe’s Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate. I have only begun to read it but already a couple of sections can be quoted:
Pascoe contradicts the false belief, perhaps held by some, that all Aboriginal people were naked all of the time. Some Aboriginal people sewed animal skins into cloaks (page 89).
He criticises the uninformed view that classical Aboriginal society consisted of constantly nomadic people who simply lived off nature’s bounty, were not ecological agents, did not stay in one place for more than a few days and did not store resources (for example, page 12).
And he gives considerable attention to the storage of foods (pages 105—14), this being a useful corrective to ignorance of Aboriginal storage methods.
(Sutton, p. 5)
And in particular:
Pascoe’s message is built on a simple distinction between what he calls ‘mere’ hunter-gatherers, on the one hand, and farmers; or between ‘mere’ hunting and gathering on one hand and ‘agriculture’ on the other. We consider that the evidence, in fact, reveals a positioning of the Aboriginal people of 1788 somewhere between these two extremes: they were complex hunter-gatherers, not simple farmers. The Old People in 1788 had developed ways of managing and benefiting from their landscape that went beyond just hunting and just gathering but did not involve gardening or farming. They were ecological agents who worked with the environment, rather than, usually, against it. They frequently used slow-burning fires to make their landscapes more liveable. However, they did not cut down bush to clear the land, plough and hoe the soil in preparation for planting, or then sow stored seed or tubers or rootstock in gardens or in fields.
(p. 7)
For the Andrew Bolts who have savaged Dark Emu as “a hoax” whose purpose is supposedly to accuse white settlers of ignorant and cruel treatment of the first inhabitants here, I further note that Sutton and Walshe share Pascoe’s assessment that white occupation is more accurately described as a “conquest” of the land and not at all “the first settlement”.
Sutton, Peter, and Keryn Walshe. Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers?: The Dark Emu Debate. Melbourne University Press, 2021.
Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu. Black Seeds : Agriculture Or Accident? Broome, Western Australia: Magabala Books, 2014.
Neil Godfrey
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Try Bitter Harvest by Peter O`Brien to see how often Pascoe pulls the other one. We should be aware now of how modern authors slant selected anecdotes to bolster their point. History publications have become a joke with contrary evidence blocked or watered down.
I have not read Peter O’Brien’s Bitter Harvest but the posts by Peter O’Brien on the website Dark Emu Exposed reveal him to be the Tim O’Neill of the latter-day Quadrant right.
Any thoughtful reading of Dark Emu itself will introduce one to its shortcomings. And to its efforts to popularize certain information that should be more widely known. I would have expected/hoped Dark Emu to have promoted discussion and informed debate, not to be swallowed uncritically with its ideological biases nor trashed as “a hoax”.
The Sutton and Walshe book with its scholarly critique looks 97% spot on to me. So far I’ve only noticed one detail in Pascoe’s book that they overlook and accordingly impose too stringent a censure.
It seems strange to me how Australians are grouped together in one huge bag. I think I would put money down that one day someone will discover that some Australians did in fact “cut down bush to clear the land” and I’m pretty sure right now that some sowed seed which had been stored. Australia is a bloody big place with a lot of ecological niches and the locals were good at exploiting them.
“Sure, agriculture was important in our tradition, but is it really a universal marker of progress?“
If so, we have devolved. Such a small percentage of our population are farmers. Most of us are “hunter-gathers”. The venue has just changed. Now we hit grocery stores, not the bush. If we were farmers, we’d probably starve.
The Pigmies in Africa are considered hunters and gatherers, but they also behave as ecological agents. When you think about it, the idea that people took instantly to such a complex activity as farming is just irrational. Studying those people should give us a very meaningful insight on how we made the transition
Yes indeed. The “hyper-conservatism” of Aboriginal societies drives me to return to having a closer look at exactly what happened that led “us” to emerge from once-similarly-static socio-economic systems.