Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture Paperback – May 15, 2018

Sensational ideas presented non-sensationally, this book is a must read for everyone who has not yet read it.I'm a white Australian woman aged 70+, born and raised in Tasmania, the most Anglo-minded of the states, whose history of harsh treatment of convict and Aboriginal people is as dark as the worst excesses of cruelty on 'the mainland' as we call it. My urban grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles were well educated, many in professional occupations. In my day, as Bruce Pascoe reminded me, our history courses were anglo- and euro-centric. The senior history teacher was so very boring that I opted out of history asap, which I now regret, but even if I had stuck with it, I now know that I would have learned very little about our indigenous people because, basically that teacher and the rest of my teachers even through tertiary level, knew very little of the ancient civilisation that prevailed before europeans come to the island continent now known as Australia. I knew plenty about the Ancient Egytians, Etruscans, Mesapotamians, Greeks, Romans and a bit about medieval Europe, European colonisation of Africa, Asia and the Pacific, but almost nothing about the Australian Aborigines - they were so little mentioned it was as if there was nothing much to tell, anyway. (Incidentally my education rarely mentioned the Americas, either, except as an object of european exploration and colonisation) Though still below voting age I remember the heated discussion about the May 1967 referendum which passed to at last count Aboriginal people in the national census. Until I went to live in an Outback mining centre as a young bride, I had never seen, let alone met, anyone Aboriginal. For a long time now (not by choice but hubby's work) I've been living outside Australia, and so though I've learned a bit about these people along the way, I've missed much of the daily talk on radio and tv that might have taught me more sooner, and introduced me to the things in this book far sooner. Like many readers, I found this book fascinating, exciting and some how hopeful for a better future as more non-Aboriginal Aussies come to understand not only enormity of what happened to the Aboriginal civilisation, (which we can't unwind back to pre-1788) I hope the facts and ideas in this book lead to wider understanding of more appropriate land management across our damaged continent, and respect for our Aborigines' history and achievements.

Interesting hypothesis about Australian Aboriginal agricultural society.Pascoe makes the claim that Australian Aboriginal society, in part, was an agricultural one rather than being a wholly hunter-gatherer one. The claims seem to be strongest in the Murray-Darling basin.The difficulty in sustaining this hypothesis is the degradation of oral history due to genocide, and the destruction of Aboriginal artefacts to forestall Native Title claims. History is being erased before our eyes.Also, the prevalent accepted wisdom that Aborigines were hunter-gathers makes it difficult for this hypothesis to be investigated properly.

My Green friends who place eucalypt forest gone wild at the pinnacle of their value system have got it badly wrong. Swathes of Australia only look like that today because of the dastardly deeds of the invaders of 1788 and histories written by the victors to eliminate the vanquished. In Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe builds a comprehensive account of the farming, settlement and other markers of great civilisation that fill out the picture expounded in Bill Gammage's The Greatest Estate on Earth. Importantly Pascoe points the way to reviving this most neglected basket of foods which should be a cornerstone of international cuisine.Fortunately there is no shortage of evidence once people like Pascoe and Gammage start digging, from explorers' and settlers' diaries to scientific examination of remnant vegetation. The eight chapters of Dark Emu have copious footnotes pointing to an extensive bibliography. The first five chapters break the data up under broad headings: Agriculture, Aquaculture, Population and Housing, Storage and Preservation, Fire. The final three return to and develop issues raised in the introduction about the way this has been hidden so as to denigrate indigenous civilisation in the interests of the land acquisition goals of the invasion, together with how the very different indigenous value system had been worked out and flourished over 50,000 years.Books like this should be compulsory reading for all Australians. Looked at from even as close as our nearest major neighbour, the third rate Anglo-multi-culture that is the legacy of the ongoing occupation is of no global significance, while even those tiny hints of the riches of our indigenous culture which make it into the wider world and much more highly valued. We occupiers have more to learn form indigenous Australians than they have from us. Our highest aspiration should be to find a way forward together which ends and redresses our misdeeds.