Dark Emu (book)

The first edition, entitled Dark Emu: Black seeds: agriculture or accident?, was published by Magabala Books in 2014.[1] A second edition, entitled Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture was published in June 2018,[2] and a version of the book for younger readers, entitled Young Dark Emu: A Truer History, was published in 2019.[3] The 2019 version was shortlisted for the 2020 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature in the Children's Literature Award section.[4]

In Dark Emu: Black seeds: agriculture or accident?, Pascoe examines the journals and diaries of early explorers such as Charles Sturt and Thomas Mitchell[5] and early settlers in Australia,[1] finding evidence in their accounts of existing agriculture,[6][7] engineering and building, including stone houses, weirs, sluices and fish traps, and also game management.[8][9] This evidence of occupation[10] challenges the traditional views about pre-colonial Australia[11] and "Terra Nullius".[12] The book also gives a description from Sturt's journal of his 1844 encounter with hundreds of Aboriginal people who were living in an established village in what is now Queensland (then part of New South Wales), in which a welcoming party offered him "water, roast duck, cake and a hut to sleep in".[5]

Pascoe discovered that other historians had pursued the same material; one of these was the independent scholar Rupert Gerritsen, who in 2008 published Australia and the Origins of Agriculture,[13] which argued that Aboriginal people were agriculturalists as much as hunter-gatherers. Gerritsen died in 2013, and Pascoe cites him as a scholar who languished in obscurity because his theories contradicted the mainstream view. He said that Gerritsen "should have got all the credit for Dark Emu”. Pascoe also drew on the work of historian Bill Gammage, author of The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (2012), which looked at how Aboriginal people used fire, dams and cropping to support themselves sustainably in their environment.[5][14]

Pascoe also cites the work of Dr Heather Builth and colleague Professor Peter Kershaw, noted palynologist at Monash University,[15][16] with reference to their research into the extensive aquaculture and farming of short-finned eels (kooyang) practised by the Gunditjmara people of western Victoria, dated by Kershaw as 8,000 years BP.[17] (Evidence of the dams, weirs and stone dwellings are now protected under several layers of legislation, including a large area being on the World Heritage List as the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape since 2019.[18][19])

In the last pages of Dark Emu, Pascoe says that Australia could learn from Indigenous culture and landcare, replacing wheat with native grasses and eating kangaroo rather than cattle, a message he continues to drive home in his public appearances.[5]

Pascoe's friend, writer Gregory Day, thinks that the success of the book lies in its ability to connect with "whitefellas", in a sense, translating it for this audience.[5]

The book received critical acclaim, winning two NSW Premier's Literary Awards (Book of the Year and the Indigenous Writers' Prize)[8] and being shortlisted for two other prizes (the History Book Award in the Queensland Literary Awards and Victorian Premier's Award for Indigenous Writing),[1] as well as mainstream recognition.[20][14][5] It has been widely reviewed in academic journals,[21] earned positive reviews in other media,[22][23] and, with the highest number of nominations by members of the public, was chosen to be the first book discussed in the inaugural meeting of the Parliamentary Book Club.[24][25] By May 2019 it had sold more than 100,000 copies and was in its 28th printing.[5] There is an audiobook and ebook version,[26] and a new edition was published in 2018.[27]

Gammage, whose work was built upon in Dark Emu, praised Pascoe’s storytelling gift of weaving a narrative that challenges many readers' preconceptions, and says that he is a big fan of the book because of its impact, but added that Pascoe sometimes romanticises pre-contact Indigenous society, and says that his claims that Stone Age Indigenous people invented democracy and baking may be "push[ing] these things too far".[5]

Professor Lynette Russell of Monash University's Indigenous Studies Centre and co-author of Australia's First Naturalists: Indigenous Peoples’ Contribution to Early Zoology,[28] admired Dark Emu's achievement in popularising ideas that challenged European Australians' cultural preconceptions.[5] She said that it had managed to promulgate more widely "information about indigenous land management practices that archaeologists have known for a long time".[29]

Tony Hughes-D'Aeth, Associate Professor in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia and researcher in cultural history, said that Dark Emu "...provides the most concerted attempt [yet] to answer the question about the quality of the country...in the pre-colonial epoch", and that the book's strengths lie in "its ability to bridge archaeology, anthropology, archival history, Indigenous oral tradition and other more esoteric but highly revealing disciplines such as ethnobotany and paleoecology".[14]

The main criticism of the book by academics has been of Pascoe's claim that since 1880 there has been an academic suppression of alternative historical accounts about Aboriginal peoples' housing, farming and cultivation practices. Professor Peter Hiscock, chair of archaeology at Sydney University, archaeologist Harry Lourandos, who documented the construction of eel traps in Victoria in the 1970s, and Ian McNiven of Monash University's Indigenous Studies Centre all agree that there is a large body of published work on the topic. However, Lourandos and McNiven are delighted at the book's success in reaching the broader public.[5]

• 2014: Shortlisted – History Book Award in the Queensland Literary Awards[1]
• 2014: Shortlisted – Victorian Premier's Award for Indigenous Writing[1]
• 2016: Winner – two NSW Premier's Literary Awards: Book of the Year and the Indigenous Writers' Prize[8]
• 2019: Chosen by the public for the first Parliamentary Book Club[25]
• 2020: Young Dark Emu: A Truer History shortlisted for the 2020 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature in the Children's Literature Award section.[30]

• The Bangarra Dance Theatre Dark Emu production was first performed in 2018 at the Sydney Opera House.[31]
• Young Dark Emu: A Truer History, was published in 2019,[32] intended for school use.[8]
• Blackfella Films have announced plans to adapt Dark Emu as a television documentary.[33]

• History wars
• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

• Morton, Rick (30 November – 6 December 2019). "Bolt, Pascoe and the culture wars" (281). The Saturday Paper. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
• Graham, Ben (11 July 2018). "Indigenous historian Bruce Pascoe says we've got our story all wrong". news.com.au.
• Gerritsen, Rupert (2010). "Evidence for Indigenous Australian Agriculture". Australasian Science.
• Wilson, Cameron (15 May 2014). "Rethinking Indigenous Australia's agricultural past". Radio National. Bush Telegraph. Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
• Nissen, Judith (13 July 2014). "Review: Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe". Stumbling Through the Past.
• "Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe". Resident Judge. 13 July 2014.
• Pascoe, Bruce (3 June 2016). "Aboriginal agriculture" (audio). IATSIS.
• Stephens, Tony (1 October 2011). "The first farmers". [Review of] The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia by Bill Gammage