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Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture Paperback – 1 June 2018

by Bruce Pascoe (Author)

280 ratings

in Animal Biology

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‘Dark Emu injects a profound authenticity into the conversation about how we Australians understand our continent...[It is] 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 Awards

Dark Emu puts forward an argument for a reconsideration of the hunter-gatherer tag for pre-colonial 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 in Dark Emu comes from the records and diaries of the Australian explorers, impeccable sources.

Bruce’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. [Gammage] doesn’t contest hunter gatherer labels either, whereas that is at the centre of my argument.'

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Product details

Paperback: 278 pages
Publisher: Magabala Books; New edition (1 June 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1921248017
ISBN-13: 978-1921248016
Package Dimensions: 20.8 x 13.4 x 2.4 cm
Boxed-product Weight: 322 g
Customer Reviews: 280 customer ratings
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 3 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1 in Animal Biology
- #2 in History of Australia & New Zealand
- #2 in Natural History

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A different perspective on Aborigines & toxic settlement

Reviewed in Australia on 4 January 2019

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I thought this work would promote and illustrate pre-settlement aboriginal achievements in a positive cascade of historical development and recognition of what they had pre-settlement. It refers to explorers and early settlers journals and apparently draws on them heavily. I enjoyed reading it from agriculture to buildings; but found the underlying hate and toxic side comments undermined a positive promotion of aboriginal achievements. The consistent message of hate towards settlement and it's impact detracts from the book in so many ways. In the end I was diss-appointed and put off.

This should have been written so much better with clearer detailed, specific references and excerpts to capture and encourage more interest and real appreciation of what has possibly been lost.

32 people found this helpful

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peter

Wishful thinking

Reviewed in Australia on 10 January 2019

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Ignoring the supposed oral history of 65,000 years and omitting any commentary from the 2% of Australians who call themselves Aboriginal the author selectively draws from accounts by early white settlers (whom he treats with derision and scorn).
There's simply no physical evidence that the utopia Mr Pascoe imagines existed. Colonists didn't find Aboriginal people living in houses and growing crops. You'll find nothing of what he describes in any museum, even people living on traditional lands don't have a clue what he's talking about.
Received well by politicians but rightly ignored by the scientific community this is speculative fiction and should not be taught as fact.

33 people found this helpful

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Refreshing the Dark Emu

Reviewed in Australia on 26 July 2018

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After being quite frankly thrilled by Bill Gammage's book The Biggest Estate on Earth - Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu of some years back gave chapter and verse particulars of the civilisation of Indigenous or First Nations Australia. This revised/up-dated edition is timely - given the savage dismissal by our current PM Turnbull of the Uluru Statement from the Heart! It will hopefully become compulsory reading by every politician (no salary until finished reading) and every company/institute CEO/Board and academic - and set for study across the curriculum in our schools. I've been a fan since way back - when Bruce Pascoe edited the popular Australian Short Stories books from the early 1980s. But this book proves beyond doubt that a deliberate conqueror/coloniser wilful dismissal of all the best elements of First Nations democratic ways of living with one's part of the jigsaw of connectedness right across the continent took place - and the ugly trivialisation of the truth continues with the ignorance still being displayed by those who need to hold on to their of this land and its resources - looking at you Gina and Twiggy and the threats of Adani! Bravo Bruce! Thank-you.

In the early-mid-1980s I undertook graduate studies in education about "Aboriginal" Australia - it opened my eyes to the landscape in which I was living, through which I was travelling. Not quite three years ago I spent time in the rural town where I grew up - rode my bicycle, swam in the local streams and climbed all over its regional hills and ranges. Like the back of my hand I knew it - this I knew. I joined the local regional art gallery cultural tour one week-end to learn about it from local significant Gomeroi elder Len Waters. And quickly realised I knew nothing - mere surface landscape - as he explained the land, places of significance, revealed brilliant rock art and scar trees and pointed out all manner of locational features. Bruce Pascoe's book does this for us all - and for folk beyond our shores who want to know the truth!

19 people found this helpful

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Jacqui King

Balanced, eye-opening and mind-changing

Reviewed in Australia on 9 November 2019

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Searching for the right word. Stunning? Stupendous? Certainly the most important book I have read in several decades.

I am reminded of when I was doing a course at the National Gallery of Victoria. The then Director of the Gallery, Dr Eric Westbrook, said that many of the early artists who came to Australia struggled with the differences from European scenery. Specifically their minds and hands could not fully see and accept the shape of a eucalypt but painted gum trees as more like European trees. Although only once spelt out by Bruce Pascoe this dissonance seems behind much of the lack of understanding of what the explorers and early settlers recorded.
Pascoe has searched early European records of what was seen and makes a mind-blowing case for a rethink about Australian First People's ethos and culture. Through it all he writes compassionately about the European settlers/explorers and recognises the hiccups that occurred in understanding. A very measured perspective.
I'm glad I have read this book.

6 people found this helpful

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GBMMGB

Completely changed my intentions

Reviewed in Australia on 27 June 2017

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I had always suspected there was more to aboriginal life before the colonialists but had never taken the time to investigate. This easy-to-read book has, perhaps a little late, changed the way I will do my future teaching and research (I'm an agricultural scientist). We can't change history, but we can explain it, regret it, learn from it, and use it to inform our future. This book demonstrates that principle beautifully.

18 people found this helpful

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Jim W

Disappointing - could only get through half the book.

Reviewed in Australia on 7 July 2019

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A bit over the top and use of overly romanticized adjectives did not help

12 people found this helpful

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Stephen Kemmis

A reassessment

Reviewed in Australia on 2 July 2018

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Bruce Pascoe makes the case that the Aboriginal peoples of Australia were not primitive hunter-gatherers, but practitioners of agriculture and aquaculture. They built permanent dwellings, sustained villages, lived largely in peace with one another, and with the country they inhabited. They made clothes from the great variety of materials the land provided. They lived in harmony with the souls, the flora, the fauna and the laws they had been taught by their ancient ancestors. Contemporary Australians - indeed, people everywhere - have much to learn from their cultural, astronomical, agricultural, economic and social achievements. Past dismissals of these achievements were motivated by colonists’ desires to diminish the original owners of this land, in an attempt to justify the dispossession that accompanied the violence of invasion. Pascoe’s case is woven from evidence available in the public historical record, and much will be new for many Australian readers not familiar with these sources. It is written accessibly and with passion.

9 people found this helpful

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Doug Scott

Historical re-evaluation of the Australian aborigines.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 June 2019

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Historians have now started to collate the earliest experiences of European settlers and are re-examining their own conclusions, with a new appreciation of the way aborigines survived and farmed the land. The original settlers were so convinced that they were dealing with primitive savages that they ignored the obvious fact that the aborigines were in fact knowledgeable farmers and fishermen, preserving water and irrigating the in a collective fashion. Like the American Indians, they had no concept of land ownership, which had fatal consequences for the aborigines - and for the settlers, who did not know how to farm the land using native flora and fauna. Instead, they imported their own ill-matched hooved livestock (better for wet soils in the Northern hemisphere but which trampled the soft clay flats). Similarly they imported their own seeds for crops, ill-suited to the Australian climate when the aborigines already had different varieties of plant which they used for bread, medicine, and so forth. So the white man is now learning, after over two hundred years, what they should have been doing to preserve "The greatest Estate on Earth"

2 people found this helpful

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ian

Disturbing read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 July 2019

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A fascinating book that lays bare the long promoted myth that aboriginals were merely hunter-gatherers leading a simple existence. In fact they were extremely sophisticated farmers and resource managers living in a very sympathetic relationship with Australia’s unique environment who were swept away by resource grabbing colonialists. With the current intense debate on modern man’s sudden and devastating impact of the planet, it really makes you think.

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Harry

Not just hunter-gatherers

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 June 2019

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This book calls for a reassessment of 'the first Australians'. Usually dismissed as primitive hunter-gatherers, of no fixed abode, Bruce Pascoe gives a detailed account of real aboriginal society, as first described by the white explorers, which was more stable, fixed, and sophisticated, with well built housing and land management, including planting of grasses as a crop and careful management of game resources, than the conventional dismissive accounts indicated. The idea of the aboriginals as primate nomads suited the white settlers, making it easier to take over land that had long been the home of a settled people.

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A. Epicure

Interesting

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 December 2018

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I was pointed in the direction of this book by an Australian business man. He had no idea of the existing culture in Australia before the 'colonisation' by (mainly) European settlers. The bulk of the book puts that to rights with facts and descriptions, and a few photographs, that leave the reader in no doubt of that established, ancient culture. Interesting stuff but my enthusiasm petered out two thirds of the way through. Political correctness snuffed it out.

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Andrés Noé

Great Book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 February 2020

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As a non-Indigenous Australian, I was fed and believed much of 'conventional' teaching regarding pre-colonial Australia. This book makes me feel sad, angry and proud all at the same time. Sad at the poverty of my expectations of Indigenous Australia and that we didn't end up with a country that's more influenced by our Aboriginal Australians forerunners. Angry that Australia's colonisers have (and continue to...) come close to destroying such a rich culture from which we could all learn so much. Proud that we have the opportunity to change all of this and become a better country.

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paul marks

Great antidote to the conventional and flawed history.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 March 2018

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Such a little known subject. I’d urge all to read and learn the amazing story of the First Australians. Highly recommended.

2 people found this helpful

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John C.

Excelent

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 September 2018

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The book was in mint condition. Easy to read and very interesting.
I had absolutely no idea of how advanced the aboriginals were before the civilised world took over.

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Cara Keegan

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 December 2016

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The first place to start when learning about Australian history

2 people found this helpful

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CNN

Completely changed my view of Australia

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 February 2020

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Thought provoking and engaging to read. An enormous amount of research went into this book. Modern Australia could learn a lot from this book

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David

Plenty of light amongst the dark - grains & roos leading!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 March 2020

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Care needed in support for Menzies (some of whose work is refreshing), more on good that could done (and is being done) without huge cost would be welcome.

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Amazon customer

IMPORTANT

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 February 2020

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It has been extremely useful to find out how the aborigines cultivated the land. Thank you for helping me to understand.

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MS T M ASHBRIDGE

Great read. All Australians should know this

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 September 2019

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All Australians should read this. It should be part of school curriculum alongside its younger version. Young black emu for primary students

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K...

A book of many informations that needs more focus

Reviewed in France on 8 June 2019

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I bought this book thinking I will learn about indigenous grains, past utilization and possible adaptation and introduction into today australian agriculture.
This book enumerates historical informations and materials to think Australian history anew. Unfortunately it lacks focus on its title topic. After the first chapter, we are not sure anymore about the topic of the book (pre-colonial plausible agricultural practices). Facts are overwelmed by temptation of advocacy against prejudices that Australian Aborigines suffered and for Aboriginal recognition. If legitimate, I question the interest in this book and think it does not serve this book and its topic.
Less deviation and a focus on precolonial agriculture and deeper interdisciplinary research (ecology, history, anthropology, economy, agronomy, archeology...) about past, present and future use of indigenous grains would have surely been a better contribution to the rehabilitation of pre-colonial history into the future of the country.

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"aborigine"

Myth busted at last

Reviewed in Germany on 7 April 2016

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The pernicious myth remains that Aborigines were perpetually moving nomads with no attachment to any particular place. In this and a previous book, "Convincing Ground", Pascoe proves from original invader sources that Aborigines farmed, fished and built permanent villages. A book everyone interested in Australia's real history, rather than the whitewashed lies, must read. After that they will want to know more. In "Convincing Ground" Pascoe asks Australians to fully acknowledge their past whose actions continue to influence them physically and intellectually. He has written it for all Australians, as an antidote to the great Australian inability to deal respectfully with the nation’s constructed Indigenous past. For an extensive listing of books by and about Aborigines see [...].

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Ricardo

A história sobre os aborígenes e a colonização na Austrália

Reviewed in Brazil on 19 November 2019

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Livro didático e com bom embasamento.

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