Dark Emu

The book received critical acclaim, winning two NSW Premier's Literary Awards (Book of the Year and the Indigenous Writers' Prize)[19] and being shortlisted for two other prizes (the History Book Award in the Queensland Literary Awards and Victorian Premier's Award for Indigenous Writing),[2] as well as mainstream recognition.[20][21][22] It was reviewed by three Australian teachers' associations,[23] earned positive reviews in other media,[24][25] 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.[26][27] A new edition was published in 2018.[28] By mid 2021 the book had sold 250,000 copies.[29] There is an audiobook and ebook version.[30]

Historian Bill Gammage, whose 2012 work The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia influenced Dark Emu, praised Pascoe's gift for weaving a narrative that challenges many readers' preconceptions. He admired the book for its impact, but added that Pascoe sometimes romanticises pre-contact Indigenous society, and his claims that Stone Age Indigenous people invented democracy and baking may be "push[ing] these things too far".[22]

Lynette Russell, at Monash University's Indigenous Studies Centre and co-author of Australia's First Naturalists: Indigenous Peoples' Contribution to Early Zoology,[31] admired Dark Emu's achievement in popularising ideas that challenged European Australians' cultural preconceptions.[22] She said that it had managed to promulgate more widely "information about indigenous land management practices that archaeologists have known for a long time".[32]

Tony Hughes-D'Aeth, a researcher in cultural history at the University of Western Australia, 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".[21]

Writer and historian James Boyce, after some discussion of the book's strengths and weaknesses, says that, although a "flawed attempt", the book's appeal is to "a community of folk who... are eager to learn from and engage with First Nations peoples and their heritage"; Pascoe is a skilled storyteller, and Dark Emu is a significant cultural achievement because it has engaged these readers, where many other examples of scholarly information have not done so. While there is no single narrative that tells the whole story, Dark Emu might be the first step for many readers who have not previously engaged with the history of dispossession of the Indigenous peoples of Australia.[29]

Pascoe's friend, writer Gregory Day, thinks that Pascoe's book connects with general readers because "he knows what it feels like to be a whitefella – in a sense, Bruce is translating it for this whitefellas".[22]

Pascoe's book has been extensively debated in Australian media and political spheres.[33]

Several academics have criticised Pascoe's claim that since 1880 scholars have suppressed accounts of sophisticated housing and food and environmental management practices in traditional Aboriginal societies. 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.[22]

Some academics have specifically addressed the debate surrounding Dark Emu's thesis that Indigenous Australian society was largely built on sedentary agriculture rather than hunting and gathering. Anthropologist Ian Keen argues against Pascoe's thesis that Indigenous Australians practised agriculture. He concluded that "Aboriginal people were indeed hunters, gatherers and fishers at the time of the British colonisation of Australia", although acknowledging "the boundary between foraging and farming is a fuzzy one".[34]

Historians Lynette Russell and Billy Griffiths wrote that Pascoe had drawn together an enormous amount of ethnographic evidence showing that Aboriginal peoples "were not hapless wanderers across the soil, mere hunter-gatherers"; however, they challenge the implicit Eurocentric idea that agriculture is the result of "progress" on a continuum from hunter-gathering, or that such an evolutionary hierarchy exists. They argue Western terminology lacks nuance, and "Communities have shifted between these categories and moved back and forth as suited their needs".[35] James Boyce echoes this view: "The 'progress' inherent to a move from foraging to farming has been questioned by historians, anthropologists and archaeologists for more than 50 years... there was rarely a sharp line between farming and hunter-gatherer ways of life".[29]

In Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate (2021),[36] anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe suggest that Dark Emu devalues pre-colonial Aboriginal society, privileging agriculture above a hunter-gatherer socio-economic system.[37][38] They also criticise the work on grounds of being poorly researched, not fully sourced, and selective in its choice and emphasis of the facts.[39][40] In James Boyce's opinion, their most salient criticisms include that Pascoe uses white explorers’ journals, ignoring the knowledge of Aboriginal sources, and also that he generalises from local examples and claims incorrectly that such technologies were used across the continent. However, he is also critical of some aspects of Sutton and Walshe's work.[29]

Aboriginal human rights advocate Hannah McGlade, a Noongar woman and member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, writes in The Australian that Dark Emu is "misleading and offensive to Aboriginal people and culture" and that it "is not very truthful or accurate".[37][41] Warrimay historian Victoria Grieve-Williams,[42] also in The Australian, calls Dark Emu a scandal and a hoax, and expresses deep concerns in the Aboriginal community about the story Pascoe is telling, saying that her family were not farmers, but proud of being hunter–gatherers.[43]

After Pauline Hanson's One Nation MP Mark Latham proposed in the New South Wales Parliament in June 2021 that the book should be banned from use by teachers in NSW schools (where it is not part of the curriculum, but available as an historical source for critical discussion), his motion had little support. The Minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, later commented that he welcomed "more people taking the time to read Dark Emu and consulting Mr Pascoe’s references to verify or disprove his assertions as we do with various academic studies or research... What’s important here is that we are open to hearing other people’s perspectives, contemplating and genuinely engaging in working constructively together to reconcile our understandings".[41]

On 11 September 2021, Pascoe published in the Sydney Morning Herald a reflection in which he wrote:

There has been some criticism of my book, Dark Emu, but when I read the book, [Farmers or Hunter-Gathers? The Dark Emu Debate by Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe], which claims to repudiate it, I was amazed at how frequently the writers agreed with me. The big sticking point seems to be what we call the precolonial Aboriginal economy and culture. I don’t really care what it is called as long as Australians are allowed to know that Aboriginal people sometimes lived in houses and villages, often employed technology to harvest food and sometimes wore cloaks and sewn apparel.

I want all Australians to know that their country had an automatic fishing machine, that Aboriginal people often built houses that could accommodate 50 people, that miles of aqueducts and channels had been built to harvest fish. I can’t believe anyone would not want their fellow countrywomen and men to have this knowledge about their country and not to consider what this says about our history. Whether the history is 65,000 or 120,000 years or more, we know that it is the oldest human civilisation on earth.

It’s not about a culture being better or worse than any other, it’s about the true history of the land and how the First Nations culture managed their economy and society. And how that sovereignty was taken away. It still surprises me that airwaves melt down when someone suggests that the invasion of Australia was just that, an invasion.[44]