When I first read Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu about three years ago I was, like many readers, mightily impressed. Pascoe takes the myth of Aboriginal people as passive hunter-gatherers and turns it on its head. He argues that Aboriginal people engaged in agriculture, aquaculture, building of durable permanent housing, food processing and storage and active management of pastures and the game animals that lived on them. The picture he develops is of a highly intentional, sophisticated and sustainable food economy.
Some of the controversy seems to me to have less than noble motives. For instance, some people have launched personal attacks on Pascoe, suggesting he has faked his own Aboriginal heritage (Pascoe has outlined clearly his own process of discovering this heritage and the uncertainties surrounding it, and he is accepted as an Aboriginal person in the community where he lives). A bloke called Roger Karge has been curating a website called 'Dark Emu Exposed' since at least the start of 2019 which claims to be 'compiled by a collective of Quiet Australians from many walks of life who question, and want to hold to account, authors who appear to be re-writing our Australian history to progress their own particular, political narrative.' They are certainly 'quiet Australians' in the sense that apart from Karge most of the authors are pseudonymous, but they are not focused on 'authors', just one, and they are noisy and strident in their desire to take Pascoe down. As well as personal attacks on him the site contains articles with titles like 'Australia's Greatest Literary Hoax - The Exposure of Dark Emu'. Don't go looking there for reasoned, impartial critique.
On the other hand, there is a more serious debate around the book, conducted by scholars and which Pascoe himself has said he welcomes. The latest product of this is a book by Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe called Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers: The Dark Emu Debate. Both of these authors are serious students of Aboriginal culture and history, Sutton a social anthropologist and Walshe an archaeologist. Sutton is the book's main author, writing 11 of its 13 chapters, while Walshe contributes two chapters on her areas of expertise and a short appendix on dating the first human arrival in Australia. I just read it, but before I did I re-read Dark Emu, this time in its later 2018 edition.
It's worth starting out by commenting on the authors. Pascoe, as mentioned, believes he has Aboriginal ancestry but he grew up unaware of it and only explored this aspect of his heritage in later life. He now has strong relationships with the Aboriginal community in his own location in Victoria and elsewhere. Not everyone accepts his claims but his story of cultural estrangement is all too common, particularly in the southern part of the continent.
Neither Sutton nor Walshe are Aboriginal people but both have lived and worked in Aboriginal communities for much of their lives, often working for traditional owner groups on aspects of native title or cultural heritage. By his own account Sutton has been incorporated into the kinship systems of three different Aboriginal families, two in Cape York Peninsula and one in the Northern Territory.
This is not a competition about who is 'more Aboriginal'. It is just to say that all three authors are people who are liked and accepted in Aboriginal communities and committed to writing about Aboriginal people, culture and history in a positive and constructive way. The question is, how to do this well and accurately? The task - to describe pre-invasion Aboriginal economies - is fraught with challenges in space and time.
In space, Australia is a large continent which in 1788 was home to something like 500 separate peoples and cultures. These lived in every part of Australia, from the wet tropics to the temperate south and from the coastal fringe through the inland river systems to the arid centre. Although there are common elements to all Aboriginal cultures there is also wide variety determined by both their differing cultural and religious systems and the vastly different ecologies in which they lived. Any author needs to be wary of writing about Aboriginal communities without qualifying which ones they mean.
In time, 1788 is long ago and colonisation is brutal. How can we know what happened before it? In some places Aboriginal communities and cultures are still relatively intact, but over large parts of the country they were damaged beyond recovery by the process of war and dispossession. No culture escaped unscathed but pertinently for the question here the most devastation was in those areas most conducive to agriculture, at least on the European model.
When I reread Dark Emu a few things stood out for me. The first was how easy it is to read. This is not surprising because Pascoe is primarily a writer rather than a historian, and has published more fiction than non-fiction over the years. Not that it's a brilliant literary work, but he knows how to tell a story. He sets up a tension - farmers or hunter-gatherers? - and then proceeds to follow it and return to it throughout the book. He tells engaging stories and paints little character portraits to enliven the evidence and argument. He avoids jargon and complex sentences. He lets his passion show, provoking readers to feel something as well as knowing stuff. Finally, he is as much focused on the present and future as the past, suggesting that greater use of Aboriginal land management and food production techniques could contribute to us better weathering the present ecological crisis.
Along with this go some of the things that have exposed him to criticism. He doesn't use terms precisely, as an academic writer would. When he uses terms like 'agriculture', 'aquaculture' and 'permanent housing' it's not always clear exactly what he means. Sometimes he jumps from data to speculation in a way that makes it unclear where one starts and the other ends. Sometimes he is sloppy in his use of his sources.
Anyway, on to the substance of the debate. For me, the most eye-opening criticism Sutton makes of Dark Emu is that it frames the question within a discredited idea of social evolution. This assumes a more or less inevitable progression in human societies from hunter-gatherer to farmer, through various stages of 'proto-agriculture'. Within this scheme, hunter-gatherers are more 'primitive', farmers more 'advanced'. Inferior and superior.
For Sutton, to become aware of this framework is to reject it. I agree with him. A consequence for Pascoe's project is that when he wants to show that Aboriginal culture is more 'advanced' than we think, he shows that it was closer to agriculture. Without this framework, the question becomes more open. In Sutton's understanding, Aboriginal people were and are (where they are still living a traditional life) highly sophisticated hunter-gatherers. When they manage food resources, as he agrees they do although he disagrees with Pascoe as to the nature of this management, they are not progressing towards agriculture, they are implementing a sophisticated, sustainable form of hunting and gathering which he refers to as 'hunter-gatherers-plus'.
Yet this seems counter to Pascoe's explicit intentions. One of his most impassioned criticisms of Australian colonialism is that it was driven and enabled by a version of Darwinism which saw Aboriginal people as less than human and their replacement by more advanced Europeans as sad but inevitable. This, then, is a tension which Pascoe does not seem aware of, and which Sutton is much better at analysing and resolving.
A second critique is that Pascoe chose not to reference the voices of senior Aboriginal leaders in his analysis, relying on mostly European and academic sources. Principal among his academic sources are Bill Gammage's The Biggest Estate on Earth, which addresses land management; Rupert Gerritsen's writings on Australian food plants which suggest that Aboriginal people deliberately cultivated certain plants (a book I haven't read and which Sutton says is both complex and controversial); and Queensland architect/anthropologist Paul Memmot's work on Aboriginal construction methods and building types. His primary sources are the journals of various early European explorers and settlers.
Sutton seems to regard the exclusion of Aboriginal voices as disrespectful but it also leads into a related issue - that Pascoe describes Aboriginal land and plant management in technological and economic terms, whereas traditional Aboriginal elders are much more inclined to describe them spiritually. A large part of Aboriginal land management (which neither Pascoe nor Gammage discuss in any detail) consists of religious increase rites designed to ask the ancestral spirits to bring about the growth of important food plants.
I wasn't so sure about this line of argument. Pascoe is very clear that he deliberately chose this strategy. He was convinced that non-Aboriginal readers would only believe this story if they heard it from European sources and put in European terms. It is also incorrect that Pascoe ignores or is unaware of the religious/spiritual dimension of Aboriginal society. Indeed, he has a whole chapter on 'The Heavens, Language and the Law' which includes this statement:
The economic foundations of traditional society were inseparable from the philosophic and religious beliefs, and to see the spiritual life as simply superstition and myth means that the practical advances in food production become invisible.
Indeed, there is no 'either/or' about religion and technology, you can both conduct increase ceremonies and practice technological land management. Even a 21st century farmer, if he or she is also a religious believer, will carefully tend soil and crops and pray for their growth. Pascoe has chosen to focus on the tending and not on the prayer, but this doesn't mean he discounts the prayer.
A third general criticism which I found very interesting is that Sutton suggests Pascoe over-estimates the extent of ignorance on this subject. Pascoe seems to have got under Sutton's (and perhaps also Walshe's) skin on this point and Sutton becomes quite snarky. Maybe this is because Pascoe implies blindness or negligence on the part of Australia's anthropologists and archaeologists and they feel personally affronted. Hence Sutton provides a long list of works, both academic and general, including educational materials for school children, which paint a much more nuanced and complex picture of Aboriginal society than the view Pascoe sets out to counter.
This is a fair point and I would be snarky too if some outsider to my field accused the whole housing policy community of negligence. Yet although I accept Sutton and Walshe's point that Pascoe has missed significant pieces of research, I do think Sutton is way too optimistic about the wider community. After all, if we all already knew that Aboriginal societies were complex and sophisticated, why has Dark Emu been such a sensation? Sure the books were out there and even in our school libraries, but did we read them? Did their message sink in? The success of Dark Emu suggests not, and it took a communicator of Pascoe's skill to bring it to our attention.
Along with these general criticisms, there is a lot of detailed analysis - indeed, just as Pascoe covers a lot of ground in his short book, so do Sutton and Walshe in theirs. I can't get too far into these details here. I would encourage you to read both books for yourself. The details, indeed, are way beyond my level of knowledge and the best I could do is a kind of 'he said/they said' which you can read better in the originals.
The general point, I think, is that Sutton and Walshe believe that Pascoe over-states the degree to which Aboriginal people practiced technologies such as plant cultivation, aquaculture and house-building. For instance, some groups certainly built fish traps and modified streams to make fishing more productive, but the Brewarrina fish traps and Lake Condah eel fisheries which Pascoe discusses in some detail were unusually complex. Other technologies for fishery management were much simpler. Similarly with agriculture - certainly Aboriginal people dug yams and replaced their tops to ensure regrowth, and could hardly have been unaware that yams grew better in recently dug soil, but there is no evidence they purposefully planted and spread them. Likewise, they did indeed fire grasslands and harvest grass seeds, but they do not seem to have planted them, and their reason for burning is open to question - was it purposely to clear land and make new grass grow, or was it just to flush out the game? They built durable houses (though not often of stone) but they lived in them seasonally, not all year round, and a lot of the year they slept under the stars or in makeshift shelters. None of these things applied everywhere - people in many areas, particularly in the desert lands, lived lives much closer to the 'hunter-gatherer' picture Pascoe is trying to counter. This does not make them unsophisticated. You need a lot of very complex knowledge to thrive and build a culture in a desert.
Let me tell you what I got out of going back to this subject with the aid of Sutton and Walshe's critique. I got a strong sense once again that Aboriginal culture is complex and sophisticated. This sophistication is both material (Aboriginal people engaged in complex, sustainable processes of managing their country) and spiritual (they had complex belief systems which informed and guided this material action). The fiction that they were simple primitives, or inferior to Europeans, was just that, a convenient fiction that deflected the guilt of our act of genocide but doesn't excuse it.
This sophistication was not European, nor an approximation of some ideal European model. It was something all their own, made in Australia, which should be accepted in its own terms. There is a lot we can learn from this knowledge as we face the challenge of living sustainably in this country instead of merely pillaging it as we have done so far.
Despite Sutton's somewhat grumpy dismissal of Pascoe, I think all three authors would agree on these points. They disagree on details, and on the way they should be presented. I'm inclined to think that in a lot of ways Sutton and Walshe provide a useful corrective, and on many points are probably more reliable than Pascoe. Expertise is hard won and not to be despised.
Yet when you write an entire book responding to someone else's book, and put that book's title in your subtitle, then whether you realise it or not you are writing a tribute. Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? could not exist without Dark Emu, but Dark Emu stands on its own. It is Pascoe, not Sutton and Walshe, who threw the public spotlight on this question and worked tirelessly for seven years to keep it there. It is he who has drawn them out of their niches and technical specialties and persuaded them to engage in a more public discussion.
We shouldn't let ourselves be drawn into an 'either/or' debate, or lulled into thinking that Pascoe has been discredited so we can go back to pretending Aboriginal people were savages after all. Read carefully. No-one who has any significant relationship with Aboriginal people thinks that. Certainly neither Sutton nor Walshe do. They, like Pascoe, want us to respect and appreciate the richness, complexity and diversity of Aboriginal cultures. Let's take that with us, and keep learning.
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