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. Since then I have become aware that a lot of controversy swirls around Dark Emu. This has grown in the three years since I first read it as the book itself has continued to gain popularity, spinning out into a dance performance by Bangarra and a version for children. 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 outl
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson