Dark Emu

Bruce Pascoe argues that the pre-colonial Aboriginal economy has been grossly undervalued and that evidence from the earliest European explorers' and colonists' journals reveals Aboriginal people practiced agriculture, aquaculture, and complex land management far beyond what the "hunter-gatherer" label suggests. After publishing his earlier book Convincing Ground (2007), about Australia's frontier battles, Pascoe received over 200 letters containing new material that revealed a consistent pattern: not only had the frontier war been misrepresented, but the sophistication of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander economic life had been systematically dismissed. He traces this dismissal to the racial and imperial ideology that British colonists carried with them, rooted in assumptions of cultural superiority and reinforced by proto-Darwinian thinking. Colonists arrived not to marvel at Aboriginal civilization but to replace it.

Pascoe opens with the story of Peter Beveridge and James Kirby, two young colonists who drove 1,000 cattle to the Murray River in 1843 and encountered Aboriginal people of the Wati Wati, an Aboriginal nation of the region, shouting what the colonists chose to interpret as a welcome. Linguistic analysis suggests the phrase likely meant a demand to leave or a threat. Despite observing an ingenious automatic fishing device at a weir, Kirby concluded the device was evidence of Aboriginal laziness. The conflict that followed at the Beveridge property, Tyntynder, adhered to a familiar colonial pattern: initial acceptance gave way to violence, and Andrew Beveridge, a member of the settler family, was killed by the Wati Wati specifically for violating women. By denying the existence of the Aboriginal economy, Pascoe argues, settlers denied Aboriginal people's right to their land and fabricated the justification at the heart of Australia's claim to legitimacy.

Pascoe details how European farming rapidly destroyed the pre-contact Aboriginal landscape. He cites Eric Rolls's A Million Wild Acres, which documented how sheep destroyed grasslands, ate out croplands, and compacted soils within a few years. The yam pastures of Victoria vanished as soon as sheep grazed upon them, because sheep could eat growth to the ground, destroying basal leaves. Villages were burnt, foundations stolen for other buildings, occupants killed, and the country usurped, so that after 1860 most observers saw no evidence of prior complex civilization.

In his chapter on agriculture, Pascoe introduces the five activities Europeans used to define agricultural development: selection of seed, preparation of soil, harvesting of crops, storage of surpluses, and permanent housing. He presents evidence from explorers' journals showing Aboriginal Australians met all five criteria. Explorer and surveyor Major Thomas Mitchell described grass pulled and piled in hayricks extending for miles, seed made into bread, and villages of more than 1,000 people with clay-coated circular houses featuring chimneys. A member of Mitchell's party observed that some buildings were "large enough to contain at least forty people and were of very superior construction" (15). Explorer George Grey found villages with large houses, wells up to 12 feet deep, and extensive yam fields in Western Australia. Across southeastern Australia, multiple observers documented women harvesting the yam daisy, or murnong, a sweet tuber that served as a dietary staple. Settlers noted that Aboriginal people had worked their gardens so long that terraced earthen mounds had formed and the soil had become exceptionally loose from centuries of tilling.

Pascoe maps an extensive Aboriginal grain belt across the continent, drawing on researcher Norman Tindale's work showing that grain-harvesting peoples identified themselves with words meaning "grass people." Evidence from multiple witnesses shows seed being broadcast by hand, covered with soil, irrigated, and traded as a cultural item across long distances. Grindstones found at Cuddie Springs in western New South Wales were used to grind seeds more than 30,000 years ago, making Aboriginal Australians the world's oldest bakers, predating the Egyptians by roughly 15,000 years. Pascoe also presents evidence of domestication: Aboriginal cropping activities produced genetic changes in grains, including a tough rachis, a thickened stem that held the grain to the plant and prevented natural germination without artificial watering. These are the same domestication markers scientists recognize in European wheat and barley.

The chapter on aquaculture describes fish traps, weirs, nets, and elaborate engineering systems observed across Australia. Some nets took three years to complete and stretched up to 270 metres. Pascoe examines the Brewarrina fish-trap system in northwestern New South Wales, so old that the local Ngemba, an Aboriginal people of the region, attribute its construction to the creator spirit Baiame. An archaeological team calculated a minimum age of 40,000 years, and the traps were designed to allow breeding stock through so upstream fisheries could share the resource. At Lake Condah in southwestern Victoria, archaeologist Heather Builth proved through scientific analysis that stone structures dismissed by the Victorian Archaeological Survey were human-built houses, and that nearby hollow trees served as smokehouses for eel preservation. Environmental scientist Peter Kershaw dated the complex to around 8,000 years old. Local Gundidjmara Aboriginal people, whose opinion had never been sought, guided Builth's research.

Pascoe documents large Aboriginal populations living in permanent villages with sophisticated housing. He recounts explorer Charles Sturt's 1845 encounter with a village of 300 to 400 people in harsh desert, where Sturt's sick party was offered a new house, roast duck, and cake. Sturt described buildings with entrances over 14 metres wide and houses with strong arches rendered in thick clay. Despite such evidence, both Sturt and Mitchell diminished what they saw, referring to inhabitants as "children of the soil" and labeling as "huts" structures comparable to croft houses, or small farmhouses, in rural Ireland. Pascoe cites evidence that references to permanent settlements were deliberately suppressed, including a case where Captain Stokes's 1841 reference to substantially constructed winter habitations was the only line omitted when his account was later published.

In his chapter on fire, Pascoe argues that Aboriginal fire management was a planned system operating on five principles: rotating mosaic burns to control intensity, timing burns by country type and condition, considering weather, advising neighboring clans, and avoiding the growing season of particular plants. Historian Bill Gammage's research shows that fire was used to shape the land into mosaics of cleared land and forest that maximized food resources, protected individual crops, and provided shelter for towns. The disruption of this regime after colonization led to severe ecological consequences.

Pascoe examines the philosophical and governmental foundations of Aboriginal society, arguing that economy and spiritual life were inseparable. He cites anthropologist Bill Stanner's conclusion that Aboriginal belief centered on continuity, constancy, balance, and symmetry, with no great conflicts over power or contests for place. Aboriginal governance resembled democracy, Pascoe argues, with Elders earning authority through complex initiation processes rather than force or inheritance. Trade networks known as songlines served as cultural, economic, and artistic conduits connecting clans across the continent, carrying goods, news, technology, and marriage partners to centers of exchange.

Pascoe calls for a practical revolution in Australian agriculture based on Aboriginal crops and land management. He reports on contemporary trials of yam daisy cultivation showing increasing productivity with each season, and the successful baking of native millet bread at Lake Mungo in 2015 by women and children of the Mutti Mutti, Latji Latji, and Barkinji Aboriginal communities. He advocates for indigenous grains suited to Australian conditions, arguing they require less water, fewer chemicals, and cause less soil damage than European imports.

In his conclusion, Pascoe argues that denying Aboriginal agricultural and spiritual achievement is the single greatest impediment to intercultural understanding and to Australian moral and economic prosperity. Accepting the full history of the country, he contends, would release Aboriginal people from despair while providing intellectual and practical benefits for the entire nation, drawing on knowledge accumulated over at least 80,000 years of managing the continent.