Watching The Dark Emu Story in iview https://iview.abc.net.au/show/dark-emu-story.

I learned colonial Australian history in the 60s & 70s, read some interesting material raising interesting questions 20-30 years ago, taught a much better version to year 12 students some years later & then read this book.

I’d learned that Indigenous Australians were Hunter-gatherers, merely harvesting & hunting what nature provided. I’d taught (at a simple middle years level) that the first farmers were people who tended the land, cared for it, used fire to control some plants & promote growth of others,use some collected seed to increase the density of some plants etc, and cultivate the soil to replant food producing plants. I learned that this happened first in places like Sumerian, Egypt etc.

Later peoples used fencing to protect crops from animals & claim ownership of the land, invented machines to more effectively cultivate the land, selected & later bred more productive plants. Animals were domesticated, selectively bred & raised for meat & dairy. Such practices developed in fertile areas with generally reliable & sufficient rainfall, & were then transferred to less fertile areas to improve productivity.

Pascoe challenged this, using the evidence of journals & letters written by white people viewing the land & its people before white settlement. And archeological evidence is that the early farming, or gardening, or land management & the building of sophisticated fish tracks, & semi-permanent villages were taking place here well before such practices in the Mediterranean. And that they mined, & produced & traded.

And he was attacked, by right wing politicians & media, & conservative academics. He claims to be truth telling, while his critics claim he has produced propaganda to try to make Indigenous Australians more relatable to non- Indigenous Australians.

All Pascoe wants, is for people to know that Indigenous Australian culture was not as simple & unsophisticated as claimed, largely in attempts to justify the appropriation of land, the pushing of Indigenous Australians onto reserves, into missions, the “opportunities” to work as stockhands & domestic servants but nothing else, and the removal over decades of mixed race children from their families & placement into institutions (many but not all the result of sexual violence & exploitation), where many of the children were themselves abused & set on a path of crime & substance abuse. (See Jack Charles’ book https://www.penguin.com.au/books/jack-charles-9781760899158).

Good documentary, excellent & thoroughly researched book. Jack Charles’ book is a lighter read. He definitely wasn’t an entertainer but was such a treasure. I really regret not going to see him on stage before he died. #DarkEmu #TheDarkEmuStory #IndigenousAustralia