Dark Emu

[Toots]

Has anybody read the Bruce Pascoe book Dark Emu?  I read it a year or so ago and found it a bit dry but recently it has caused a some controversy so I am re-reading it.  It claims Aboriginals were not hunter-gatherers as generally believed but farmers who planted crops and stored grain in silos.  Pascoe also states many Indigenous Australians also lived in villages with stone huts and constructed dams and irrigation systems.  Many historians disagree but you would think archaeologists would have found proof of those statements.

 

[Bobj]

1 hour ago, Toots said:

Has anybody read the Bruce Pascoe book Dark Emu?  I read it a year or so ago and found it a bit dry but recently it has caused a some controversy so I am re-reading it.  It claims Aboriginals were not hunter-gatherers as generally believed but farmers who planted crops and stored grain in silos.  Pascoe also states many Indigenous Australians also lived in villages with stone huts and constructed dams and irrigation systems.  Many historians disagree but you would think archaeologists would have found proof of those statements.

 

I know that a few early Aboriginal people built stone ‘hides’  in order to catch pigeons. There are some remnants in the Victoria River valley. But, as to the rest...?

i have seen two lots of Aboriginal families go ‘walkabout’ in the Kimberlies over 50 years ago. The adult males carrying a number of spears, while the womenfolk carried water and babies.

Maybe the author was talking about the SE Australian people, definitely not the desert people.

Cheers, Bobj.

[Bulya]

I’ll see if I can borrow this from the library 

[Toots]

2 hours ago, Bobj said:

I know that a few early Aboriginal people built stone ‘hides’  in order to catch pigeons. There are some remnants in the Victoria River valley. But, as to the rest...?

i have seen two lots of Aboriginal families go ‘walkabout’ in the Kimberlies over 50 years ago. The adult males carrying a number of spears, while the womenfolk carried water and babies.

Maybe the author was talking about the SE Australian people, definitely not the desert people.

Cheers, Bobj.

The book is to be adapted as an ABC TV documentary series.

[Bulya]

So I just called in to Belconnen Library for Dark Emu.  They laughed!  They have 20 Copies, all out, and a waiting list of weeks if not months.  So I’m off to find a bookshop and hopefully buy one!

[Becontree Boy]

Dark Emu is a powerful book.  It goes to the accounts of early white explorers and settlers to describe a pre-European Australia of settled farming communities.  I'm fortunate to have living evidence of such a community close by where I live in south west Victoria.  The Budj Bim Cultural landscape has recently been granted UNESCO World Heritage status.  It contains the architectural remains of a stone hut community of at least 200 homes built around a wooden and stone eel traps.  The traps go back at 6,000 years.  A keeping place and interpretation centre is being built on site, and the intention is to put some of the traps back in operation, but even now visitors can clearly see the remains of huts and traps.  Pascoe points out the remains of other dams for acquaculture and agriculture all over Australia.  Budj Bim is no "one off".  Read Pacoe's book and your view of Aboriginal Australia may be profoundly changed.

[Mike@Bonbeach]

Is this the book written by an Englishman who claims to be an Aborigine?

 

[Toots]

47 minutes ago, Mike@Bonbeach said:

Is this the book written by an Englishman who claims to be an Aborigine?

 

He claims that his indigenous ancestry was distant and he was “more Cornish than Koori”.  His forebears came from Cornwall UK.   He once stated that his great-grandmother had an Aboriginal name but declines to elaborate today because the claim has put him in dispute with the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre which polices claims of Aboriginality in that state.  

He has been to Britain and walked around the Cornish landscape of his forebears.  He says he felt nothing. “When people ask me whether I’m ‘really’ Aboriginal because I’m so pale, I say ‘Yeah"  and when they ask me whether I can explain it, I say: ‘Have you got three hours?"

 

[Becontree Boy]

Aboriginal or Cornish.  It hardly matters.  What counts is the quality of his scholarship going back over the records and diaries of the first European settlers in Australia.