Using first-hand accounts from the journals of European colonists and explorers, Professor Bruce Pascoe wrote a book that will forever change how Australians view their history. In just 221 pages, Dark Emu exploded the myth that Aboriginal Australians were nomadic hunter gatherers and that farming and agricultural techniques were only introduced to the country with the arrival of white colonists. “I wrote the book because I found it hard to convince Australians that Aboriginal people were farming,” Pascoe says.
It takes a master storyteller to captivate a nation and up-end what generations of Australians have been taught and accepted about their history and land. Pascoe himself had to go through a similar journey. After discovering his Aboriginal ancestry at the age of 19, he wanted to understand his own history: “I knew nothing. What I found in my research was so different to the history I’ve known at school. I went and checked up in the libraries, because that’s what I am – I’m a book person. And I was confronted by this completely new history that hadn’t made it into our schoolbooks and our classrooms,” Pascoe told The Brilliant.
But the written word alone could not fill the gaps in his understanding. “I went searching for family links and the elders were a bit confronted by my ignorance of everything, not just my family. And so, before they would talk about family, they wanted to talk about history. The history that had impacted their families, which had also obviously impacted my family.”
These stories and his research led to his first book, Convincing Ground: Learning to Fall in Love with Your Country, about the massacre of Gundidj Mara people in Victoria in 1834. In his research, Pascoe was struck by just how many references there were to Aboriginal people harvesting grain and milling it, and growing murnong (a native yam). “It was clearly horticultural. Aboriginal women were lifting these tubers, selecting some, pressing the plant back in the ground so that it remained a perennial plant that was never completely taken out of the soil, which meant that the soil had its own microbes and nutritional strengths remaining and sequestered carbon. This was done over areas where you couldn’t see one end of the field from the other, because they were so vast.”
Pascoe couldn’t believe what he was reading.
I just shook my head. This was incredible investment of labour in the production of food. How come no-one thought it was interesting enough to teach to Australians?” Observing the terraced hillsides of Melbourne, complex fishing and irrigation systems, and preservation of grains in sheds and homes – it was obvious to Pascoe that Aboriginal people were highly skilled agriculturalists and that Australian history had been completely misrepresented. And for him, the reason is clear: “It’s a political thing. Not a curriculum thing.”
Dark Emu was an instant hit. It received critical acclaim, won numerous awards, has sold more than 260,000 copies and is now in its 28th reprint.
But profoundly challenging the status quo of the history books has come at a price. Pascoe has found himself subject to a greater level of scrutiny and attacks than most historians would ever anticipate.
An anonymous website was created purely to pull his book apart, conservative commentators have attacked him and a complaint that Pascoe falsely claimed to be Indigenous to benefit financially was referred by the office of the home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, to the Australian Federal Police (AFP). The complaint was dismissed.
I’m having to prove and re-prove what should not need proving, because it is coming out of first-hand accounts of reputable observers – explorers and pioneers that Australia usually accepts without a blink. But because I’ve said it with the implications that I’m implying, now it’s being challenged. And I’m being challenged. Even my Aboriginality has being challenged.”
In talking to Pascoe, the hurt and frustration with the personal nature of these attacks is plain –but so is his resolve. “We’ll have to be brave if we’re going to change the minds of the people that detract us, because it’s a bit uncomfortable, and it will remain uncomfortable for our children and our grandchildren,” he says. “But if we can change minds now, we’ll save the intellectual freedom of our children and grandchildren. We’re fighting for the right to talk about the reality of the world, not some capitalist perception.”
It is the story itself which has the power. And as long as you’re open to that story, then you will accept it, because all of it, the bibliography, the index, all the references are there.”
Pascoe has also seen over the last two decades that the national mood has shifted, which prepared the ground for the success of Dark Emu. “By the time Dark Emu came out, the world had changed a little, and it was more acceptable. Bill Gammage had already written his book [The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia], Stan Grant was making statements. The atmosphere was quite different.”
And today, he sees an openness in young Australians to questioning history, and more people interested in where their food comes from, and suspicious of industrial agriculture. “There’s a different audience reading in a different way,” says Pascoe.
As Dark Emu’s impact continues to reverberate into the national consciousness, Pascoe has returned to farming. For the last six years he has been growing murnong and native grains on his farm in East Gippsland, Victoria. His vision is to produce native grains to be milled into flour and made into bread using traditional Aboriginal techniques. “We are doing that so that no judge could ever say that we weren’t engaged with our culture, because that has been used against Aboriginal people to deny our cultural rights. So I thought I better getting to growing it and studying it,” Pascoe says.
Pascoe is working with scientists from several universities, including Dr Beth Gott from Monash University, who supplies seeds and support. The bigger plan is to help build a market around the consumption of food products that were here before European settlement but which have been largely overlooked since. But his message of reconciliation is clear. “We don’t want to exclude the rest of Australia from these products, but we want Australians to include us [the Aboriginal community] in the economy, and they can do that by buying our products.”
With drought and bushfires intensified by climate change, Pascoe sees that now, more than ever, Aboriginal land expertise needs to come to the fore. “Aboriginal people managed the forest so that there were 10 massive trees to the acre on average. That forest type is impossible to burn. You can cool burn it, but you’ll never get a forest fire in it because the trees simply are too big. If Australia wants a safe country, that’s the way to go,” he argues.
He also wants Australians to understand where the wood they consume comes from, and why that contributes to catastrophic fires. “it’s not the big trees that are the problem, it’s these plantation timbers. That’s where the big explosions occurred. That’s where the heat for our fires was generated, in the plantation timber forest.”
As Pascoe continues on his journey to reviving knowledge and building pride in Aboriginal history, he will continue to speak his mind.
Well, I can’t speak for others,” he says. “All I can say is that I have obligations to my community, and I believe we’ve all got obligations to the world. And if a bit of discomfort deters us, then we’re not fair dinkum.”
For more information about Dark Emu – Website
Article by Kylie Ahern
Photo credit: Photo supplied
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