As we checked Mr Pascoe’s text, and compared it to his quoted “original” references and what he was saying in his lectures, we started to find some errors. These finds were small ones at first, which can be forgiven in any academic work, but then larger errors appeared and, most worryingly, some even appeared to be possibly wilful manipulations, additions or omissions to slant the narrative and bolster his argument. Could this be?

We have assembled here, as a number of blog-posts, the results of our review and critique of Dark Emu - Aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture and we will let the reader be the judge!

The Case of the Creeping Boundary!

One of Mr Pascoe’s most admired references with regard to evidence of an “Aboriginal agricultural economy” is Norman Tindale, the Australian (Mr Pascoe confusingly sometimes refers to him as being American in his lectures) anthropologist, who Mr Pascoe claims, “was able to plot Indigenous grain areas from which the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (RIRDC) was able to construct a map.”

He then inserts this map :

Figure 1 : Mr Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2018 reprint, p.28) map supposedly after Tindale, but showing considerable expansion of Tindale’s aboriginal grain belt boundary to include the contemporary Australian grain belt regions, including most of Victoria s… — **Figure 1 :** Mr Pascoe’s *Dark Emu* (2018 reprint, p.28) map supposedly after Tindale, but showing considerable expansion of Tindale’s aboriginal grain belt boundary to include the contemporary Australian grain belt regions, including most of Victoria south of the Murray River! Why was Tindale’s original map altered like this?

This map in Figure 1 is NOT the RIRDC map, but is just a creation by Pascoe, and which looks nothing like the real RIRDC map (Figure 2 below). Pascoe’s map appears to have been ‘re-drawn’ to expand the boundaries of the “Aboriginal grain belt” (after Tindale 1974), when compared to the RIRDC map (Figure 2). This RIRDC map is identical to Tindale’s original 1974 map (Figure 3), both of which clearly show a much more limited range for “Tindale’s Arc”, the grasslands where Aborigines had a high reliance on grass seeds in their diet. We have included copies of the relevant pages of Dark Emu, the RIRDC report and Tindale’s 1974 book, Australian Tribes of Australia below as evidence.

One might ask why anyone would need to attempt to ‘fudge’ the boundaries of ‘Tindale’s Arc’? Why didn’t Mr Pascoe just copy accurately the RIRDC or Tindale’s map?

Unless Mr Pascoe can offer a reason, it does appear that he may have re-drawn an expanded, Aboriginal “grain-belt” boundary to incorporate the highly productive grain areas, developed by modern Australian farmers, as well. We believe it is unjustified to alter the data of Tindale and the RIRDC to make the Aboriginal “grain-belt” look much larger than either of these two authorities claimed.

Similarly, Mr Pascoe only considers the relative areas of the Aboriginal and Modern “grain-belts”, not their productivity. It has been estimated (Ref 1) that an Aboriginal woman could produce around one 280gram seed cake a day. Assuming 365 days per year and say, half the pre-colonial, Aboriginal population of 300,000 were women capable of producing seed cakes, then some 15,000 tonnes per year of grain-seeds may have been harvested, per year, across Mr Pascoe’s Aboriginal “grain-belt”. This compares to Australia’s farmers of today producing some two thousand times more, or 30 million tonnes, of grain annually (See Figure 4).

Figure 2 : Map of ‘Tindale’s Arc’ in RIRDC Report, June 2015, RIRDC Publication Number 15/056. — **Figure 2 :** Map of ‘Tindale’s Arc’ in RIRDC Report, June 2015, RIRDC Publication Number 15/056.

Figure 3 : Original ‘Tindales’s Arc’ from Norman Tindale, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia, UC Press, 1974, p99. — **Figure 3 :** Original ‘Tindales’s Arc’ from Norman Tindale, *Aboriginal Tribes of Australia,* UC Press, 1974, p99.

Figure 4; Modern Australian grain-belt (From The Australian Export Grains Innovation Centre (aegic) website-2019).Note that the real modern Australian grain-belt is much larger than Mr Pascoe gives Australia credit for in his re-drawn map. — **Figure 4;** Modern Australian grain-belt *(From The Australian Export Grains Innovation Centre (aegic) website-2019).*
*Note that the* ***real*** *modern Australian grain-belt is much larger than Mr Pascoe gives Australia credit for in his re-drawn map.*

Mr Pascoe’s ‘re-drawn’ “Tindale’s Arc” is also featured in the new school-children’s version of Young Dark Emu. The area depicted where “grain has been harvested since white settlement” is also shown to be smaller than it is in reality.

Figure 5 : Areas of Aboriginal “grain-belt” compared to modern Australian grain-belt - Young Dark Emu, Magabala Books, 2019, p26 — **Figure 5 :** Areas of Aboriginal “grain-belt” compared to modern Australian grain-belt - *Young Dark Emu, Magabala Books, 2019, p26*

Reference 1 : Cane, S., First Footprints, Allen & Unwin, 2013, p 178.

Update January 7th 2020 : Several readers trying to rescue the reputation of Professor Pascoe’s scholarship with regard to the “Tindale Map” re-drawing issue have pointed out to us that we have ignored either, the footnoted references cited at the bottom of Professor Pascoe’s map (Dark Emu, 2018 Reprint, p.28), or we have failed to consider several additional paragraphs in the RIRDC Report. These paragraphs are :

‘There are several reports of expeditions to northern South Australia and central Australia conducted by Cleland, along with either Johnston or Tindale, through the late 1930’s with the latest in this series published in 1959. Specht published on Arnhem Land, NT uses in 1959.

Apart from the literature-based study by Allen published in 1974 there was no activity until a flurry of projects in the 1980’s and 1990’s by O’Connell, Cane, Smith and Wightman. These projects focussed on Aboriginal communities in central Australia (O’Connell), the Western Desert (Cane) and Northern Territory (Smith and Wightman). Since that time there has been only superficial mention of Aboriginal use of grasses for foods or other purposes in reviews. The conclusion that can be drawn from the spread of dates of these studies is that this is a field that has not received consistent effort.

Nor is it a field that has had wide geographic coverage across Australia with the great majority of the continent not having any report made on the use of grasses. It is more than likely, according to Tindale, who utilised recordings of grinding stones as inferring the use of grains, that the deliberate harvesting of grass seeds (and potentially also wattle tree seeds) was widespread throughout a very broad swathe of Australia.

Tindale described a large area, now known as ‘Tindale’s Arc’, where grinding stones were considered as prevalent. The map, taken directly from Tindale (1974) “Aboriginal tribes of Australia” shows the area he considered where a reliance upon grass seeds as a source of food was evident. Both contemporary and older evidence (Hiatt, 1968) suggests that grinding stones are much more widespread than reported by Tindale and as such, the use of grass seeds for food is likely to have been more widespread than suggested in this map’…

The locations of a number of the ethnobotanic studies that have been undertaken fall well outside Tindale’s Arc suggesting that the food use of native grasses by Aboriginals was even more prevalent than was first considered - RIRDC Report -pages 5 & 6

We have highlighted in bold the location and researcher references cited in Dark Emu and the RIRDC report, which some readers think have provided the basis for Professor Pascoe to redraw his extended ‘Tindale’s Arc’ boundary to extend further into Victoria, NE Qld and SW WA. We disagree. The RIRDC has indicated the locations of these additional researchers work by adding blue diamonds to their map (See Fig. 2 above). Some of these points fall outside Tindale’s original map, but we note none are located in Victoria, NE Qld or SW WA. The point on the SA southern coast may, or may not, be an outlier. If anything, professor Pascoe may be entitled to extend his boundary further north into the NT, but he has no evidential basis to support the ‘dodgy’ map he has published in Dark Emu. - Editor