Dark Emu - Going, Going, Almost Gone......
After a year and a half of plugging away exposing the inaccuracies and misleading narratives of Bruce Pascoe’s book, Dark Emu, our group of amateurs here at Dark Emu Exposed are finally sensing that the tide is beginning to turn.
More and more people are coming to the view that there is something not quite right with this book and Bruce Pascoe’s wild claims that Aboriginal people were settled agricultural farmers at the threshold of British colonisation.
Pascoe’s appearances on the formerly enthusiastic ABC seem to have dropped off dramatically during 2020; the two-part, ABC documentary on Dark Emu, due out in 2020, appears to have stalled; Pascoe nowadays seems to appear more in the ‘fringe’ media - New Age, Socialist, Green, Community or Lifestyle - rather than in the mainstream media; the launch of Dark Emu into the International markets seems to have been abandoned; etc.
Some members of the Australian academy have also woken up (finally!), six years after the publication of Dark Emu and started to voice their concerns. For example, anthropologist Dr Ian Keen from the ANU Canberra, published on January 5th 2020, an academic critique entitled, ‘Foragers or Farmers: Dark Emu and the Controversy over Aboriginal Agriculture’, where he concluded that,
“… while the boundary between foraging and farming is a fuzzy one, Aboriginal people were indeed hunters, gatherers and fishers at the time of the British colonisation of Australia.”
A forthcoming book by the anthropologist and linguist Peter Sutton and the archaeologist Keryn Walshe entitled, Australia Before Conquest: A Response to Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (Melbourne University Press) is promised to,
‘…bring a high standard of scholarship in scrutinising Pascoe’s claims, and adopts a non-political stance.’
Our website, Dark Emu Exposed, will continue to debunk Dark Emu (with its sometimes political stance) over the coming year, but we plan to broaden our scope to include a few other topics, such as, Why was Dark Emu written?; What are the politics behind Dark Emu?; The Sustainability Myth; and What are the power relationships of the ‘amateurs’ like us and Bruce Pascoe, versus ‘The Establishment’, such as the Academy, the mainstream media and ‘The Clerisy’, in the Age of the Internet?
Stay tuned.
Image : ‘Dark emu' – portrait of Bruce Pascoe by Craig Ruddy, 2020
