Finally, the University of Melbourne Sends in Some Big Guns in the 'Emu Wars'
A publication date of June 16th, 2021 has been announced for the new book,
Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate, by Peter Sutton, Keryn Walshe (Melbourne University Publishing, 2021)
This is a long-awaited, proper academic assessment of ‘The Dark Emu Debate’ in a book form that we Australians have been waiting for, notwithstanding the excellent 2019 book by Peter O’Brien, the first proper academic paper by Dr Ian Keen, and a school resource book by Robert Lewis.
Melbourne University Publishing advertise the book as,
‘Australians' understanding of Aboriginal society prior to the British invasion from 1788 has been transformed since the publication of Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu in 2014. It argued that classical Aboriginal society was more sophisticated than Australians had been led to believe because it resembled more closely the farming communities of Europe.
In Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe ask why Australians have been so receptive to the notion that farming represents an advance from hunting and gathering. Drawing on the knowledge of Aboriginal elders, previously not included within this discussion, and decades of anthropological scholarship, Sutton and Walshe provide extensive evidence to support their argument that classical Aboriginal society was a hunter-gatherer society and as sophisticated as the traditional European farming methods.
Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? asks Australians to develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of Aboriginal society and culture’. - [our emphasis]
This book promises to clarify what we all already knew - that pre-colonial Aboriginal societies were hunter-gatherer (including those that could be called complex hunter-gatherer-fisher-forager, etc) and that Bruce Pascoe with his Euro-centric ‘Aboriginal farming’ thesis has done a great disservice, indeed a great insult to, amongst others, traditionally-minded, Aboriginal Australians.
In addition, it will be interesting to see how the authors address the underlying political messages, and enormous popularity in Progressive-Left circles, of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu.
In our view, the book has been so popular because the audience truely wanted to believe Pascoe’s thesis for what they believed it said about the colonisation of Australia - it was an invasion not a settlement; it was illegal land theft without a treaty or the ceding of Aboriginal sovereignty, rather than the actual reality of legal British sovereignty by discovery and settlement under International Law.
It looks like we will have another twelve months in the trenches of the Emu Wars!
Update of September 2021
The Emu War has been Won
Many of us predicted (and desperately hoped) that the promised June 2021 book by anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe, Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate, would be the final nail in the coffin for Bruce Pascoe and his Dark Emu theory.
The results have been more than we could have hoped for.
Coupled with a devastatingly successful media launch and book review by The Sydney Morning Herald’s Stuart Rintoul, Bruce Pascoe and his Dark Emu have lost all credibility, except amongst Pascoe’s most dedicated ‘hoax’ victims.
The beginning of the end for the Dark Emu ‘hoax’ was when Stuart Rintoul, told Australia,
‘In page after page, Sutton and Walshe accuse Pascoe of a “lack of true scholarship”, ignoring Aboriginal voices, dragging respect for traditional Aboriginal culture back into the Eurocentric world of the colonial era, and “trimming” colonial observations to fit his argument. They write that while Dark Emu “purports to be factual” it is “littered with unsourced material, is poorly researched, distorts and exaggerates many points, selectively emphasises evidence to suit those opinions, and ignores large bodies of information that do not support the author’s opinions”.
“It is actually not, properly considered, a work of scholarship,” they write. “Its success as a narrative has been achieved in spite of its failure as an account of fact.” - (SMH June 12th 2021).
Dark Emu - A Truer History - RIP
