A Harried Dark Emu

Dark Emu is ‘90%’ based on the work of Rupert Gerritsen

Professor Bruce Pascoe freely admits that he lifted almost the whole idea for Dark Emu from the published work of one, Rupert Gerritsen and his 2008 book, Australia and the Origins of Agriculture, BAR International Series 1874. Oxford: Archaeopress.

As reported in The Australian in May 2019,

“Gerritsen died in 2013 without ever achieving a university job, and Pascoe cites him as a scholar who languished in obscurity because his theories contradicted the mainstream view. “Rupert should have got all the credit for Dark Emu,” he says candidly, a sentiment that gets ready agreement from Gerritsen’s brother Rolf, a professor of economic and indigenous policy studies at Charles Darwin University. “Ninety per cent of Bruce’s book is taken from my brother’s research,” Rolf Gerritsen says with a chuckle, adding that this is not to belittle Pascoe’s considerable achievement in popularising complex issues and shifting the national conversation about indigenous history.”

Given that until very recently, no detailed critique of Bruce Pascoe’s book, Dark Emu , had emerged from suitably qualified academics, we thought we would see if any academics had critiqued the work of Professor Pascoe’s source of inspiration, his ‘muse’ so to speak, Rupert Gerritsen.

Some time ago, we located a paper critiquing Rupert Gerritsen’s work by Ian Gilligan, from the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, The Australian National University.

Now we have located another critique of Rupert Gerritsen’s book, ‘Australia and the Origins of Agriculture’ by BAR International Series 1874, 2008, in the form of a June 2010 book review by Harry Lourandos.

Harry Lourandos is an eminent Australian archaeologist and adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology, Archaeology and Sociology, School of Arts and Social Sciences at James Cook University, Cairns and, according to his biography in Wikipedia,

Harry Lourandos

‘He is a leading proponent of the theory that a period of [Aboriginal] hunter-gatherer intensification occurred between 3000 and 1000 BCE…

He attended Sydney Grammar School and commenced a degree at the University of Sydney in 1963, leading to an honours degree followed by a position as Research Archaeologist at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, the first professional archaeologist appointed at the museum. In 1970, he received an M.A. in pre-history at the Australian National University followed by a PhD. in Anthropology at the University of Sydney in 1980.

In 1973, he became a teaching fellow at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney and then in 1979, was a lecturer with the Department of Prehistory at the University of New England. He moved to the University of Queensland in 1986 as senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology.

In 1964–1965, Lourandos undertook archaeological fieldwork in Tasmania with Rhys Jones, who had commenced his own archaeological research in Tasmania the previous year. In 1965 he helped excavate the Rocky Cape South cave site, and recognising the importance of the 5000-year-old sealed site, contacted Jones and subsequently they carried out a detailed survey and excavation.

It is for his contribution to the Intensification debate that Lourandos is best known. Intensification involved an increase in human manipulation of the environment (for example, the construction of eel traps in Victoria, population growth, an increase in trade between groups, a more elaborate social structure, and other cultural changes). A shift in stone tool technology, involving the development of smaller and more intricate points and scrapers, occurred around this time.”

In short, Professor Harry Lourandos knows his stuff when it comes to the Aboriginal pre-history of Australia.

So, if anyone can claim some experience and wisdom in being able to critique the ideas put forward by Rupert Gerritsen and then by association, 90% of Dark Emu, as admitted by Bruce Pascoe and Rupert’s brother Rolf, it is Harry Lourandos.

Here is the book review by Lourandos, who points out in his review that Gerritsen is just providing evidence and arguments that,

“…could just as easily have represented the Australian material within the ‘complex hunter-gatherer’ frame rather than the ‘agricultural’; and still conform to prediction. For, as argued here, the only significant difference is the labelling; the details remain essentially the same”.

In other words, writers such as Gerritsen, and by inference Pascoe, are just taking well-known practices of Aboriginal societies and saying they represent ‘agriculture’ when others, who are more experienced in the field, say these practices are a better fit with the ‘complex hunter gatherer’ label.

So to our mind, his critique only confirms to lay people like us that the whole hunter-gatherer/farmer ‘debate’ just comes down to ‘labelling’.

Many anthropologists, archaeologists and historians have observed, or written about, a multitude of Aboriginal societies, resulting in labels such as :

simple hunter gatherer (Stanner, Diamond, Tindale, Flannery, Mulvaney (early));

complex hunter gatherer (Mulvaney & Kamminga - Ref 1.);

hunter-gatherer-cultivator (Keen), hunter-gatherer-fisher (Keen), hunter-gatherer-intensifier (Lourandos);

estate managers who farmed but were not farmers (sic) (Gammage);

hunter gatherers who practiced fire-stick farming (Rhys Jones) or,

settled farmers who tilled, sowed and irrigated their crops (Pascoe).

Early colonialists, anthropologists and historians judged the Aboriginal societies as simple, nomadic hunter gatherers, notwithstanding their early observations of the complex fish and eel traps in SW Victoria and other parts of the country. With more detailed work and improvements in scientific skills, 20th century anthropologists, archaeologists and historians quite rightly pushed the definition towards now widely accepted labels such as, complex hunter gatherer, hunter-gatherer-cultivator, hunter-gatherer-fisher or hunter-gatherer-intensifier.

But to our mind this is where the labelling game should terminate.

‘Word-creep’, to encompass terms such as ‘farmers’, ‘farming’, ‘horticulture’ or ‘agriculture’, is inappropriate given the modern understandings we have of these well-defined words.

But in some ways, who cares. Aboriginal people know themselves who they were and don’t have to rely on being given an acceptable label by academics. If academics want to spend their time debating ‘how many hunter-gatherers can fit on the head of a pin’, good luck to them.

Dr Ian Keen did criticize our website Dark Emu Exposed in his recent paper, ‘Foragers or Farmers: Dark Emu and the Controversy over Aboriginal Agriculture’, for our summary of pre-colonial Aboriginal society, where he writes,

‘The ‘Dark Emu Exposed’ website (Anon. 2020) provides an egregious* example of evolutionist thinking: ‘Australian Aboriginal Society was a classic Stone-Age Hunter Gatherer Society prior to British settlement, with albeit a glimmer of an expected Neolithic advancement underway…’ - (ibid., p.3).

Now, we will admit that our phrase may be blunt, but we are not so sure that it is wrong. Australians in general accept evolution - we don’t find it derogatory to admit that our societies are on a evolutionary trajectory that involves advancement. When Harry Lourandos discovered in the Aboriginal archaeological record what seemed to be an increase in human manipulation of the environment (for example, the construction of eel traps in Victoria), population growth, an increase in trade between groups, a more elaborate social structure, and other cultural changes, he called this ‘Intensification’. A shift in stone tool technology, involving the development of smaller and more intricate points and scrapers, was also thought to have occurred around this time.

As lay people, we use a simpler language than academics. Hence, we say what appears to have been happening in pre-colonial Aboriginal Australia was ‘a glimmer of an expected Neolithic advancement’. Why would we not expect Aboriginal people and their societies to become more complex and advanced over time? We are all the same Homo sapiens, and Aboriginal people are just as highly intelligent as anyone else. It is just unfortunate that Aboriginal people landed on a ‘dud’ continent, with few plants and animals to domesticate and an inhospitable and challenging climate, which greatly slowed their ability to develop and take-up ‘agriculture’ as we know it.

* Definition of egregious - 1. Adj : outstandingly bad; shocking. 2. Archaic use : remarkably good. (‘egregious’ appears to be an auto-antonym or Janus word - a word that has changed its meaning over time to ultimately mean the complete opposite of its original definition. To us crusty old researchers, amongst the scrolls in our archaic library at Dark Emu Exposed HQ, we will take Dr Keen’s quote as a compliment on our remarkably good turn of phrase to describe pre-colonial Aboriginal societies.

Reference 1 : Mulvaney, J., & Kamminga, J. Prehistory of Australia Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999, p79-102.