No Dark Emus to be Seen in 1788? — Dark Emu Exposed - And the Assault on Australian History

Dec 28

Dec 28 No Dark Emus to be Seen in 1788?

Bruce Pascoe’s book, Dark Emu, was published in 2014, and for some five years no scholarly critiques seemed to have emerged to counter Pascoe’s essentially ‘made-up’ narrative that Aboriginal people were ‘farmers’ and not nomadic hunter-gatherers, as was the accepted wisdom.

By mid-to-late 2019, some voices began to appear in the popular press, Skynews, Quadrant magazine and blog-sites such as our, Dark Emu Exposed, claiming that Mr Pascoe was ‘just making stuff up’ in an attempt to re-write our Aboriginal & Colonial history, but still no-one from academia had come forth publicly to make a stand for truth and call-out the wild, false claims littered throughout Dark Emu.

During 2020 however, some academics began to tentatively make a public stand. Surprisingly, one of the first came from France, where Christophe Darmangeat, who is a lecturer in Economics and Social Anthropology at the Université de Paris (Diderot), published a review article of over 6000 words on Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu on his personal blog, La Hutte des Classes, as reported by Michael Connor in Quadrant Magazine.

Historian Professor Geoffrey Blainey in August 2020 also went on the record to confirm that, as far as his extensive reading of Australia’s Colonial historical records was concerned, Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers and not, as Bruce Pascoe claims, ‘farmers.’

Dr Ian Keen, Source : ANU — Dr Ian Keen, *Source :* ***ANU***

Then in August 2020, to our knowledge the first qualified archaeologist and anthropologist, who has the detailed knowledge required to speak on this subject, came forward publicly to counter the wild claims being made by Bruce Pascoe.

Dr Ian Keen is Honorary Associate Professor, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, College Arts & Social Sciences at the Australia National University in Canberra. His distinguished academic career spans more than forty years. He started his academic career in Australia in 1974 with field work at Milingimbi, off the coast of Arnhem Land, where he lived for 14 months, followed by 10 months at Nanggalala on the mainland. He learnt Djambarrpuyŋu, one of the Yolŋu languages.

His list of 39 main publications, including several books, is very impressive and covers his research interests of Yolŋu kinship and religion, Aboriginal land rights, Aboriginal economy, Aboriginal kinship systems, and language and culture.

So here appears to be a highly qualified academic who has all the credentials necessary to make a professional critique of the claims made by Bruce Pascoe in his Dark Emu book.

So what does Dr Ian Keen say?

On the 31st August 2020, Dr Keen gave a Zoom Seminar advertised as follows:

FORAGERS OR FARMERS? DARK EMU AND THE DEBATE OVER ABORIGINAL AGRICULTURE

Bruce Pascoe’s book Dark Emu, which has been a publishing phenomenon in Australia, argues that Aboriginal people were not ‘mere’ hunter-gatherers in 1788, but were farming. This article sets the argument of the book within the context of a long-term debate in archaeology and anthropology about Aboriginal agriculture. Some have argued that Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers and asked why they did not adopt agriculture, while others have argued that at least some groups were practicing farming. The article finds 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.

ANU - Zoom Talk 31/8/2020 - [our emphasis] - Note 1.

So finally, some academics are starting to make a move and publically give Bruce Pascoe and his Dark Emu the critique it, and our society, deserves.

Note 1: Unfortunately to date we have not been able to find a recording of this seminar, but will post it should we locate one.

Professor Christopher Lloyd, Emeritus Professor of Economic History in School of Business, University of New England, Armidale - Source — **Professor Christopher Lloyd, Emeritus Professor of Economic History in School of Business, University of New England, Armidale -** *Source*

Another Australian academic, whose published works would seem to contradict the claims of Mr Pascoe’s Dark Emu, is Professor Christopher Lloyd from the University of New England, Armidale who describes the ‘Aboriginal Economy’ as follows:

Australian Aborigines were foragers or hunter/gatherers before European colonisation. Neither agriculture in the sense of settled communities of cultivators nor pastoralism in the sense of settled or nomadic groups with domestic animals existed in Australia.

There were areas of partially sedentary material culture where food sources were abundant, such as some river valleys and coastlines. There were, however, no permanent dwellings, no real villages and very few possessions. Nomadic foraging was by far the dominant socioeconomic system. As with foragers elsewhere, however, here there was a wide variety of activity, dependent to a large degree on the environment in which people lived.

Aboriginal people did a great deal to mould the landscape to their needs by, for example, firestick farming to improve grasslands for grazing animals, building fish traps in shallow riverbeds and coastal zones or building canoes for hunting marine mammals and fish. There was much local specialisation in food production depending on natural conditions, and the manufacture of tools was a matter of local specialisation—again, depending on resources. Trade of tools and special materials with neighbouring peoples and over long distances across many language boundaries has been well studied (see Butlin 1993; Keen 2004). It seems clear that there was a continent-wide system of cultural diffusion and trading networks.

Dr Christopher Lloyd , Emeritus Professor of Economic History in School of Business, University of New England, Armidale. - [our emphasis].

Further Reading 1.

In his quotation above, Dr Keen hints at the debate between researchers, where one side says, Aboriginal people were ‘classic’ hunter-gatherers and not ‘farmers’ using ‘agriculture’, as we understand those words today, whereas other researchers argue that (some) Aboriginal people were ‘farming’, that is, they weren’t necessarily ‘farmers’ but were ‘farming’. Mr Pascoe alone is out on an ‘academic’ limb in claiming that Aboriginal people were full blown agriculturalists who tilled the soil with their ‘Bogan picks’, constructed dams and irrigation schemes, and lived in towns of 1000 people with large grain silos supported by miles of cultivated crops.

To our mind, there is a ‘play on words’ going on, which is exemplified by the concept of ‘fire-stick farming’, first tentatively put forward by Rhys Jones in 1969, where he writes of the recorded practice of Aboriginal peoples to burn their local environments to stimulate plant growth,

“Perhaps we should call what the Aborigines did "fire-stick farming". Was this deliberate? In some cases, yes; in others, no. Robinson records that a park-like landscape in Tasmania had been formed so as to give cover for the kangaroos. "This has been done by the natives: when burning the underwood, they have beat out the fire in order to form these clumps", he writes. R. Gould reports that Aborigines in the desert are quite clear that burning will attract kangaroos once rain has fallen. On the other hand some of the effects take thousands of years to become recognizable, and no primitive people could possibly document these processes”. - Rhys Jones 1969, p227

The concept of Aboriginal fire-stick farming is then further developed and popularised by an academic, who specialised in covering research in history, anthropology and botany, Bill Gammage, in his 2011 book, The Biggest Estate on Earth, which,

“…describes how the [Aboriginal] people of Australia managed their land in 1788. It tells how this was possible, what they did, and why. It argues that collectively they managed an Australian estate they thought of as single and universal.” - (ibid., p.1)

Nevertheless, even Bill Gammage adds a nuanced, slightly confusing disclaimer,

“[Aboriginal] [p]eople farmed in 1788, but were not farmers. These are not the same: one is an activity, the other a lifestyle. An estate may include a farm, but this does not make the estate manager a farmer. In 1788 similarly, people never depended on farming. Mobility was much more important. It let people tend plants and animals in regions impossible for farmers today, and mange Australia more sustainably than their dispossessors. It was a critical difference between them [the Aborigines] and farmers.” - (ibid., p.281) -[our emphasis]

So both Rhys Jones and Bill Gammage use the term ‘fire-stick farming’ to imply that Aboriginal peoples used fire to ‘manage’ the land and increase their food supplies, which is what the evidence indicates. However, it is a pity that they used the Eurocentric term, ‘farming’ rather than say, ‘fire-stick management’ or ‘fire-stick gathering’ and/or ‘fire-stick hunting’ which is what it really was. The use of the word ‘farming‘ has allowed later, less rigorous writers such as Mr Pascoe to use language-creep to manipulate our meaning of the words 'farming’ and ‘agriculture’ (and also ‘aquaculture’) to describe the Aboriginal economy in 1788, which clearly it was not, as we understand those words today.

Now it is true that, as Dr Keen says, ‘the boundary between foraging and farming is a ‘fuzzy one’. We all know that mankind’s economic systems vary from the purely hunter-gatherer, right across the spectrum with ‘fuzzy’ boundaries between each category, to the full, industrial and complex agronomic systems that we have in many parts of the modern world today. This is best illustrated by the diagram below from Harris, David R. and D. Q. Fuller, (Agriculture: Definition and Overview, in Encyclopaedia of Global Archaeology (Claire Smith, Ed.). Springer, New York. 2014, pp 104-113), which provides a very instructive summary table on the stages of mankind’s agricultural development.

Table showing the development of Agriculture from ‘none’ (left column where Australian Aboriginal societies were) to fully developed Industrial Agriculture (far right column, where modern Australia is today). -from Harris & Fuller (2014). — Table showing the development of Agriculture from ‘none’ (left column where Australian Aboriginal societies were) to fully developed Industrial Agriculture (far right column, where modern Australia is today). -*from Harris & Fuller (2014).*

From what we can see, it appears that some researchers, such as Dr Ian Keen, are happy to describe Aboriginal peoples as ‘hunter-gatherers’ (and ‘hunter-gatherer-fishers’), with the occasional stretch over the ‘fuzzy line’ to ‘hunter-gatherer-cultivators’ to account for the few recorded cases in Aboriginal societies where, for example, ‘yam-tops were replanted in the tropical north and on the west coast’, ‘continual digging occurred to assist yam daisy re-growth’, ‘grubs were cultivated in grass-trees and saplings’, ‘nesting bees were encouraged’, ‘dingoes and young cassowaries were domesticated’ and, ‘complex systems of eel canals in western Victoria’ were built. - (from Ian Keen’s book, Aboriginal Economy and Society – Australia at the Threshold of Colonisation, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.94-95).

Even though Dr Keen says,

‘these practices may change our picture of Aboriginal hunting, gathering and fishing as a mode of subsistence’ , as they appear to involve,

‘a more radical intervention in the ecology than we recognised earlier’,

to our mind they are in no way ‘farming’, ‘agriculture’ or ‘aquaculture’, as we understand those words today. By all means describe them as the first tentative steps from Column 1 of Harris’s Table above, across a ‘fuzzy line’ to Column 2, but don’t conflate them with this year’s crop from a 1000ha laser-levelled and fertilized paddock of GM-canola in the Wimmera, which undoubtably represents the ‘agriculture’ in Column 5 of the table.

As Dr Keen notes,

‘Agriculture’ involves more or less exclusive cultivation of domesticated plants, livestock raising by settled farmers, or transhumant or nomadic pastoralism.’ - (ibid., p96)

One doesn’t need to be an academic to see that Aboriginal societies were predominately non-Agricultural with wild food procurement, gathering, burning and tending, with some incipient Pre-Domestication Cultivation starting to appear on the continent with replacement yam planting, management of wild eels, bees and wild grasses and the evolution of domestication of dingos and birds and complex eel traps.

Political writers such as Mr Pascoe are trying to redefine the Eurocentric words ‘agriculture’ and ‘farming’ to accomodate Aboriginal practices in the belief that this shows that Aboriginal people were ‘settled farmers’ in 1788, and hence the British illegally stole the land, rather than ‘settled’ it. If the Australian public can be convinced that the British illegally acted against the standards of International legal conventions of the time, then perhaps Australians will vote to allow ‘Treaty’ and Aboriginal ‘Sovereignty’.

All we can say is, be careful what you wish for Mr Pascoe. Promoting a Eurocentric agricultural vision of Aboriginal societies runs the risk of re-igniting the debates on the evolutionary, progress-orientated view of human societies, where hunter-gatherers were ‘primitive’ and agriculture was the first stepping stone on the way to ‘advanced civilization’. Or as Australian archaeologist Harry Lourandos controversially (and probably inadvertently) put it,

“Intensification of [Aboriginal] social and economic relations would appear to have been increasingly taking place during the Holocene period on the Australian mainland, the process being nipped in the bud by the coming of the Europeans”

- (Lourandos, H., ‘Intensification…’, Archaeology in Oceania, 18, 1983, pp.92). - [our emphasis].

Indeed, Mr Pascoe even concedes that the examples of the first tentative steps by a few Aboriginal societies from Column 1 of Harris’s Table above, across a ‘fuzzy line’ to Column 2, show that,

‘The intensification of resource use, language development, and social organisation were in the curve of great change prior to the colonial period, because Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were on the same cognitive trajectory as the rest of the human family, albeit in a different stream and in a unique channel in that stream.’ - (Dark Emu, 2018 Reprint, p. 209).

So Mr Pascoe seems to be agreeing with the British when they arrived in New South Wales, namely that,

- Aboriginal society was at a very early stage of development, and

- it was ‘primitive’ in the sense of being ‘simple’ and ‘basic’, when compared to the colonizing European civilization of 1778.

But there was a complete understanding and expectation by the British that Aboriginal people were, as Mr Pascoe says, on the same ‘cognitive trajectory as the rest of the human family’ and therefore could be ‘civilized’ and assimilated and ultimately made full, equal members of British/Australian society. The British knew that their own European ancestors had been very ‘primitive’ once themselves only a few thousand of years or so ago. And the rest, as they say is history, as Aboriginal people have brilliantly achieved going from the Stone-age to the Modern Industrial age in a mere 250 years, whereas my ancestors took some 10,000 years to achieve the same leap.

Is Dr Ian Keen part of Bruce Pascoe’s Mysterious Group of Canberra Academics?

In various interviews, Mr Pascoe has commented on what inspired him to write Dark Emu. One of the more interesting reasons was due to the response from a group of academics in Canberra as related in an article in the The Australian in 2019.

‘Bruce Pascoe likes to tell a good yarn, and one of his better ones concerns the time that his long-running conflict with academia accidentally turned him into our most influential indigenous historian. This was eight or nine years ago, not long after Pascoe began vehemently proclaiming that generations of Australians had been duped by their history books into the false belief that Aboriginal people were nothing more than spear-throwing nomads before white colonisers arrived here. In fact, he said, Aborigines cultivated crops, built large villages and devised sophisticated dams and aquaculture systems — achievements Australians were so ignorant of that the country was like “an innocent baby” with a paper bag over its head.

At the time he was lobbing these polemical bombs, Pascoe was best known as a writer of fiction and a publisher, pursuits he had subsidised over many decades by working variously as a tourist guide, dairy farmer and fencer. His broadsides against the history profession, he recalls, came to the attention of a group of academics in Canberra who were sufficiently concerned to invite him to an off-campus meeting at one of their homes. Pascoe remembers arriving there in his second-hand ute, having driven to the nation’s capital from his home four hours away in the remote Victorian town of Gipsy Point in East Gippsland. “They said, ‘Look, we don’t want you talking to our students about this stuff, because it’s wrong, it didn’t happen’,” he says. “You’re talking about agriculture, but that didn’t happen. Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers.”

Pascoe is hazy on the identity of these eminent professors, but remembers that they slapped him over the wrist with utmost civility. “Cup of tea, lovely conversation — nice people, actually. But when I left that meeting, I got in my old beaten-up ute, and I was furious.” He says he drove straight to a second-hand bookstore and plonked down $8 for a copy of the journals of 19th-century explorer Sir Thomas Mitchell, which he cracked open while sitting in the driver’s seat. There his eyes fell on Mitchell’s eyewitness account of Aboriginal villages in Queensland housing more than a thousand people, and “haycocks” of harvested seed-grass stretching for miles, drying in the sun to make flour for native bread. It was then he knew he had his next book. “I have to thank that group of academics,” he says wryly. Because without their intervention, he might never have written his one and only bestseller.

- The Australian - Turning history on its head - Academic conflict accidentally turned Bruce Pascoe into our most influential indigenous historian. - Richard Guilliatt, May 2019.

Some people might wonder whether Dr Ian Keen was a member of that, ‘group of academics in Canberra’, that inadvertently spawned the birth of Dark Emu?

To amateurs like us, all this controversy over how to define the economies of pre-colonial Aboriginal societies just sounds like semantics. Aboriginal people were quite happy with their lives as very skilled and successful hunter gatherers. If 250 years later, politically motivated academics and activists want to engage in world play by calling Aboriginal people farmers, living in settled stone villages of 1000 people, so be it. It won’t make any difference to the Aboriginal Sovereignty argument - When the British colonised New South Wales in 1788 they legally ‘settled’ here amongst nomadic, native hunter gatherers. It was not a ‘conquest’ or ‘cession’ of settled farmers who had a recognisable social government, as understood by the legal definitions of the time, so no Treaty was required.

Academics can write as many papers as they like with ‘Farming’ in the title such as, ‘Food-getting, Domestication and Farming in Pre-colonial Australia’ and then have to admit that, ‘This paper argues that Australian Aboriginal economies do conform to the “complex” hunter gatherer archetype’. (ibid. p116). Which is what all us amateurs already know - Aboriginal people were brilliant and successful hunter gatherers and fishers with many complex tools and practices. They were not farmers.