The Daily Grind - A Day in the Life of an Aboriginal Woman Baker — Dark Emu Exposed

Looking back, we can only admire the skill and stamina of the Aboriginal women in the way they fed their families. But, don’t be beguiled by Mr Pascoe’s Aboriginal romanticism when he quotes from one of his favourite explorer’s journals :

“as evening fell, Sturt would sit out the front of his hut and write… and he said that as evening fell he loved to listen to the people singing and laughing, children playing and dogs barking, but behind all of that cheerful noise, was a sound, and that sound was, pshhh, pshhh, pshhh, as people ground grain into flour. He said it was mesmerising, the lifestyle that these people had. And as the meals were finished he could hear women putting children to bed and by 10 o'clock at night the whole village was silent. Our people were considered by the colonists to be barely human and reading that evidence of our culture really, if you're not moved by that, and if you're not moved by the fact that those people were murdered shortly afterwards, then you have indeed a very hard heart. And you also, as well as being moved by it, you have to do something. You have to respond intellectually. - why did this happen? But why does the absence mean something to us today?”

From Mr Pascoe's lecture - View from 21:00min

Well, that all sounds very romantic, but the reality is that after a hard day gathering food and attending to other family matters, the women still had to grind grain into the evening in preparation for the following day. I can almost here them say, ‘It might sound like a sweet, mesmerising pshhh, pshhh, to you Mr Pascoe, but to us ladies it is just an endless, daily grind’. The domestic life of these “women bakers” was far from easy, as the following photographs of the bread-making process show.

These photographs are from one of Mr Pascoe’s favourite sources, Norman Tindale’s, *Aboriginal Tribes of Australia,* UCP 1974, B&W plates section.
In this photograph we see the Aboriginal women, so short of grass seeds that they are reduced to even gleaning the seeds that have been gathered by ants around their nests. No ‘vast Aboriginal agricultural cereal estates’ to see here Mr Pascoe?

This is the typical size of the ‘sustainable harvest’ from Mr Pascoes ‘vast Aboriginal grain Belt.’

The following photographs describe the laborious steps involved in making even a small loaf of cereal bread

Film clip from 1965 of actual seed processing

SEED GRINDING.jpg — Academics have calculated the productivity of these “women bakers”:
There is a 95minute preparation time (plus time to harvest the seeds which we assume is an additional 95mins) so, say, 3 hrs total to harvest seed and make a 280g loaf, or 11hrs (660mins) /kg loaf.
A 280g loaf of Aboriginal bread has 1885 kj of energy, (6.7 kj/g).
If we compare this to modern bread, which is 7000kj/700g loaf = 10kj/g and costs $2/loaf at Coles .
Today the average worker wage is $25/hr so it takes 7 minutes “work” to “make” 1kg of bread; whereas the skilled Aboriginal baker takes 11hrs (660 mins), or 94 times longer to make the same amount of bread for her family.
*- Images from Cane,S., “First Footprints”, Allen&Unwin, 2013, p178.*

Film Clip of Actual Wet seed processing

And, Mr Pascoe never misses an opportunity to play the “guilt card”, in this case adding the throwaway line :

“ and if you're not moved by the fact that those people were murdered shortly afterwards, then you have indeed a very hard heart”,

but he offers no evidence that these people were ever actually murdered.

Likewise with his comment :

“And you also, as well as being moved by it, you have to do something. You have to respond intellectually. - why did this happen? But why does the absence mean something to us today?”.

Well, no one is stopping any Aboriginal baker re-invigorating this 30,000 year old tradition and harvesting Australian native seeds for flour and bread-making. One would think there is no shortage of Government or Aboriginal community funds to invest in a flour and bread making business. The market potential is enormous. Australians would be so supportive. So why blame modern Australian society for this failure of the Aboriginal community to maintain its own traditions. In my local community in Dandenong in Melbourne, there is no end to the number of artisanal bakeries, run by migrants and refugees, churning out delicious Vietnamese french baguettes, Afgani flatbreads, Italian sourdoughs, Parisian croissants and German rye-breads. If all these Australians can keep their traditions alive Mr Pascoe, why can’t I buy an Aboriginal Desert Seed or Quandong Cake from your mob?

Making a quandong cake the traditional way

film clip of 1965 showing making one of sturt's "cakes'

Despite Mr Pascoe’s claim that there was an “Aboriginal civilization in Australia” (Dark Emu, 2018 reprint, p155), there is no evidence of this. The essence of human ‘civilization’ is specialization and trade or exchange, which were very rudimentary within Aboriginal society, if they occurred at all. Aboriginal society in contrast was highly self-sufficient, something that is very appealing to many of Mr Pascoe’s romantic “Gaian or Mother Earth” readers. Each member, or family unit, of Aboriginal society made all of their own tool kit and meagre belongings. Some rare trading occurred in special stone raw materials, ochre or plants, but this trade was not significant.

A modern example of the power of specialization within our real civilization, compared to the lack of specialization in a hunter-gatherer society like the Aborigine’s, is provided in the video clip below of a making of a “chicken sandwich’ from scratch by one self sufficient preparer (cost 6 months and $1500) compared to a modern consumer working is a specialized job and then buying (exchanging labour for money) the chicken sandwich (cost 10mins work and $6).

This is why Aboriginal society was poor materially and the women had to laboriously work for hours to produce one loaf of bread - there were no Aboriginal specialist farmers, meat producers, vegetable growers or bakers.

Making a Chicken Sandwich from Scratch

Further Reading.

Overtime, we will re-visit our blog posts on Dark Emu with updated information as it comes to hand.

1. October 27th 2020 : Here are some more details regarding the collection of seeds and the calorific efficiency of Aboriginal ‘bread making’.

“The collection of grass seed is relatively easy, and it is possible to collect roughly 1000 g of seed in about half an hour. Most grass seeds are stripped straight from the grass into a wooden dish by running/rubbing the heads of seeds through a loosely clenched fist. Some of the grasses (particularly F. oxystachya and P. australiense) could also be collected from the ground or from the surface of ants' nests. Ants collect these seeds to eat the nodules…and leave the seeds scattered around their nests. Once collected, the outer husks of most seeds have to be removed. This is done by rubbing handfuls of seeds between the heel of one hand and the palm of the other. As this is done, the seeds are dropped onto wooden dishes so the wind can blow some of the unwanted vegetable matter away… When seeds have been husked, they are placed into a large softwood dish (luandja) to be separated from contaminating sticks, sand, and stones. Women are very efficient at separating seeds and can separate about 1.5 kg of rubbish from 500 g of seeds in about 40 minutes. However, this time varied according to the kind of litter mixed with the seeds. Each different material has to be winnowed out separately and this often necessitates between three and five different winnowing operations. When the seeds begin to separate, the winnowing dish is tilted slightly and balanced between the last fingers and the ball of the thumb of the lower hand. The rocking motion is continued with the other hand, and the ball of the thumb on the lower hand is used to jar the lower end of the dish and spill the clean seeds into another dish (wirra), where they are collected for grinding. After the seeds have been cleaned, they are either ground directly or soaked for several hours beforehand. Seeds are only soaked to soften them, and this is not done if the Aborigines are hungry. When the women are ready to start grinding they set the grinding slab into the ground and place a wooden dish under the lip of the slab. A small quantity of seeds is placed on the grinding slab and a steady trickle of water is dribbled onto them to facilitate grinding and to help the flow of seeds down the grinding groove and onto the wooden dish. Seed grinding is the most arduous part of the preparation process and takes about 50% of the total time required to make seed cakes. An average time of about 1 hour to grind approximately 200 g of seeds provides a reasonable indication of the effort required. When the seeds are ground, the paste is either eaten raw or several small dampers are baked in a campfire. In the latter case, the raw paste is placed in a shallow depression dug into hot ashes. A small fire of spinifex or dry twigs is lit over the paste to dry the crust of the damper. The paste is then covered with hot ashes and baked for 10-20 minutes. We prepared four dampers from different grass seeds… Briefly, the preparation time for each meal means a handling time of about 5 hours per kg of damper and gives a return of about 350 kcal per hour.’