Book that rewrote history of Aboriginals ‘f lawed’
An award-winning book that recast Aboriginals as sophisticated farmers rather than nomadic hunters and led to a widespread reappraisal of indigenous culture has been criticised as flawed.
Dark Emu was hailed when it was published seven years ago and won some of Australia’s leading literary awards. Judges in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards said that author Bruce Pascoe was ‘‘without peer’’.
Pascoe, 74, wrote that Aboriginals sowed crops, built dams, made cloth and lived in substantial dwellings before the British arrived in 1788. His contention was so compelling that school curriculums were changed.
Penny Wong, the Labor Party’s foreign affairs shadow minister, said when she was finance minister that Pascoe’s work had helped to free Australians from an ‘‘underlying supremacism’’.
Now, two academics – anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe – claim that Pascoe’s work was ‘‘littered with unsourced material’’. Their rebuttal, Farmers Or HunterGatherers? The Dark Emu Debate, is to be published this week.
They write that the book ignores material that fails to support the notion that Aboriginals were an agricultural society, rather than ‘‘simply wandering from plant to plant, kangaroo to kangaroo in a hapless opportunism’’.
Sutton, from Adelaide University, has lived and worked with Aboriginals for 40 years. He told The Sydney Morning Herald that he was outraged that curriculums were being changed in line with the Dark Emu narrative.
‘‘In contrast to the picture conveyed by Dark Emu, the greater part of Aboriginal traditional methods of reproducing plant and animal species was not through physical cultivation or conservation but through spiritual propagation,’’ Sutton, 75, said.
‘‘This included speaking to the spirits of ancestors at resource sites, carrying out ‘increase rituals’ at special species-related sites, singing resource species songs in ceremonies.’’
His co-author, Walshe, said when she tried to read Pascoe’s book, now in its 29th print edition, she became frustrated by its lack of scholarship.
They explain in their new book how they believe Pascoe’s work became so influential.
‘‘As far as we can tell, no journalist or book reviewer covering the Dark Emu story has interviewed senior Aboriginal people from remote communities where knowledge of the old economy is retained, at least by some, and practised in an adapted way by many,’’ they write.
Pascoe, a professor at Melbourne University, appeared to welcome the criticism.
‘‘Certain academics may feel a particular book has flaws,’’ he said. ‘‘But it would be an indictment on all our futures if we suppressed dissent.’’