The Dark Emu Debate. Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? by Sutton and Walshe

Book review

It took me twenty years of research to prove my birth mother’s ancestry from a village in north-west Croatia of less than a thousand people. Although I have the baptismal records of her mother, her grandfather, her great grandfather and multiple photos of her in that village, I am haunted by the absence of her own birth certificate. I’m worried that I’m not perfect.

With this in mind, I chose not to read Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe because my equanimity is not up to reading an alleged classic by an alleged Aboriginal who cannot prove his ancestry and doesn’t feel he needs to. My interest in reading Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? the book that debates its claims, extends only so far as a morbid interest in human nature. Why should Dark Emu, the work that contradicts 200 years of scholarly observation, attract national consensus? 

Because the reading public rarely challenges the myths it is fed if those myths are agreeable and if a book is well written. To quote from Trevor on Goodreads: ‘I had found Dark Emu breathtakingly good.’ There is even a sense of resentment in some of the reviews of Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? that it could dare criticise Dark Emu. A popularist book has a high chance of being well received. You write what people want to hear, what makes sense to them from their Western perspective, you gain fame, popularity and wealth, while scholarly works that contradict it languish on academic shelves.

But to quote from Dark Emu: ‘The start of that journey is to allow the knowledge that Aboriginals did build houses, did cultivate and irrigate crops, did sew clothes and were not hapless wanderers across the soil, mere hunter-gatherers.’

When I read a sentence like this, I feel the need to ask whether Pascoe is being judgemental. Pascoe evidently wants to be Aboriginal, but only on his terms. I flick through the images taken of Aboriginal families a hundred years ago in Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? and I wonder if Pascoe finds them confronting. Naked families and simple dwellings may make one long for things with which one is familiar, like houses, agriculture and clothes.

It happens frequently that a book written by an excellent writer is poor in scholarship. A conscientious scholar constructs a theory from observations and then tests the theory. An author, like Pascoe, may make a bold claim then search for the information to support it. This is debating, not science, particularly when the author cherry-picks his information then presents it in a way to support his theory, which is what Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? accuses Dark Emu of doing.

The more I read Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? the more I am glad I did not read Dark Emu. Pascoe makes mistakes that would have sent me into orbit.

For instance: ‘Egyptian baking started around 17,000 BP’ (Before Present).

The Fertile Crescent, please, not Egypt. It’s in all the school textbooks and the dates were later. You shouldn’t make lazy mistakes when the correct sources are so easy to find, otherwise people like me are forced to write reviews to correct you. Some of the really interesting archaeology on this theme is happening as we speak in SE Turkey at a place called Göbekli Tepe. 11,500 years ago (BP), grinding stones were being used here, the earliest in the world, yet people were still not considered farmers.

Most interesting for me in Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? was the spiritual farming also called spiritual propagation, which was ceremonies aimed at species reproduction and maintaining an adequate food supply. ‘Spiritual propagation was combined with physical conservation’ that left a miniscule footprint on the land. Aboriginal peoples are variously termed active managers and ecological agents of the ‘unchanging cycle of life and a subsistence system underpinned by the Dreaming ground of being.’

The Mabo Legislation of 1992 reversed the terra nullius which had previously allowed Europeans to lay claim to Australia. Terra nullius is Latin and means, 'land that is legally deemed to be unoccupied or uninhabited,' an observation by the early explorers that Australia was not used by Aborigines in the European tradition of farms and permanent settlements. Sutton and Walshe express dismay that Pascoe condemns their traditional hunter gatherer lifestyle as inferior by claiming 'that categorizing Aboriginal people as "hunter-gatherers" is prejudicial to the rights of Aboriginal people to land"'. When I recall the fight in Parliament to pass the legislation and the opposition from Queensland (of course), I am stunned that Pascoe had apparently forgotten to the extent that he could compose that sentence.  'Aboriginal land tenure,' write Sutton and Walsh, 'and the primary requirements for proof of it under legislation...is founded on a perpetual spiritual belonging to country that is based, usually, on descent from preceding landowners, plus some other factors, depending on the legal jurisdiction.'

We are so blessed to have Aboriginals. They are a living culture in Australia. We don’t need archaeology to the extent that they do in Europe and the Middle East because we have the Aboriginals before us. We also have the records of escaped convicts, anthropologists, explorers and missionaries who have spent years of their lives observing them.

In my black moments I speculate that Pascoe wrote Dark Emu as a joke and was surprised when his attempt at humour took off so splendidly. In a spectacular display of irony, SBS even asked him to comment about the surge in white Australians claiming Aboriginal Ancestry. So, I'm going to conclude with a juicy sentence that I found in a book about Nazi conspiracies. 

'Heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed.'

Richard Hofstadter, 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics", essay published in Harper's Magazine November 1964. From 'The Hitler Conspiracies' Richard J Evans 2020 Allen Lane

 

BTW FYI

my DNA results,