Margaret Walker - MY PREHISTORY

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 Tr