DARK EMU, BRUCE PASCOE AND THE HUNTER/GATHERER CONTROVERSY

There are fashions in ideas, just as there are fashions in clothes and cars. Aboriginal history is now in fashion, and that is to be welcomed. But the main new versions of Aboriginal history, the Dark Emu books, often have their heads in the clouds.

Bruce Pascoe has written two influential books on Aboriginal history. As he claims to be Aboriginal, many readers think he is an insider. Certainly, he writes engagingly;  he chats with his readers and moves quickly from theme to theme. He collects snippets of the latest research, and those scholars whom he quotes probably feel some empathy with him.

He gives hope to the young that they can change the world. They can change the world, Pascoe says, if they emulate the best features of ancient Aboriginal societies

But what Pascoe’s audience does not realise is that most of his major viewpoints are imagined. He seems to make up a lot of his history. He displays his way-out ideas mostly in the big eye-catching themes.

Pascoe has declared – you have to blink at this – that Aboriginal Australia was a birthplace of democracy: “Of all the systems humans have devised to manage their lives on earth, Aboriginal government looks most like the democratic model.” That seems to be make-believe. The typical Aboriginal form of government had no parliament, no elections, no formula for removing rulers and no recognised way of reforming society. Pascoe bravely argues that Aboriginal democracy has been here for 80,000 years. That is almost 78,000 years before democracy was born in ancient Athens.

The greetings which we now hear Aboriginal leaders recite at many public gatherings are said to be traditional in spirit. They are certainly not democratic.  Their hallmark is a simple tribute to the elders, past and present. To be old or older: that’s what the word “elder” means. Women, even if old, were not often elders.

To say this is not to dismiss or disown these Aboriginal people. Their respect for the old, especially if wise and experienced, was probably normal in the whole world, for most of human history. It was normal for Warren Mundine’s  far-off ancestors and mine too.

Pascoe is said to have made other astonishing discoveries. Aboriginal Australia, we learn from him, was a haven of “trans-continental peace”, perhaps a world first.  The peace apparently reigned here long before most of Europe was settled by human beings.

Here is the final sentence in the school-room book called Young Dark Emu: “Where else on earth was there a civilisation that lasted more than 80,000 years and depended on both agriculture – and peace.”I myself don’t believe it was any more a haven of peace than was the stormy first half of the twentieth century in Europe and Asia and our part of world. Wars between Aboriginal groups, for long, were frequent. This was also true of nomadic societies in other parts of the world. We should query the schools and universities which now teach that Aboriginals lived in a paradise of peace.

Pascoe is right to denounce the frequent killing of Aboriginals in many decades since 1788. He is right to deplore the massacres, one of which occurred at Coniston, to the north west of Alice Springs, as late as 1928. Remarkably, a survivor died recently, aged 101.

Pascoe could be on slippery ground, however, in claiming that the massacres and “terrible cruelties”  were mostly “covered up” by the early settlers and therefore are “rarely mentioned” in Australian history books. No, they are mentioned in a few hundred books. I confess that I have written some of them, for better or worse.

Admittedly the writing of history is a difficult craft or profession. We all make mistakes, but here the mistakes are not only on a large scale but embracing events and trends too important to be turned into fantasy.

For example, his view of the Torres Strait Islanders cannot possibly be accepted. He treats them as if they were the same people as Aboriginals. Readers are left to assume that the Islanders were here for 80,000 years. In fact, their history in Torres Strait goes back fewer than 4000 years. What a big gulf in time! Another mighty difference. The Islanders were gardeners: the Aboriginals were not.

It is true that many Aboriginals, generation after generation, were often treated poorly by the incoming Europeans. Understandably, many Aboriginals call 26 January 1788, and its events in Sydney, Invasion Day. But the Torres Strait Islanders celebrate their invasion day, which was accomplished by preachers of the London Missionary Society in 1871. It is still celebrated each year as The Coming of the Light. Alas, Bruce Pascoe, who seems to be hostile to Christianity, has wiped the Torres Strait Islands from the map in his two books.

If, like Pascoe, you have recently come to see Aboriginal history as a long saga of peace and prosperity, how do you handle or interpret catastrophic events that disrupted Aboriginal life for thousands of years? Perhaps you leave them out. Perhaps you have not noticed them. And yet, these are events which highlight the remarkable capacity of these nomadic peoples to live through extreme adversity.

For some 10,000 years these Aboriginal people, inhabiting the changing coastline of their Australia, saw with obvious alarm the seas rise and rise. Eventually Australia was cut off from New Guinea, and Tasmania was cut off from Australia. Perhaps one quarter of Australia went under the seas, and it remains drowned. This catastrophe  makes the modern rising of the seas, widely predicted for Australia in the next 100 years, seem a trickle. Pascoe does not mention this prolonged ancient maritime disaster: the starvation which must have hit many coastal regions, and the tensions and perhaps the occasional warfare when the Aboriginal coast-dwellers retreated, century after century.

Pascoe, in his books, disputes the long-held idea that the Aboriginals were skilled nomadic peoples who moved about according to the seasons, utilising their wide knowledge of plant and animal life. He argues that they were farmers who planted and harvested crops and lived in permanent villages or townships and stored large quantities of food for the 11 or 12 months until the next harvest. Did they really store huge quantities of grain?  Pascoe points to one big outback storage place that held maybe one tonne or ton of grain. I asked Rod Gillespie, who heads the biggest network of bakeries in Australia, whether it would feed the 1000 Aboriginal people said to live in one of the largest traditional farming towns. He consulted his technical staff and came back with the report that it might feed the town for a mere two days – if the grass seed was as nutritious as modern wheat. That’s a big if.

Pascoe declares that the Aboriginal grain belt covered a huge area of the continent. On his map the grain belt crossed the continent from west to east like a giant rainbow. In a north south direction it ran from the present Mt Gambier (SA)  almost to Mount Isa and the Gulf of Carpentaria. But there is a catch. This allegedly enormous grain belt includes most of the five largest deserts in Australia: The Simpson, Great Sandy, Great Victoria (it’s not in Victoria), the Tanami Desert and the Gibson Desert.

Not one of those deserts is on the map in the Emu books. Not one desert. The idea of this great grain belt is far fetched.

The small book Young Dark Emu is handsome, almost a work of art, but unsuited for schools. It has very little information; nearly half the book is illustrations. The nomadic Aboriginal Australians and their distinctive way of life do not receive justice in the book. And why should education departments praise a book which is so wrong on major themes? Why should they prescribe books which are so hostile to Australian people of many backgrounds and make such exaggerated attacks about their culture and their loyalties. The intellectual arrogance of Europeans is one of Pascoe’s frequent comments. “European and Asian cultures are suffused with violence and war,” he writes on one page.

He gives pleasure to many readers. All honour to him. But is it history?

Much more could be said about the Emu books. Sufficient to say that Bruce Pascoe accepted the Enterprise Chair in Indigenous Agriculture at Melbourne University – judged to be Australia’s greatest research university, and rightly so. But will Chinese students who study there and know their own Gobi Desert blink when they hear about these Australian deserts and the farms they allegedly nourished for thousands of years?  Did the agriculture faculty explain to the university heads that there were  doubts about Pascoe’s knowledge of  agriculture? The university has not yet seriously justified his appointment.

Warren Mundine’s earlier address to you was forthright and timely. Why should people who pretend to be Aboriginal claim privileges rightly designed for others. The practice is now on a large scale.  In the year 2016 – our latest census to be fully counted – the scoreboard for the preceding ten years is startling. Australia’s Indigenous population had increased at three times the pace of the mainstream population. The high Aboriginal birth rate is part of the reason for the increase. But in urban NSW and urban Queensland half of the increase in the Indigenous population actually comes from people who are not Aboriginal but now claim to be so.

Those who have looked closely at the census information have made another little-known observation. The mixed marriage or partnership of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal is now common. Nine of every ten people who enter into that relationship prefer, when filling in their census document, to designate their children as Aboriginal. There is a new pride in being Aboriginal.

There can also be extra Indigenous privileges in education, especially higher education, and in the arts, and sometimes in housing. Some of these benefits are nationally justified but only for those who deserve them. This will be a difficult problem to solve. You can understand many Aboriginal leaders leaving it alone.