DARK EMU, BRUCE PASCOE AND THE HUNTER/GATHERER CONTROVERSY

I hadn’t taken much notice of Dark Emu when it first came out. I was looking and doing other things. But in the last couple of years, when this controversy started blowing up, especially about the author Bruce Pascoe’s Aboriginality and about some of the issues that were in the book, a friend of mine gave me a book and said, “You should read this.” I thought okay, I would. So, I did. Last year, while we were very much locked up during Covid, I had to bide my time, so I read the book.

One of the things I really have to talk about in Aboriginal culture is that, through your history, through your background, you have song lines. You have stories that talk about a wide range of things, and how your culture and community is. Also, about your dreamtime stories and your history. That’s all done through stories, and storylines. What I found within Dark Emu was that Bruce Pascoe takes a few relevant historical truths and then blows them up into massive ideas about Aboriginal agriculture; scenarios that say we had townships, villages with a thousand people and so on.

To me, he also takes a Eurocentric approach to things by downplaying the hunter gatherer societies. In my community, the Bundjalung community, we have no stories of villages of a thousand people. We have no stories of towns. We don’t have stories of agriculture in the style of agriculture Pascoe is talking about. Agriculture in regard to fencing or stabled animals. We had more of a hunter gatherer society, we moved around. We did stay in places, and we did have some large gatherings, such as the Gumigarah, which is a big ceremony on Evans Head on the North Coast of NSW.

That was a large gathering. But it wasn’t a village. It was just a gathering for that ceremony over the few days it was held. After it was over, everyone went back to where they had come from. I come from the Western Bundjalung areas which is north west of Grafton or west of Lismore. I found it quite interesting that if what he is saying is true – and I have met many Aboriginal people from all across Australia – then we would have those stories. We would have the song lines about what our communities were about.

What I find fascinating about the whole thing, is that we can’t find anything in relation to song lines from Dark Emu. There are no conversations, no traditional stories about it. What he talks about is just a blank. I describe this as him being Eurocentric. He’s trying to lift Aboriginal culture as being equal to the European culture that was happening at that time in Europe when they had agriculture, towns, villages and cities. Pascoe plays down as inferior the idea of being a hunter gatherer.

One of the things I am very proud of is that, being a hunter gatherer society, Indigenous people survived so long on this continent. This continent was tough, hot; it had droughts, we got through ice ages, and we got through bushfires, we got through a whole range of things as a society. We had a technology that helped us through that. Take for example Indigenous fire management and how that gave us open spaces to hunt.

I just couldn’t believe what I was reading with Dark Emu, and I find it quite bizarre that we have this book that is being taught as fact in our schools and universities, when there’s no evidence to support the exaggerated and fabricated descriptions of how Aboriginal people were living. By saying that we invented all these great things is an attempt to compare us to European society. But we’re two worlds apart, in regard to that.

You had a civilisation in Europe which had advanced itself over many hundreds of years. Then you look at Aboriginal society in Australia, and we were a constant society. Our history and stories are based on that, that we were a hunter gatherer society.

I have not heard, within the Aboriginal community, from my life going back to the 1960s when I grew up, and from my grandparents and parents and so on, any of the stuff that Pascoe raises and talks about.

So, I just find it interesting, to be polite. And, I’ve said this publicly – that book should not be treated as non-fiction. It should not be taught to school children and to university students as a factual record of how Aboriginal people were living prior to Europeans coming to Australia.

As such, it downplays the traditions of Aboriginal people.