The "Dark Emu" controversy

Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu was first published seven years ago, but its popularity began after it won the NSW Premier’s literary award in 2016. By the end of 2018 it had sold 35,000 copies and UK and USA editions were being planned[1]; currently it has now sold more than 260,000 copies[2].

In an academic review in 2014, the year it was first published, Dr Michael Davis writing in Aboriginal History gave it a mixture of mild praise and some criticism:. While he wrote that the book showed that  ‘Indigenous people, before European arrivals, maintained a sophisticated economy’, at the same time Davis commented on the limitations of Pascoe’s evidence for these statements and in particular his over reliance on secondary sources:

… his reliance on secondary sources and compilations, through which he accesses the works of colonial observers is puzzling. So too is his reliance on the works of the late Rupert Gerritsen. Why this excessive use of Gerritsen and other recent syntheses, rather than go to the primary sources themselves?[3]

Despite its popularity and praise from people like the Indigenous Academic Marcia Langton, it was not until this year that a scholarly refutation of both its evidence and interpretations received wide acknowledgement in a  book by the social anthropologist Professor Peter Sutton and archaeologist Dr Kerry Walshe: Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate[4]:

Pascoe’s book purports to be factual. It offers support for propositions in footnotes that lead to an extensive list of published and archival sources, and has an index. However, it is littered with unsourced material. It is poorly researched. It distorts and exaggerates many old sources. It selects evidence to suit the author’s opinions, and it ignores large bodies of evidence. It contains a large number of factual errors … Dark Emu is actually not, properly considered, a work of scholarship. Its success as a narrative has ben achieved in spite of its failure as an account of fact.[5]

Sutton and Walshe do more than just provide a critique of Pascoe’s careless use and misinterpretation of sources; in some ways they turn the argument on its head. While Pascoe’s aim in finding incipient farming practices was to show that Indigenous Society was more similar to the invading society, what Sutton fears is lost in Pascoe’s account are the ways in which it was different. We lose the uniqueness of that society:

…the First Australians and all of us deserve better than a history that does not respect or do justice to the societies whose economic and spiritual adjustment to their environment lasted so well and so vigorously until the advent of the colonies and the subsequent degradation of much of the environment through land clearing, pastoral stocking and the spread of feral animals and plants.[6]

A similar opinion was expressed in the Online Journal Crikey by Guy Rundle:

Without a strong notion that pre-1788 society was filled with meaning, purpose and process – but of a fundamentally different character – the claim for contemporary regional/remote society as a modern/traditional hybrid which should have specific modes of sovereignty and governance fails also.[7]

The criticism of Dark Emu, was, of course, grist to the mill for the Right Wing populists. Andrew Bolt, not known for moderation, wrote in a blog on June 14, 2021 that ‘“Aboriginal historian” Bruce Pascoe pulled off the biggest hoax in Australia’s literary history’.

Earlier criticisms of Dark Emu

The first detailed criticism came in 2019 from Quadrant Books, the publishing arm of the Conservative Quadrant Magazine, currently edited by Keith Windschuttle.  Windschuttle is a historian whose aim is to prove that massacres of Indigenous Australian did not exit or have been highly exaggerated.

This book, Bitter Harvest: the illusion of Aboriginal Agriculture in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu was written by Peter O’Brien, a former Military Colonel, a businessman and a Science graduate. (Because it was published by a small press to a small audience, copies are hard to find.) For the first two thirds of the book he provided a thorough and critical analysis of Bruce Pascoe’s sources and did so in a readable style, although where Pascoe sometimes saw too much in the sources, O’Brien can see too little.

However, in his conclusion, O’Brien moves from an academic refutation of Pascoe’s approach to sources to the conservative political position that motivated him and that is critical of much contemporary thinking about Indigenous policy.

O’Brien first quotes the Law Academic, Professor George Williams on the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’- a statement by the Aboriginal Community demanding recognition in the Constitution, acknowledgement of their prior occupation, and a separate voice in Parliament. The Uluru Statement, said Professor Williams ”outlines three proposals to empower indigenous peoples so they can take a rightful place in our country.[8]”

 O’Brien then goes on to attack the concept of ‘rightful place’:

1.       ‘Whatever the ‘rightful place’ looks like, you can be sure it will involve ‘rights’ not available to other Australians’

2.       ‘By our own country … do not be deceived into thinking they mean Australia. They are clearly talking about a political entity, either totally separate from Australia or more likely as a seventh state within the Commonwealth.[9]

O’Brien’s lack of empathy is clear from his conclusion:

… Dark Emu is nothing more than just another motif in a rich tapestry of grievance that seems to grow larger, as it becomes more remote in time from the upheaval that changed the lives and the culture of the Aboriginal people forever. Aboriginal advancement as part of a united Australia will not come until the Aboriginal people can let this grievance go.[10]

Does this controversy mean a step backwards?

What now do those tens of thousands of people who, concerned about the situation of the First Nations people today, embraced this book, now think? Are they disillusioned? Why didn’t people like us speak up to express our concerns earlier.

I was given a copy as a gift by someone who thought I had ‘progressive views’. I wasn’t a third of the way through the book when I gave it up. It became obvious to me that Pascoe had a ‘thesis’ – that incipient agricultural practices took place all over Australia - and was continually going beyond the evidence in order to ‘prove’ it. But rather than pursue this, I felt at that time that if reading the book made people feel more aware of Aboriginal culture that was sufficient.

The popularity of ‘Dark Emu’ showed the desire for more knowledge of Indigenous society. The challenge is for scholars in areas such anthropology, archaeology and history to assist the Reconciliation process by working towards better informing the general public about insights in pre-colonial and post-colonial history that go beyond the technological and are currently ‘hidden’ in academic journals or monographs.

Ian Keese

[1] https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/arts-in-daily-life/artist-stories/bruce-pascoes-dark-emu/ accessed2 July 2021

[2] Victoria Grieve-Williams, Weekend Australian Review, July 3-4 2021 p 14

[3] Michael Davis ‘Aboriginal History’ p 198

[4] Sutton P and Walshe K Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate, MUP 2021

[5] Sutton and Walshe  p 23

[6] Sutton and Walshe p. 202

[7] https://www.crikey.com.au/2021/07/16/in-defence-of-bruce-pascoe/

[8] Quoted in Peter O’Brien Bitter Harvest: The illusion of Aboriginal Agriculture in Bruce Pascoes’s Dark Emu 2nd Edition. Quadrant Books Sydney 2020 p 300. The quote from Professor Williams is from The Weekend Australian 6 June 2020

[9] O’Brien p 301

[10] O’Brien pp 302-3