Pascoe immersed himself in those records – such as the diaries of explorers, which were surprisingly full of information about the way Aboriginal people managed their lands.

They were in fact painting what they saw. And then I realised, when I had that trouble, that the sources I would have to use exclusively would be unimpeachable European sources.” I was taught to laugh at the colonial painters because they’d got it wrong. “Then the Aboriginal studies press had it and similarly they couldn’t believe the information. It didn’t ring a bell with them but then, their major editors were all English, so I wasn’t surprised. “My publisher knocked it back very promptly. “An observation of that importance couldn’t have gone straight through to the keeper without anyone in education or politics or history remarking on it, but that’s what happened. I’d read the record and kept thinking to myself, ‘surely that can’t be right’,” Pascoe says. While researching another book, Convincing Ground, about the 1834 massacre of between 60 and 200 Gundidj Mara people in Victoria, he kept reading colonial accounts of Aboriginal people farming: irrigating, harvesting, living and prospering in large villages. Using compelling evidence from the records and diaries of early Australian explorers and colonists, he reveals that Aboriginal systems of food production and land management have been blatantly understated in modern retellings of early Aboriginal history, and that a new look at Australia's past is required - for the benefit of us all.ĭark Emu, a bestseller in Australia, won both the Book of the Year Award and the Indigenous Writer's Prize in the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards.Writing it, Pascoe says, required a big shift in his own thinking. All of these behaviours were inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag, which turns out to have been a convenient lie that worked to justify dispossession. In this seminal book, Bruce Pascoe uncovers evidence that long before the arrival of white men, Aboriginal people across the continent were building dams and wells planting, irrigating, and harvesting seeds, and then preserving the surplus and storing it in houses, sheds, or secure vessels and creating elaborate cemeteries and manipulating the landscape. History has portrayed Australia's First Peoples, the Aboriginals, as hunter-gatherers who lived on an empty, uncultivated land.

Dark emu by bruce pascoe